And one Russian in particular, Lev Kuleshov. But it was the Russians, in this early period, that focused specifically on editing as the essence of cinema. Filmmakers like Georges Melies seemed to catch on quickly, not only using mise-en-scène and in-camera special effects, but also employing the edit, the joining together of discrete shots in a sequence to tell a story. It took a few years before filmmakers understood the storytelling power of the medium, before they realized there was such a thing as cinematic language. And we have to go to Russia.Īs you may recall, the earliest motion pictures were often single-take actualit é s, unedited views of a man sneezing, workers leaving a factory or a train pulling into a station. ![]() To do that, we have to go back to the beginning. And just as it is with any other language, much of its power comes from the fact that we rarely notice how it works, the mechanism is second nature, intuitive, invisible.īut before we get to the nuts of bolts of how editors put together cinema, let’s look at how the art of editing has evolved over the past century. As such, editing is fundamental to how cinema communicates with an audience. A word (or a shot) in isolation may have a certain semantic content, but it is the juxtaposition of that word (or shot) in a sentence (or scene) that gives it its full power to communicate. Just as linguistic meaning is built up from a set sequence of words, phrases and sentences, cinematic meaning is built up from a sequence of shots and scenes. And yes, that work involves selecting what shots to use and how to use them, but more importantly, editing is where the grammar and syntax of cinematic language really come together. Many editors are involved in pre-production, helping to plan the shots with the end product in mind, and many more are on set during production to ensure the director and crew are getting all of the footage they need to knit the story together visually.īut, of course, it’s in the edit room, after all the cameras have stopped rolling, that editors begin their true work. And their work is rarely limited to just post-production. So, one of the primary roles of the editor is to simply manage this tidal wave of moving images in post-production. It would take 40 hours a week for 14 weeks just to watch all of the raw footage, much less select and arrange it all into an edited film! The filmmakers behind Deadpool (2016), for example, shot 555 hours of raw footage for a final film of just 108 minutes. Today, it is relatively common for a film to have 50 or 100 times more footage than will appear in the final cut. With the rise of digital cinema, that ratio has exploded. They didn’t know it then, but they were lucky. ![]() And the editors had to look at all of it, sorting through 10 hours of footage for every hour of film in the final cut. That includes all of the re-takes, spoiled shots, multiple angles on the same scene, subtle variations in performance for each shot, and even whole scenes that will never end up in the finished film. During the Golden Age of Hollywood last century, most feature films shot about 10 times more film than they needed, otherwise known as a shooting ratio of 10:1. That too is, essentially, an act of translation. And at the end of that process, the director hands off a mountain of film and/or data, hours of images, to the editor for them to sift through, select, arrange and assemble into a coherent story. The production process is essentially an act of translation, taking all of those words on the page and turning them into shots, scenes and sequences. When the screenwriter hands the script off to the director, it is no longer a literary document, it’s a blueprint for a much larger, more complex creation. I don’t know who “they” are, but I think they’re onto something. And the third is by the editor in post-production. Please note: definitions and more information for bolded cinematic terminologycan be found in Wikipedia’s Glossary of motion picture terms.
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