This weeks workshop was focused on editing and editing techniques. We were shown this short film by Lev Kuleshov(above) in which a short sequence of unrelated photos are placed together, the audiences reaction to this is referred to as the ‘Kuleshov effect’. The ‘effect’ refers to the mental phenomena of people associating emotions or feeling with images that don’t neccessarily carry these; resulting from the images placement against and with other images. In Kuleshov’s case, an image of a mans face portraying no emotion is placed next to, first, a child in a coffin, the same image of the man is shown again, next to an image of a bowl of soup and last, the man is shown immediately before the image of a woman laying on a bed. This experiment in editing is used to exemplify how the precise placing of images in a sequence can truly affect the way the audience receives each image.
We were then shown sites such as archive.org, a place we can access lots of stock footage to use in future assignments, this footage has passed its copyright dates and is now considered within the public domain – which is great! We were each given a different subject or idea such as shape, time, movement and then left to source stock footage and have a play around editing techniques on whichever program we had. It was hard to pull myself away from some of the seriously weird and entertaining old footage found within the site! I’m looking forward to practicing my editing skills more over the next few weeks during work on my project briefs, and in class.
