How to Make Stock Cool

What a wild and busy year it’s been so far! We’re super excited to finally share some of the awesome projects we’ve been working on!

We had the chance to team up again with our friends at Grand Crew for another round of Spotify RADAR, this time featuring the incredibly talented band The Marías.

We also jumped in with Grand Crew to handle the post-production for Vogue’s Met Gala coverage with LaLa Anthony. The “In My Met Gala Era” spot for eBay follows LaLa as she curates vintage accessories for fashion’s biggest night.

Plus, we tackled a quick color grade for Good American featuring Khloé Kardashian. It was so fun for us to collaborate with this brand, and creating a look for a big celebrity is always an exciting challenge!

Last but not least, we were delighted to sprinkle some of our magic on the post-production for this Prose piece. As the kids would say nowadays: So demure!

Now, we’re thrilled to share some insights from our co-founder and editing whiz, Alex Ramsey, on making stock projects visually interesting and cool.

Imagine having a few minutes of beautiful 16mm dailies featuring Nas (not the lil one with the X) and being tasked with telling the story of Hip Hop in 60 seconds. This was the situation I faced last year, when Canvas reached out to us here at Cross Cut for their 50 Years of Hip Hop campaign with Hennessy.

At first, I thought, “You want me to cut a fashion video of Nas hanging around in different spaces?” My initial excitement waned. Luckily, the creative director had a bigger vision for the video, and we immediately looked for archival footage. The creative director wanted to create a poetic video showing the last 50 years of Hip Hop through Nas’ eyes, using his poem, “Dear Hip Hop” as the backbone of the piece. Ideally, you want awe-inspiring, rare footage featuring iconic Hip Hop faces, right? Well, that probably wasn’t an option for us. So, we logged into Getty and started pulling stock footage as “placeholders” while an archivalist searched for the good stuff.

As an editor, I usually assume that what we have at the start of a project is all we’re getting. So, in this case I set out to make the stock footage as cool as Nas. I pulled thousands of clips from Getty and Filmsupply using “archival” and “16mm” as keywords to match the existing footage. Surprisingly, a lot of it had potential, but I knew I’d have to get creative. I used every trick in the book, from film flashes to a stop-motion effect, to make sure the viewer didn’t notice the many different sources of footage, resulting in an impressively frenetic edit (if I do say so myself). I pushed the energy to the max, using every possible frame from the Nas dailies to create the feeling of being thrown around Nas’ memories of Hip Hop’s past, building to a final climax where he figures out the flow of his lyrics and remembers the biggest performances of his career.

In the end, the archivalist didn’t find much iconic and in-scope footage from Hip Hop’s storied past, and that was okay. I almost forgot we were using stock footage. Yes, the process was frustrating at times, with certain footage pulled for budgetary reasons, but those limitations pushed me to find even more creative solutions. Eventually, I fell in love with the final edit, which included a ton of footage from Getty. When the final grade came back, I was relieved to see that we had actually made stock footage cool.

-Alex Ramsey

‍