The Editing Process and Fandoms

In this week’s lectorial (Week Eight) we focused on the importance of fandoms in the media as well as a talk by guest speaker, Jeremey Botell on the power of editing; rough cuts, final cuts and the like.

Fandoms are important because of textual attention – they bring in the world to a text that would otherwise be obsolete. I think the most important and fascinating part of fandoms are the fact that individuals who call themselves ‘fans’ of a text can spin their own angle and their own story. I think this links well with this weeks reading focusing on Harry Potter. You can also put the focus on the media and fandoms through advertisers, commercial broadcasts and media scholars and how they use fandoms to portray the importance of the media. In a consumeristic sense, fandoms are the driving force behind the success of a franchise such as Harry Potter and Star Trek. Fandoms can also be deemed as ‘crazy’ because they have so much love and passion for the subject. Thus, this links with the post-broadcast era and how it has changed through fandoms.

This element of the ‘active audience’ allows individuals to make more sense of a text, viewing as an activity, cultural sense and sociocultural ideologies. Fandoms allow an emotional attachment to a text, this also means that the line between high culture and low culture is blurred such as fanfiction.

Jeremy Bowtell focuses on the editing process and the importance of the editing process and planning such as assembly, rough cuts (first draft SFX, montage) and fine cuts (audio, colour grading, pace, noise reduction). He also went through how to edit a montage and some focusing on colour grading.