EPK is short for Electronic Press Kit, which is a fairly self-explanatory term. They’re primarily used in the film and music industry.
This was my first experience cutting one, and it was far more difficult than I expected. I thought, “Bah - I’ll bang it out in a few days, no problem.”
But as with any skill or talent, when you really apply yourself to it, you realize that mastering it will not be easy. Indeed, I still don’t think I licked it - I just squeaked by.
Part of the problem was simply organizing the material, so that one interview comment seemed to stem naturally from the previous one. Sounds easy, but trust me, it’s not.
Add to that the problem that people often digress in interviews, or fail to complete sentences, or say “uhhh…” between every other word, and you can drive yourself crazy trying to cut this stuff. Often I would sit there in front of my editing system cursing an interviewee - “Why couldn’t you finish that f*&%ing sentence?!!”
I finally happened upon a shockingly simple solution at the last minute - I typed out all the interview clips we had selected, organized them in MS Word so they progressed in a logical way, then recut the footage to match.
It vastly improved the thing, made it passable, and taught me an interesting lesson that I probably learned years ago but had forgotten - your talents can (and should) cross-polinate, and inform each other.
So here it is. And despite my comments on the editing, I suggest you disregard it and simply take note of the talented performer this piece is about.
An amusing footnote: some of the footage showed Tamela singing “And I Love Him” in the booth - and when I laid in the finished version of the song, she remained perfectly in synch. They clearly used the entire take for the album with little or no tampering.
In this Pro Tools age where vocals are cut together in snippets and remixed until the performers sound like androids, I found her singing ability very impressive.
It was too long to use the entire piece in the EPK, but I banged out this somewhat sloppy-looking music video in about 45 minutes and gave it to them as a freebie…
If you like Tamela’s music, you can purchase her album ‘Got A Little Story’ from either Amazon or iTunes.