“I spent close to 80 hours editing it. “
Well that’s your background kicking in. I wrote a particular screenplay years ago. 150 pages in the first draft. About 93 pages when I got done editing it. That’s 57 minutes of screen time that went away without hurting the narrative. The minor editing you’re talking about in that 80’percent is not what I’m talking about. They need to slash twenty minutes out of many of these slow bloated masterpieces. A subject line that looks interesting loses all attraction for me when I see a running time of thirty forty or more minutes. People aren’t as fascinating as they think they are. They don’t have the power of narrative that they think they do and it shows in the videos they make. Give me three to five minutes on most subjects or at least lean things down by trying to aim for that. There are people that can ramble and be interesting all the way along but that ain’t most of us.
Now that I totally agree with. I watched a YouTube video the other day on bear spray, and the guy spent 15 minutes babbling, when the whole thing could have easily been edited down to three minutes.