The last week or so has been a trial for me as I try to learn how to edit footage in iMovie in the lead up to Project Brief 2. Technically my skills are still basic but I’m learning. What our lecture on Tuesday and reading from Monday got me thinking about is the theory of editing.

Our speaker Liam Ward described editing as ‘breaking’ footage, cutting it up and getting the audience to create their own image of what happens in the gaps. Its the same as what Scott McCloud describes in ‘Blood in the Gutter’ except applied to film rather than comics.

I’m very interested in the power of the human mind to create meaning from anything. We look for pictures in cloud formations, we see patterns in random numbers, we latch onto superstitions, lucky numbers and habits that will give order to our lives.

In editing we can use this to make the audience draw their own conclusions rather than explaining them ourselves. I could google search any two random images, put them next to each other and we would look for something that connects them, anything to explain why they’ve been put together.

eg. I let google autofill assume what I was looking for then picked the first picture that came up:

Immediately you start looking for connections. Does Hilary Duff wear these shoes? Are these two looks that someone particularly liked?

These are things to keep in mind when editing, will the audience fill in this for themselves? Is this part necessary or can I leave a ‘gutter’ for the audience to fill in? What connections will the audience make?