‘Should I cut this out or keep it? I mean, it’s kind of important, like it gives you a bit more detail? …(watches the edited preview a million times)… Actually, nah, I’ll just take it out. It just makes it longer.’ This is probably my most recurring thought/action every time I have to edit something.

Hence, I was quite glad about our second lectorial where we were given a presentation about editing in film by Jeremy Bowtell, a BComm Media Alumni. He discusses how editing can be used to juxtapose components to produce new meanings. It can also be a process of ‘fixing’ as well as ‘breaking’. He makes references to some practical advice from Walter Murch, an American film editor in terms of the functions of editing. This includes how it can evoke emotion, progress the narrative, create rhythm, eye tracing, and 2D and 3D placing.

We then analysed a scene from ‘Casino’ (a 1995 film by Scorsese) where Sam meets Ginger and looked at how the previously mentioned functions and juxtaposition can be applied to one scene. And in this particular scene, there was a lack of dialogue, thus the story was told through eye contact and there was continuous cutting between Sam and Ginger’s characters to accelerate the story. There was also a juxtaposition created between Robert De Niro’s (Sam) character with the chaos of people collecting the thrown poker chips.

The presentation brings a forward a set of questions to ask yourself, or rather myself, when it comes to editing film. How important is this footage, or part of the footage? Does it drive the story forward or backwards, or just leaves it stagnant? How does it make the audience feel? And this is just a very limited list of questions to ask. I’m sure there are plenty more to ask when you’re actually editing, but for now, I’m just going to focus on editing out my habit of careless editing.