Shoot and edit.(UP FRONT)

When I was in high school, I worked in the AV (Audio Visual) department one period a day. Yes, I was that AV geek (although I don't think that word had appeared in our vocabulary), who would be summoned to a room to fix the movie projector. We did it all, from replacing the lamps, resetting that pesky film to flow correctly through all of those sprocket wheels, splicing, and yes, upon request, editing film. In retrospect, this seems like a violation of child labor laws, but I digress.

To edit and splice film, we used two spools: one for film feeding, the other for pickup, both with wooden crank handles, all nailed down opposite each other on a two-by-four. A little …