The substream.com presents Editing Basics 02: Non Linear Editing –A Primer the FilmLab.
Hey everybody, I’m Ryle from the substream.com and here I’ve written a bunch of words on our whiteboard. What I’d like you to do is t arrange some or all of them to form two sentences. The first one should be something funny and the second one should be something serious or dramatic. There is no right or wrong and you can use words more than once if you like. The only thing you have to remember is you have to follow the basic rules of grammar to the best of your ability. But how you’re going to approach this assignment? Are you going to pick one to start with and just write your sentence out logically word by word? Or you are going to get scrap paper and maybe write a bunch of sentence fragments there until you get some ideas that start making sense. And how many of you are going to come up with the exact same sentence? I mean there’s only 17 words so it’s pretty likely right?
Wait a minute, this assignment reminds me a lot of filming and video editing. You know editing you will often find that there is not really such a thing is right or wrong. But more is the case of appropriate or inappropriate, sure you’re following along with the scripts but it’s up to you whether or not the scene opens with our wide shot or close up. And if you and I were cutting the same footage, the chances are the result won’t be the same. That’s because you and I aren’t clones that share the same hive mind but rather we are individuals with different thoughts and different gut feelings.
And as editors, we have different ideas when it comes to making movies. You may not heard film of Spoon Maker but she was the editor on every, last one of Martin’s Crusaders films since Ranging Bull.
Something about the way she cut that’s help to gives Crusader’s his voice as an author over the last 30 years regardless of the film or its subject matter. It’s the same with Michael Calm who was the editor on every Steven Spielberg film from close encounters to minute. So, obviously choice of an editor is an important to these guys and why shouldn’t it be? If the editor that has a huge job of piecing together all that footage in coming up with something as stylish in accomplish as Good Fellows or Shinmu’s List. But how an editor works is just as important to consider?
Way back in ancient time film editing was a completely manual and dabber from start to finish. People have shoot a bunch of running footage and no particular order than they get the negative process, then they get the work print made from the negative and then they would laterally take the razor blade and cleared his tape and splash their footage together in a way they wanted it to appear.
And since often they were working with thousands of thousands of feet of cambers in film they will force to cutting away that didn’t easily afford than the luxury of experimentation. But it also forces editors to approach the whole cutting process with special consideration and to apply a discipline that made from more efficient work well. These often, produced film work that was extremely we’ll thought out and rock solid in his realization.
The shower seen in psycho one of the most famous edited sequences of all time is a great example of this. This three-minute scene was rigidly storyboard and it took them a week to shot. But watching it even today not a single shot is out of place, nothing is held for too long or for not long enough it’s perfect. And each cock probably plays and replays it in his head a million times before even got the footage back from the lab.
It was a very specific way of working and thinking about making movies, that thanks to know in your editing technology is no longer mandatory. Now editing basically just means jamming all your footage into a computer, try a new sequences, deleting if they don’t work, copying and pasting with the simple key stroke and basically enjoying the freedom to make a zillion mistakes without having a cost you extra time and money. You know its someone who talk film editing on steam back machine that was older than I was. I can’t begin to express how liberating it is to work in a program like final cut pro, where you can experiment in making sequences and change your mind a million times all on the flood.
This allows guys, like Darren and Oskie to really push the boundaries of film editing to the limit. If you’ve seen directly and for dream you will know what I’m talking about. As editor Jay – made over 2000 cuts of that movie whereas the average film features maybe a third of that. Without knowing when your editing we use to say with kind of movie Daren and Oskie would even make. It’s exactly this technology that allows his particular brand of artistic expression to even exist.
So, how you are going to approach my little assignment? Are you going to put the worse to get a linear lead base on a singular idea you’ve already got rolling around your head or you are going to get your own whiteboard up and just go to town until you come up with something that works. Whatever your approach it’s right, as long as it works and it is in fact to your approach. So, get to it, use the comment section below to write out your two sentences. Will pick the two best and the winners will get an autograph photo of me or with Mel Gibson. So, thanks for watching and get to work.