12 Film Elements - Editing

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film

ELEMENTS


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6. EDITINGEditing is the process of trimming and piecing together lengths of film in

order to make an artistically concise and complete motion picture.

This is certainly the most obvious technique of film language. The terms

editing, cutting, and montage are often applied interchangeably to the

process.

In montage, the emphasis is on the juxtaposition of ideas resulting fromthis process. Cutting stresses the physical work with the actual strips of

film. Editing encompasses both.


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This is the original editing machinean upright Moviola, o r a

flatbed machine. Film editing has since evolved from the processof a film editor physically cutting and taping together pieces of film,

using a splicer and threading the film on this machine with a

viewer.


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Steenbeck filmeditingmachinerollers


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Before the widespread use of non-linear editing systems, the initial

editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the filmnegative called a film workprint. Today, most films are edited

digitally and bypass the film positive workprint altogether. In the

past, the use of a film positive (not the original negative) allowed

the editor to do as much experimenting as he or she wished,

without the risk of damaging the original.


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A single shotwhich is the length of film exposed at one time,

without interruption, by one cameramakes a visual and aural

record of some segment of the physical world

by effective editing, this record can be taken apart, restructured,

and shaped into an imaginative world or a discourse about the

world...

HowEditing Works


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The first editing stage is the Editors Cut. Sometimes referred to as

the assembly edit or rough cut, it is normally the first pass of whatthe final film will be when it reaches picture lock. The film editor

usually starts working while principal photography (shooting) starts.

In the first stage of editing the film editor will usually work alone

(save for his or her own team of assistant editors, associate or co-

editors and/or visual effects and music editors). Likely, prior to

cutting, the editor and director will have seen and/or discusseddailies (or the raw footage shot each day) as shooting progresses.

Screening dailies gives the editor a ballpark idea of the directors

intentions. Because it is the first pass, the editors cut might be

somewhat longer than the final film. The editor continues to refine

the cut while shooting continues, and often the entire editing

process goes on for many months and sometimes more than ayear, depending on the film.


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When shooting is finished, the director can then turn his or her full

attention to collaborating with the editor and further refining the cutof the film. This is called the Directors Cut. This is the time that is

set aside where the film editors first cut is molded to fit the

directors vision, and before the studio and/or producers are

generally allowed to have input. (In the U.S., under Directors Guild

ofAmerica [DGA] rules, directors receive a minimum of ten weeks

after completion of principal photography to prepare their first cut.)

While collaborating on what is referred to as the directors cut, the

director and the editor go over the entire movie with a fine tooth

comb: scenes and shots are re-ordered, removed, shortened and

otherwise tweaked. Often it is discovered that there are plot holes,

missing shots or even missing segments which might require that

new scenes be filmed. Because of this time working closely andcollaboratinga period that is normally far longer, and far more

intimately involved, than the entire production and filmingmost

directors and editors form a unique artistic bond.


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Often after the director has had his or her chance to oversee a cut, the

subsequent cuts are supervised by one or more producers, who represent

the production company and/or the movie studio. At times, the final cut offilms produced by the major studios is the one that most closely

represents what the studio wants from the film and not necessarily what

the director wants. Because of this, there have been several conflicts in

the past between the director and the studio, sometimes leading to the

use of the Alan Smithee credit signifying disownership or the

aforementioned directors cut re-issues in subsequent years after theoriginal theatrical releases. Some directors are also the producers of their

films, and, with the approval of the funding studio, have a much tighter

grip on what makes the final cut than other directors. The most well-

known examples of director who lorded over all aspects of their films, with

little studio intervention, and worked completely outside of the Hollywood

system are Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen. On the

other hand, Orson Welles is an example of a director constantly dogged

by studio supervision and many times had films taken away from him.

Independent directors who work outside of the studio system are usually

more free to have a final cut; thus independent films often take more risks

and have more creative rewards than studio films.


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StylesofFilmEditing

ContinuityEditing

This is the uninterrupted connection of the action from one shot to

another to create a coherent visual story.

Match cut is the technique used when the action is logically joinedwith other shots.


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StylesofFilmEditing

DiscontinuityEditing

This is the distortion of the smooth flow of the action from one

shot to another.

Jump cut is the technique used when the cut breaks the continuity

of time by jumping forward from one part of an action to another.


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1.

Fiction films contain on the average approximately 6 cuts, one

every 10 seconds.

.

Editors strive to hide their work by cutting on action, so that the

movement of a character's arm in one location flows into another

such movement elsewhere, masking the change of shot.

Things OneShouldKnowAboutEditing


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3.

More important is the principle by which an editor anticipates thespectators line of inquiry.

By releasing information just as the spectator needs it, the editor

constructs a natural drama whose seams are invisible.


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4.

Beyond rendering scenes in unobtrusive or striking ways, editingconnects scenes into sequences and larger units. It serves as a

system of punctuation.


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5.

Editing permits highly dramatic effects that could never be staged in

a single shot.


