A vertical event reel from 86 raw clips

a vertical event reel for a brand, built from their booth at a festival. the brief came on a monday call and the reel was due tuesday: the brand first, the host in a supporting role, everything in 9:16.

92 files came in, 86 once the duplicates were out: 18 min 40 s, 77 clips from a sony and 9 from a drone, plus 33 photos the next day. flat log, standard color and photos already graded, from daylight to night. then at noon on delivery day the song changed, from 83 to 72 bpm.

that first night, with the support of my ai agent to organize the files and speed up the workflow, i tagged all 86 clips: what's on screen and the best stretch of each one, plus quick drafts on the music. i could find any moment and watch eight versions before 2 a.m. the structure and every edit call were mine.

the sony files went in as s-log3, through aces and out to rec.709, then to one look: teal and green at night, the drone gold at sunset, the close in gold.

when the song changed i didn't stretch the cut. i rebuilt the hook by hand to the new groove, with the gold mark coming up through smoke, animated in after effects. the stacked photos the client asked for land on sixteenth notes over a half-saturated background, and the cut zooms through the last card into the clip.

then four rounds of changes in three days: 11 more clips, an end card with the festival name and both logos, a wide of the booth, a longer ending. with every clip already tagged, the last two rounds took about 80 minutes and under an hour from request to delivery.

v1 went out on tuesday at 9:40 pm, about 29 hours after the brief call and 10 after the song changed. the final cut runs 32.6 s with 39 cuts on the beat, about 0.8 s per shot. the same agency came back with the next spot.

what i took from it: every shot starts at its best moment, not at the head of the clip. and at 72 bpm, less whoosh, more texture.