9 Bizarre Video Editing Requests: 2 my attorney said "Never again"!

## Video Transcript

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**[Attorney on phone]** John, never take another job like this.

**[Opening]**

I've been a video editor for years now. I've been making videos for over 15 years. In that time, I've taken some bizarre requests from people. Like I've made fight scenes out of stock footage. I've sent people to heaven. I solved cheating investigations. And transcribed police body cam footage for court cases. 

Two of these videos my attorney told me I should never do again. I'm gonna show you all nine of these. And then you tell me in the comments which ones you think were the legally sketchy ones.

**Story #9: 40 Years of Artwork**

So here's number nine. This was a client wanted to showcase 40 years of artwork by an art professor at a university. And it was done by committee. And it was done by interviewing former students. And this is also a professor who had taught other teachers how to teach. He created a ton of his own sculptures. He'd done these larger than life, you know, wall sized murals. It was just a lot to put together. That one was really more just about the scale of it. We spent a summer cataloging, scanning. So is that legally sketchy? No. Let's move on to the next one.

**Story #8: Sesame Street Style Baby Show**

Number eight was the client wanted to do a Sesame Street style baby commercial. They were gonna use it as a work-in-progress trailer that they could submit and try to turn this into a TV show. Did they cross any lines in terms of copyright? Nothing like that. So let's move on to number seven.

**Story #7: When Harry Met Sally Wedding Recreation**

Number seven was a lot of fun. The client was a photographer in Texas who was working for a couple that was about to get married, doing their wedding photography and a wedding video. So they had the foresight to do a When Harry Met Sally scene. If you remember the scenes in When Harry Met Sally - not the deli scene - the scenes where the couples that have been married for 50 or 60 years are answering questions about how they stayed together. And then they're kind of juxtaposed against what's going on with this young group. It's parody, it's fair use. There's no legally sketchy issues in this one either.

**Story #6: Heaven Scene for Memorial**

Next one is I created a heaven scene for a memorial. This one was for Ruth. And there wasn't a whole lot of direction other than God, country, and family. And after finishing with a lot of photos and covering those concepts as best I could, I discussed with the husband that maybe we could create a scene that showed her entering heaven. And so with some compositing and some lights and some stock footage and some music that we knew was important to her, we were able to create this childlike moment where it gives you that feeling of what we think that Ruth would have imagined entering heaven was like. So that was an interesting one. That was an emotional one.

**Story #5: Fight Scene Made From Stock Footage**

Next one - I made a fight scene from stock footage. Now this was for an interesting character. Brother Bob needed a fight scene. He had been in Vietnam. He had been a Marine, homeless. He'd started some charities, been an author, speaker, and so on. But for this particular story that he was telling, I needed to get the actual fighting going on. And Bob is late 70s, early 80s now, so he wasn't gonna be doing it. I didn't have the budget for actors or stunts. So we made the entire thing from stock footage - different clips cut together to look like what he remembered happening. It looked good enough, and Brother Bob was thrilled. He loved it. So that was an interesting one too. I don't get that request very often - make a fight scene for me.

**Story #4: Civil War Ancestor Journey**

For this next one, we took the viewers back in time. The client wanted to put some footage together that showed how a great grandfather had been in the Civil War. So this was back 160 years ago where we were able to show the great grandfather fighting in the Civil War. He had all sorts of clippings and notes and family tree work, ancestry.com type research that had been done, compiling photos, getting them from various relatives. And so that was an interesting journey, taking our viewers back in time, back 200 years, and kind of feeling the story of this ancestor.

**Story #3: Forensic Lip-Reading Audio Rescue**

This was one of the most meaningful projects I've ever worked on. A woman named Lee came to me in tears. She had hired another editor who completely destroyed the audio from her 25th wedding anniversary celebration. The previous editor had tried to remove background noise but ended up making it completely unusable. She was devastated because this was irreplaceable footage of family members who had since passed away. 

I spent hours going frame by frame, lip-reading what people were saying, and painstakingly reconstructing the audio. When I delivered the final video to her, she cried again - but this time they were happy tears. She could finally hear her loved ones' voices and stories again. That project reminded me why I love this work. It's not always about the technical challenge - sometimes it's about preserving precious memories that can never be recreated.

**Story #2: Police Body Cam Transcription** ⚖️

So far, nothing too crazy, right? Some weird requests, some creative problem solving, but nothing legally sketchy. Now we get to the two that my attorney told me I should never do again.

All right, so this one - this was police body cam footage. The guy had some altercation with another driver, reached into the window, grabbed the keys out of the ignition of the other driver that was arguing with him, and then threw the keys into a ditch somewhere that couldn't be found, and then took off. And so then the police pursued the guy that did it, and it was this whole thing.

They were able to gather a lot of body cam footage. He was concerned about things the police had said about him, and so it was all assembled. They needed me to try to get audio transcriptions out of everything.

This was the one where my attorney said, "You don't want to be subpoenaed to come appear in court and have to spend a couple days preparing and an afternoon in court answering questions about the video and testifying to it, verifying its accuracy, for a couple hundred dollars that the guy paid you to throw together these few videos real quick."

So I stopped doing any police body cam footage, court trial type stuff after that.

**Story #1: Cheating Investigation** ⚖️

And so then this last one is the cheating investigation. And that's the one that really made my attorney nervous.

The guy had home security footage. He was convinced his wife was cheating on him, and he'd set up cameras all around the house and thought he caught some guy with his wife. So they wanted me to zoom in, figure out what was going on here.

And it turned out that when I did zoom in, I found a construction logo on the back of his T-shirt. And then I asked whose construction company this was, and it turned out it was him. So the mystery guy was the husband, not some affair that his wife was having.

So when I told my attorney about this one, he said, "John, what if this guy comes after you? This is not really worth it." And I realized - at what point am I a video editor and not a private investigator? Where does my job end and where does something potentially dangerous begin after that?

So I got paid, the couple probably went to therapy, and I never took another job like that again.

**Wrap-Up**

So there you go - nine bizarre video editing jobs, and two that my attorney told me that I probably should never take again. So did you guys guess which two? Let me know in the comments.

And if you're a video editor with weird client stories, I'd be excited to hear what those are too. And if you need a video editor who's done some strange stuff but knows where to draw the line - and obviously I've tried to protect the innocent here by blurring scenes or getting client approval on scenes where somebody's actually identified - the link to my consultation form is below.

And let's talk about your project, as long as it doesn't involve paranoid spouses or legally questionable stuff.

I'm John with Expansive Media. Thank you for watching.

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