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In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the title characters

are seen cornered by lawmen on a high cliff overlooking a river, intowhich they make an almost suicidal leap to their escape.

Actually, the scenes involving the two leading actors on the cliff and

those of the dives were shot weeks apart, and they involved

different crews and even different rivers, yet the audience readily

accepts the illusion created by the editing.


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6.

Often a film editor is blamed for improper continuity. For example,cutting from a shot where the beer glass is empty to one where it is

full. Continuity is, in fact, very nearly last on a film editors list of

important things to maintain. Continuity is typically the business of

the script supervisor and film director, who are together responsible

for preserving continuity and preventing errors from take to take and

shot to shot. Generally speaking, the editor utilizes the scriptsupervisors notes during post-production to log and keep track of

the vast amounts of footage and takes that a director might shoot .

However, to most editors what is more important than continuity is

the editing of emotional and storytelling aspects of any given film

something that is much more abstract and harder to judge


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EditingTechnique:TheAccordionSequence

(a) a drawing room conversation between two people is introduced in

an establishing (long) shot of the setting and the actors.

(b) The editor will cut to a full shot of the actors once they begin their

dialogue, because their speech gives them prominence over the setting.To help viewers understand the nuances of the dialogue, the editor will

move in for a medium shot, showing both characters from the waist up.

(c) alternating close-ups of each character (generally from over-the-

shoulder shots) to convey innuendos and reactions.

(d) back out of the sequence in the reverse order, going from close-up

to medium shot, to full shot, and finally to long shot


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Cut is the instant change of one shot to another achieved by joining

the last frame of a filmstrip to the first frame of another filmstrip . It

may or may not signify the change of time and place.

EditingTechnique:BasicCut

A variation of cut is cut-away shot. It is a shot inserted into a scene to

show a secondary event. This is also known as the insert shot.


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EditingTechnique: Fadeinand Out

The screen is left dark for a moment. This is the gradual change

from a black screen or a dark screen until a shot appears (for fade

in), and the reverse (forfade out).


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EditingTechnique:DissolveorMix

The picture dissolves, or mixes, to a new scene, with one image

showing on top of the other for a moment.


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EditingTechnique: Wipe

A line moves across the screen that wipes out the preceding

image while introducing the next.


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EditingTechnique:Iris

There is a gradual reduction of the old image from the edges to a

pinpoint size and then the expansion of the new one in the reverse

way.


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EditingTechnique:Turnover

The entire screen seems to turn over, with the new image seeming

to appear on what was the reverse side.


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EditingTechnique: Freeze Frame

The change from a moving action to a steady shot achieved byphotographing the last frame of the moving action several times on

a filmstrip.


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EditingTechnique:Superimposition

This is the simultaneous overlapping of two different visual imageson the same filmstrip. It heightens related visual images.


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EditingTechnique:MultipleImages

This is the showing of several visual images on different parts of aframe at the same time. This is also called the split screen.


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Max Ophls connected the separate episodes of La Ronde

(1950) by means of the musical leitmotiv of a hurdy-gurdy tune.

OtherCreativeEditingTechniques


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In Vivre sa vie (196 ), Jean-Luc Godard, one of the outstandingFrench New Wave directors of the late 1950s, introduced chapter

headings marking the heroines step-by-step involvement in

prostitution and, ultimately, her murder, as if it were a didactic

19th-century novel.


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Alfred Hitchcock, probably the greatest director of suspense films,

in his British film The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) cut from a woman's

scream to the similar sound of a train whistle, an effect so

dramatic that it was frequently imitated thereafter.


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Montage

There are at least three senses of the term: In French film

practice, montage has its literal French meaning and simply

identifies a movies editor. In Soviet filmmaking of the 1920s,montage was a method of juxtaposing shots to derive new

meaning that did not exist in either shot alone. In classical

Hollywood cinema, a montage sequence is a short segment in a

film in which narrative information is presented in a condensed

fashion. This is the most common meaning among laymen.

In film terminology, a montage (from the French for puttingtogether or assembly) is a film editing technique.


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Like camera-work, editing is a function that is ordinarily hidden from

the audience, but it is vital to the finished picture

It is the editors job to judge the length of each shot and to choose the

exact moment to cut. The length of a shot may depend upon the

amount of detail it contains, its scale, its dramatic impact, or its context

in relation to the shots that precede and follow it. Though the audience

is unconscious of these judgments, the impact of the finished filmdepends on how well they are made.


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In his book, On Film Editing, Edward Dmytryk stipulates seven rules of

cutting that a good editor should follow:

Rule 1 Nevermake a cut without a positive reason.

Rule 2 When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long

rather than short

Rule 3 Whenever possible cut in movement

Rule 4 The fresh is preferable to the stale

Rule 5 All scenes should begin and end with continuing action

Rule 6 Cut for proper values rather than proper matches

Rule 7 Substance firstthen form


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JFK (1991)OLIVER STONES

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12 Film Elements - Editing