I’ve always been fascinated at how films don’t just rely on the characters to progress the story. As a big movie buff, for me, the editing is one of the main things that makes or breaks the film. I’ve sat through movies where the concept of the story is amazing, but the way that it was cut just littered the whole thing with long and awkward scenes. In our second media lectorial, we had a brief discussion on editing. It was interesting to learn about the editor’s choices when making cuts to the film, and why they make said decisions. We were shown an example from Martin Scorsese’s Casino, (which, by the way, is a great movie), where he builds up the relationship between Robert De Niro’s character and Sharon Stone’s without even putting them in the same shot together. Scorsese’s technique is definitely something to keep in mind the next time I’m editing.

After this discussion, we were posed a simple, yet complex question; what is media? What makes this question so complex is the amount of different answers it has, yet they can be connected. There were answers such as phones, radio, and film, but what really grabbed my mind were the words ‘communication’, and ‘place’. After media was described as a place instead of a thing, I began to think of media as more of a network. This network is what connects the world through many different forms of communication. For example, people communicate to each other through phones, people communicate messages through radio, and people communicate stories through film. It’s interesting how much we rely on media to communicate and connect with each other. What would happen if it were to suddenly disappear?