Directors get all the credit. Whenever most people (myself included) watch a movie, they think, “Wow, that Martin Scorsese… how did he think of all this?” And while good directors do think of practically every aspect of making a movie, editors are the ones really sewing a movie all together. Thelma Schoonmaker is the editor who’s worked with Martin Scorsese on practically every movie of his since 1980, essentially co-authoring each movie. Thelma has imbued Scorsese’s movies with rhythm, visual language, and overall energy, but most audience members (excluding those in the know) do not consider her as much as Marty. And that’s true of most films. It’s true of life, too, I think.
What’s editing us as we go along our sequence of birth to death? We are an actor and director of ourselves so maybe we have some input on our sequence. But who knows really? The environment edits us in part, each particle or germ affecting the events of our life, turning our rhythm upon its head. Other people’s actions and those consequences affect us. Those who pollute put more toxins that we have to breathe in. The people who built the subway didn’t consider air filtration so God knows what I’m breathing in each ride. The People in Charge make decisions that affect every single person, forcing us into systems that hamper what we can do with our life. So many editing choices that are so hard to track and happen every second without much trace.
We all live in ecosystems. I am but a sandcastle, sculpting myself but moreso shaped by so many hands seen and unseen. And we will return to the ecosystem in some form inevitably as the force of decay/age/entropy/whatever guides us. The invisible impermanence and multitude of things inspired me to make an online sandbox to make sandcastles. These sandcastles will eventually fade away in real time (about 12 hours from making), whether a user is looking at it or not. After it decays, Claude Sonnet 4.5 will write a memorial for it, trying to preserve the memory. But even that might get swept away by whatever invisible hands lurk in Time.
Ryan Rotella 
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