Tag Archives: editing

Cinema Studies

Editing and Enemy of the State

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

If mise-en-scène concerns what’s in the shot, and cinematography is how the shot is captured, editing dictates the relationship between shots. By editing, a director joins two shots together to steer the audience’s perception and experience in a particular way. There are a number of ways a director or editor can join shots together: a simple cut (instantaneous change from one shot to another); a fade in to or out of black; a dissolve (briefly superimposing the end of one shot to the beginning of another); or a wipe (one shot replaces another by means of a boundary line moving across the screen). By deploying these techniques, a director controls the relationship between the two shots in terms of time, space, rhythm and graphic qualities.

In Enemy of the State, Tony Scott uses editing in a number of precisely controlled and kinetic ways to evoke mood, drive the narrative and create contrasts between characters and settings. As just one example, the rhythm of cutting is often ramped up to heighten the sense of tension and paranoia felt by characters during chase or fight sequences, and the same techniques are used to depict the high-tech surveillance equipment used by the CIA (the capability of the CIA to quickly locate Robert Dean is integral to the plot of the film).

Cross-cutting is often used to show the simultaneous action of characters being surveilled (usually Robert Dean) alongside the people doing the surveilling. This cross-cutting invites comparison of the two sets of characters, and emphasises the power relationship between the two — the CIA knows much more about Dean than he knows about them.

One particular example of this is a scene in which Dean and his wife are driving through a tunnel, unaware that at that moment CIA agents are ransacking and vandalising his house to cover the installation of recording equipment. The shots of Dean and his wife are mostly medium shots of the two conversing in their car, well-lit by overhead street lighting, with few cuts to different angles/perspectives other than the occasional close up to one of the characters while they talk. When it cross-cuts to the CIA agents ransacking Dean’s house, the editing changes drastically to emphasise graphic contrasts (the setting in Dean’s home is much darker and shot with higher contrast, low-key lighting), rhythmic contrasts (shot length becomes much shorter as the agents violently trash the environment), temporal contrasts (the scene condenses time by jumping forward through actions), and spatial contrasts (depth is shortened by extensive use of close ups and camera movement).

These techniques (governed by an approach to editing known as continuity editing) are working constantly through the film to affect form and create meaning.

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Media 1, Workshops

Week 5 Exercise: Surviving Uni

In our workshop this week we were assigned a group exercise to familiarise ourselves with the Sony MC50 video camera. My group mates Riah and Isobel came up with the structure and concept for the video, based around the theme of “a survival guide to your first six weeks at University”, which we then filmed in and around Building 80.

We tried to go for a more light-hearted, comedic treatment of the subject rather than a straightforward question-answer format, and so we introduced the thumbs-up motif to serve as punctuation for each of our cut-away shots.

We ended up shooting way more footage than we could conceivably use in the finished edit, so I had to cut a lot of the best answers/shots which was disappointing, but overall I’m pretty happy with the result. The narrative ties together nicely when edited, and thanks to Riah’s great first answer I managed to make it clear that the video is about tips for surviving university without needing opening titles or narration.

The only real technical problems we encountered were that the lapel mic’s extension cord connection was a bit dodgy and left some pops and crackles on the audio track, and the automatic white balancing made the green background look different across shots. I should have used the camera’s inbuilt display to view back footage we’d shot and make sure it looked consistent, but we were so conscious of time that we shot everything in one take before moving on. When I use this camera and microphone set-up in the future I’ll make sure to tape the audio connection in place and input technical settings manually.

Another key learning I took from this exercise is to ensure there is ample clear space before and after each shot, because J-cuts are much easier when you have extra material either side of the cut. It ended up being OK in this instance, but in my Project Brief 3 I’ll make sure I keep the camera rolling as long as possible.

I also wish we had recorded more ambient sound to build atmosphere, but since that wasn’t really part of the exercise we didn’t worry too much about it. Overall, I give this exercise a thumbs up.

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Media 1, Workshops

The Galaxy: a haiku

In this week’s workshop we filmed some static footage around Melbourne for an editing exercise, pairing the footage with a haiku poem. Above is my attempt, titled The Galaxy.

Compiling this footage into a short film was surprisingly fun. I wanted to try to build some sort of narrative from the naturally narrative-free bits and pieces in the collection, if possible, and I think I managed to do that by piecing together the clips in such a way that implies someone travelling to the State Library. It’s not particularly complex, but to be able to build even a simple narrative out of a random collection of static clips shows the power of editing.

A lovely thing to see:
through the paper window’s hole,
the Galaxy.

