Lecture #1, The Art of Editing

1. CLASS 1
SM2002/ B 2014
THE ART
OF EDITING
PERSEVERANCE, INTUITION, FEAR &
FAILURE

2. WHY ARE YOU
HERE?
• What do you bring to the table?
• What would you like to learn?
• Participation and sharing
• Don’t be afraid to try! All learning comes from failures
• Look at the world around you everyday & watch films
• Watch for the CUT!

3. COURSE
DESCRIPTION
& AIMS
What is editing?
More than a technical skill, it is an art!
Editing is an art of composing space (as totality or fragment, continuous
or discontinuous) and time (linear or non-linear) through the arrangement,
assembly and interaction of images (static or dynamic) and sounds (on
screen or off screen), and an art of visualizing rhythm and tempo as
emotional flow or movements of intensities.

4. • SELECTION
• TIMING
• ARRANGEMENT
WHY IS THE EDITOR
IMPORTANT?

5. COURSE OUTLINE &
WHAT WE WILL DO
Editing Assignments:
1. Action Continuity
2. Shoot for the Edit
3. Music Video
4. Trailer
LECTURES / SCREENINGS / WORKSHOPS
Lecture: 13h-14h50 Workshop: 15h-16h20

6. CLASSICS

7. "... Editing is a lot about patience and
discipline and just banging away at
something, turning off the machine and
going home at night because you're
frustrated and depressed, and then
coming back in the morning to try
again.”
-Thelma Schoonmaker
"You get to contribute so significantly in the
editing room because you shape the movie
and the performances."
-Thelma Schoonmaker

8. ALCHEMY
“The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary
images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put
together in a kind of alchemy.”
-Francis Ford Coppola

9. PERSEVERANCE
INTUITION
FEAR
FAILURE

10. EDITING CONCEPTS
1.
ACTION CONTINUITY
2.
ACTION / REACTION (Cause & Effect)
3.
CONSTRUCTION OF TIME
(Flashbacks, flash forward, logic sequence)
4. CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE
(Continuity and discontinuity, parallel editing, jump-cuts, etc.)
5. EYE-LINE MATCHING
6. GRAPHIC RELATIONSHIPS

11. STAGES IN THE
EDITING PROCESS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Digitizing footage
Organizing and Naming footage
First Assembly
Rough cut
Fine cut
Final Cut

12. HISTORY OF EDITING:
1895 ONWARDS
When the first motion pictures were created, editing did not exist.
A single shot was a single scene.
• “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory” 1895
• “Arrival of a Train at the station” 1895
• “The Kiss” 1896
Camera was placed without thought to compositional or emotional consideration, lighting was
notional even for interior scenes, the camera recorded an event, an act or an incident, and most
early films were a single shot.

13. HISTORY OF EDITING:
STORY OF FILM
In 1903 Edwin S. Porter begins to use visual continuity.
Porter also discovered that the shot was the basic building block of the film.
The Life of An American Fireman (1902)
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc7wWOmEGGY

14. HISTORY OF EDITING:
‘THE SHOT’
• Locations change
• Time changes
• Subjective POV firing his gun directly toward the audience
• Entering a shot in midstream suggests that time has passed
• Exiting the shot before the action is complete and viewing an entirely new
shot suggest a change in location
The overall meaning of the story comes from way the shots are edited
together, with the shifts in time or place implied by the juxtaposition of two
shots

15. HISTORY OF EDITING:
STORY OF FILM
“A trip to the Moon” 1902 George Melies
The ‘magic’ of cinema – Special Effects, Disappearing, altering the real

16. DRAMATIC EMPHASIS:
D. W. GRIFFITH
“The Birth of a Nation” 1915, 190 min
• Formally innovative: Variation of shots
for impact: long shot, close up, cutaway
& the tracking shot
• Cuts made for Dramatic Reasons
• Parallel editing
• Variation in pace
• What film could do with ideas: Racist
nationalist propaganda. The history of
film is political.
http://youtu.be/iEznh2JZvrI

17. CONSTRUCTIVE EDITING:
VSEVOLOD PUDOVKIN
“Film art begins from the moment when the director begins to
combine and join together the various pieces of film. By joining
them in various combinations in different orders, he obtains
differing results.” (Pudovkin, 1929)

18. EDITING AS ART OF FILM
PUDOVKIN
In Mother :not using emotional or psychological effects of
performance, but “plastic synthesis through editing.”
“Pudovkin theorised that actors on screen do
not really act; it's their context that moves us
- something established, through montage,
by their relationship to exterior objects. Thus
the factory owners and police officers in his
films wear sinister leather gloves, which he
cuts to in close-up before returning to the
peasant nursing her child. More subtly, he
uses editing to suggest psychological
states.”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/aug/31/artsfeatures1

19. “THE STORY OF FILM”
Mark Cousins, (2012)
Watch for:
•The Shot
•“Then” (continuity)
•“Meanwhile” (parallel)
•Intellectual editing
•Dramatic effect

20. Rules to remember:
PERSERVERANCE,
INTUITION, FEAR &
FAILURE!
•
•
•
•
•
Emotion is the heart of good editing
Challenge the comfort zone & your assumptions
Learn the difference between what we think & what we
feel
Imagine failure and setbacks as positive learning
experiences: Fail Harder!
Take responsibility for your imagination

21. NEXT WEEK:
ACTION CONTINUITY
EXERCISE
Group Leaders: 5 groups of 7 students
• Meet new people!
• Invite people into your group if they don’t have one!
• Bring names of group to me by end of first class