Oof, clipping really takes forever. I think the process depends somewhat on what software you’re using. I’m working in Premiere, which makes it pretty easy to flip back and forth between clipping and placing vids on a timeline, since you can clip within the program (by marking beginning and end points in the source video and labeling your clip with some keywords).

So I tend to spend a few hours scrubbing through the source video and pulling enough clips to give me a broad idea of what kinds of visual trends and patterns I have to work with. Then I place some of those on the timeline, ideally creating some anchor points that I’m sure about, and filling in between them with maybes or randomly chosen clips just to play around. (I divide these between two video tracks in Premiere: V1 for clips I’m sure about and V2 for possibilities I’m playing around with, dragging them down to V1 once I’m sure they’ll work.) When I run out of stuff to place or realize I need some wide establishing shots or a closeup of an eye or something specific like that, I go back to clipping! They’re pretty mutually inspiring processes—I don’t know what to clip unless I have a sense of the arc of the vid, and I can’t imagine an arc for the vid unless I know what shots I have to choose from—so alternating between them works best for me.