I chose this haiku because it’s evocative of the sheer size of the galaxy and how, by simply looking up at the night sky, we can see objects that are an incomprehensibly long distance away. We can actually see further than we could ever hope to travel in our lifetimes (or anyone’s lifetime, really). In my film I tried to draw a parallel between the subject of the haiku and the feeling I get when I’m in a library: that there are so many stories and worlds and characters contained within all the books in a library (paper windows) that I could never even get close to reading them all.

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Lectorials, Media 1, Readings

Michael’s extreme closure

Part of the reading this week, the comic Blood in the Gutter by Scott McCloud, explains that people are very good at filling in the blanks when given partial or incomplete information. For example, if in one image we see a woman riding a bicycle, and then in the next image the bicycle is upturned and the woman is lying on the ground, we can infer that between the two images the woman fell off the bicycle, even if we don’t actually see this part of the scene occurring. This is called closure.

Closure is a really intriguing phenomenon, and when reading McCloud’s piece I was reminded of an incredible example I discovered at the Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago.

The film is called Michael, it’s a relatively obscure Austrian film from 2011 that follows an insurance salesman as he quietly and unassumingly goes about his mundane daily existence. It’s all very boring, but for the fact that he has a 10-year-old boy, Wolfgang, locked in his basement. The relationship between Michael and Wolfgang, on screen at least, is basically parental: they have breakfast together in the morning, Michael goes to work (having locked Wolfgang away), they play musical instruments together at night, watch television, etc.

The film never actually portrays Michael abusing Wolfgang in any way, but that is clearly the subtext of what’s going on. Amazingly, this aspect of the story happens entirely in the mind of the audience. The viewer has to realise and understand what’s happening off screen, and how awful it is, using closure. And because of this, in many ways Michael is a far more disturbing film than if it had shown the abuse on screen.

This is an extreme example, obviously, but it’s interesting how editing can force a viewer to imagine things in their own mind against their will.

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Lectorials, Media 1

The edit

Editing is one of those things where, if it’s doing its job right, you won’t even notice it at all.

Jeremy Bowtell, our guest lecturer this week, explained that editing is a process of manipulating an audience in a desired direction. That is, an artist or author must have a particular outcome in mind when editing their work, and the edit must in some way work towards that outcome. But if an audience feels manipulated, or a work is attempting to achieve a certain result too conspicuously, it can backfire and have the opposite effect (or, perhaps worse, no effect at all). An editor has to walk a fine line.

Walter Murch had what he termed the “rule of six”, a list of priorities that should be considered before any edit is made:

  1. Emotion – does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling?
  2. Story – does the cut advance the story?
  3. Rhythm – does the cut occur at a moment that is rhythmically interesting or “right”?
  4. Eye trace
  5. Two-dimensional space
  6. Three-dimensional space

The idea is that higher points are more important to the result than lower ones, and in the event of a conflict an editor should choose to make an edit that favours emotion over the story, for example. (The lecture only discussed the first three points.)

We were shown a small scene from Martin Scorsese’s Casino (edited by Thelma Schoonmaker), in which editing is used in service of emotion, story and rhythm.

Bowtell mentioned that the editing in this scene, which is mostly wordless, works to demonstrate the genesis of a love story between Robert De Niro’s character and Sharon Stone’s character. As we cut between shots of the two actors, slowly zooming in on De Niro’s eyes as he’s transfixed by her every move, and her gaze fixes back on him and she walks off the gaming floor, the film allows us to feel the chemistry between these two characters without them ever speaking to one another. (This is an example of closure, where the audience “fills in” something implied but not explicitly stated or shown in a work.)

But having seen Casino many times, watching this scene closely afforded me a new way of reading it. Later in the film De Niro starts to act abusively towards Stone, as if he owns her – he disapproves of her independence and free spirit, he’s jealous of her relationship with James Woods’ character, etc. – and this fundamental power imbalance is evident right from the very beginning (the editing services the emotion of the scene).

De Niro watching her over the security camera now feels like he’s looking down on her as a God-like figure, able to take whatever he likes and make it his own. And when he makes his way down to the gaming floor and the shot alternates between close-ups of the two actors, I noticed that as Stone walks out of the room it doesn’t cut back to De Niro. The rhythm of the editing changes, and the audience is placed in De Niro’s point of view as he watches her with lust and desire, without breaking his gaze. Like a predator stalking prey.

So what first looks like the genesis of a love story is actually something much different and more sinister – and this subtle difference is communicated entirely through editing.

This scene is a wonderful example of the power of editing to shift an audience’s response in a particular direction, and I look forward to re-watching other Scorsese/Schoonmaker collaborations for more now that I’ve learned a little about the mechanics behind editing.

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