One of my biggest passions is editing and although is something I've been doing for over 10 years, I have just recently started doing it in a more professional environment, where I have time limits, other opinions and a script to guide. Throughout the years I have been learning a lot of things about editing, from making cuts to understanding the software itself. Editing for me is not just cutting and placing, but its an art on its own which gives life to any clip, because for as good as your scene can be, it is really hard that it can make any impact without being edited at all. For this project I decided to put a lot of more effort into it and not only regarding editing more or trying new things, but actually learning and understanding a bit more about editing itself so I can make sure I am doing the right things and not wasting time doing a crap editing job. This post is going to be about those tips that I researched on and took on board and how they changed or affected my editing directly.
While doing my research I cam across with a blog from a man named Oliver Peters, who is an independent video/film editor, colorist, post production supervisor and consultant. I decided to give a read to a lot of his posts and took from them a lot of tips that were really useful for me, starting with:
Cut tight – The best editing approach is to cut tight scenes without becoming too “cutty”. This means taking out unnecessary pauses between actors’ delivery of dialogue lines. Sometimes it mean tightening the gaps within dialogue sentences through the use of carefully placed cutaways. It may also mean losing redundant lines of dialogue, after the director has reviewed your cut. In general, my approach is to start with a cut that is precise from the beginning as opposed to cutting the first pass sloppy and then whittling down from there. Most basic films don’t support audience attentions for lengths over 90 minutes. If your first cut comes in at about 100 minutes, then you can typically get to 90 through further tightening of the cut. On the other hand, if it clocks in at two hours or longer, then major surgery is going to be needed.
This particular point has probably been one of the most important, which links backs to a previous post regarding "Trimming the Fat." Originally the film was going to be around 29 minutes, but after watching lots of times and showing it to other people, it started to come across very long and dragging and having very unnecessary stuff that was bringing nothing to the story or the film itself. Sometimes you feel like you have to show people a lot of actions so they can understand how people move form one spot to the other or how they get an object, but what sometimes is hard to realize is that the audience is not stupid and they will do the 1 + 1 = 2, meaning that you don't have to treat them like babies and show them every single step. For more information about this you can refer to my post on "Trimming the Fat"
The second tip was:
Temp music – Many editors like working with temporary music as a placeholder. I advise against this for two reasons. First – people tend to fall in love with the temp score and then it’s hard to get real music that feels as good. Second – temp music becomes a crutch. You tend to be more forgiving of a weak scene when there’s interesting music than when the scene is naked. I prefer to cut a strong scene and make it work through editorial solutions. If a scene can stand on its own, then the addition of sound effects and a score will make it that much better. The exception is a visual montage set to music. Here, I tend to do better when I’m cutting to music rather than the other way around.
I completely agree with this and I believe this is so true and it used to be a mistake that used to make in the past and still sometimes hard to avoid it. Usually I tried to add music from the beginning to a scene, so people felt more emotion about it and although that is a lot of times the main purpose of the music, the scene on its own needs to be able to stand without music. If you have a cut scene that without the music is completely boring or you don't understand it, then all you really are doing is trying to hide a flaw in your edit. The idea behind this is not to use or at least avoid using music that is commonly known by people, because sometimes people really just care about the beat and don't get what the music is actually trying to tell you. In our show, I limited myself to using no music well known whatsoever apart from the scene where Ollie is singing in his room, because the idea behind this is that he is listening to the radio and making a laugh out of the Uptown Funk song.
One of the biggest issues that I had with this point, was the very beginning of the film, in which two teams are playing football, one gets fouled in the box, Ollie takes a penalty and misses, hitting a man peeing in the bushes. The idea originally was to have some music underneath all that to build tension and create a momentum in which as soon as he misses and hits the man, it would become more of a joke and making the audience see that this is the kind of show they are about to watch. I struggled a lot and put a lot of songs and nothing was working out properly and the reason was because the scene actually didn't need any music. It was simple, the actions and the shots were telling the story and the intention, so instead of focusing on songs, I should have focused on creating atmosphere with natural sounds to make the scene work, which in the end did and that is how its staying for the final cut.
The third tip is:
Matching action – Matching actors’ hand positions, use of props, eyeline and stage position from one cut to another fall into the technical category of how to make a proper edit. Walter Murch offers a rule of six criteria that form reasons to make a cut at a given instance. The greatest weight is given to whether that cut drives the emotion of the scene or moves the story along. Technical matching is the least important concern. I’m not saying you should throw it out the window, because a mismatch that is too extreme can be very jarring to the audience. On the other hand, as an editor friend often tells me, “Matching is for sissies.” The audience will often ignore many minor continuity differences from one shot to the next if they stay totally engrossed in the story. Your job as the editor is to cut in such as way that they do.
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/12-tips-for-better-film-editing/
This is a very important part of editing an something that I had to use a lot in this film, because matching actions can be very very important and it is really hard to film. As an editor, i am usually the first to notice all the types of mistakes that have been done regarding continuity and matching clips, because a lot of times some very minor things, like a hand gesture, could actually make things quite painful. Since this production in general has a lot of scenes and a lot of shots, it was even harder to make sure things were fine all the time and although as a cinematographer it was fully my job to keep an eye on that, I tried helping as much as I could when I had my shots set-up and everything. One example of matching action that didn't work originally and wasn't included in the film, not for this purpose but another one, was a scene in the car where Ollie is talking about a kid in a suit and makes a move looking hopeless in which he moves his head down and in one clip he brings his hands up and in the other he doesn't, making it really hard to make a cut there. Here you can see there difference in both shots:
Another example of something minor in this case that is harder to see but happens and is proof of how hard it can be to keep things the same everytime, is a scene toward thee end where Dean is talking to Lucy in the kitchen and the mug he holds changes orientation in two different clips. This is something very minor that even as an editor I didn't notice until more than a month after filming, but I believe that this doesn't really affect the flow of the story and unlike the scene with Ollie in the car, it doesn't give the audience any reason to feel that we have jumped to a different action or moment.
 |
| Mug facing right |
 |
| Mug facing left |
.png)
0 comments: