In this weeks class, we were asked to create a film without editing. It was a good exercise to focus on actually planning what you are going to shoot before you shoot it. The cameras were still able to delete footage, which was an option unavailable in years past when shooting on film, but there was no editing done in post.
The exercise is obviously aimed to stop the age old adage of just getting a shot done and “fixing it in post”. But there’s also the problem that switching to digital provides, which is an endless amount of film. Nowadays, you can carry around so much memory with you, that it would be virtually impossible to run out of space while shooting a film. I think this creates a particular problem. It is much easier now to simply go out and shoot as much as you can, then rely on your editing to get something good. Having an extremely constrained amount of film to shoot on forced a director to be conscientious about what they filmed. I think this probably would have provided the editor with a much more focused and coherent narrative to work with.
I definitely need to start storyboarding/planning my work much more rigorously. Editing software is a great tool to put together the narrative, and create things with the pieces of film you have shot. But if the shooting is done without proper planning, there is only so much editing can do to create something meaningful. If the shooting is thoughtless, the editing cannot fix that. There’s also the problem of amount of content. If the director simply shoots as much as they can, it makes the editors job that much more difficult, as they have so much more footage to sift through and find good shots. However if the director is much more focused with his vision of the film, the editor will have an easier time collating it into something worth watching.