My first thought of Video Editing would be… Trying my best to link clips together? The conclusion of my 4 years self-learning ‘editing’ experience (I still had joined some how-to-use Premiere and AE classes), making an industry standard and creative artwork still sound difficult to me, or maybe I haven’t thought of what editing is actually.
This week’s lecture was held by Liam, introduced by images of potato and Trump. In the world of editing, would ‘1+1=3’, would there be any meaning came out when putting irrelevant things sequentially? What Editing did seem to express our own distinct message to viewers. As well as, The Kuleshov Effect, Liam had shown us how powerful editing would be, that different sequences could tell a totally dissimilar story.
Then we moved to the reason of editing, to offer gaps to audiences that leaving them spaces for their own imagination of what’s happening, and what would be going next. Also about continuity, again, to give meanings in coherence, that viewers won’t be confused about what we trying to show them.
To end with, an exercise had been given, to create a new story from 30 mixed up story pieces. I could say that, it was the most difficult exercise I have seen in my RMIT life (yeah, just 3 weeks…), depending on my English reading speed, I couldn’t even read through these pieces once in a little while. So what I did was extracting all dialogues out first, and try my best to give them meanings by bringing them together. Such as, the difference between a single “Papa. What?” scene and to repeat the scene, could become an emphasis, right?
Blood in the Gutter
Luckily, the reading this week instead of an actual ‘reading’, a comic, a quite interesting one had been assigned (Although I still took like >2 hours to deal with it). It told us how a comic could be understandable, and the importance of gaps between panels, which share the similar theory as editing and film making.
Scott had introduced a concept named ‘Closure’ as the opening, what ‘Closure’ stand for, is our ability of figuring out the whole while just had saw a part of it, like the ‘thing happened’ between panel, or Frames in Film language, of the reason why we can understand what panel-to-panel, or frame-to-frame wants to tell us. For instance, we realised a man was taking off his hat when we had just seen a picture of he’s preparing to take off it, and that the hat had been taken off. Would it been influenced by our experiences of reading/watching, or we had just seen things in a kind of ‘logic’ in our everyday life? However, everyone on this planet had been taught like this involuntarily, that’s the reason why we are able to understand most scenes between a video.
After that, 6 kinds of comic transitions had been introduced, that the Aspect-to Aspect, and Scene-to-Scene had been widely used in editing, tend to make a film more engaging by showing different related objects at the same time, and changing scene frequently to let it less bored.
Besides, the comic also indicated that the way of our presentation would also be important, of trying to let viewers be less confused while watching the artworks, and about how to let the powerful ‘Closure’ work successfully, won’t lead to misunderstanding of what we’re going to say through editing.