Pre-Visualization for short film "Proxy"
Finished Film "Proxy"
For the past 23 years, I’ve been editing professionally. And theres one question im always asked:
“How do you know when to cut?” And I can only answer that it’s very instinctual. On some level, I’m just thinking and feeling my way through the edit. This will help explain how an editor thinks and feels.
Do you want to become a better editor?
Understanding editing theory will help you greatly on your quest to craft more evocative, moving videos.
Today, we will introduce you to some of the historical schools of thought regarding editing theory so you can start making more considered editing decisions. This will include a bit about sequence editing, continuity editing, as well as the theory of montage, which delves a little bit into complexity or discontinuity editing.
It can be defined as the juxtaposition of two otherwise unrelated images, which when brought together and put one after the other can create a third idea in your mind as the viewer. You also might know it as the Kuleshov Effect. We could explain this principle in more detail to you, but why should we, when we could have a true legend of cinema do exactly that for us. So let’s roll this clip of none other than Alfred Hitchcock explaining the Kuleshov Effect to us and the effect that it can create
If you put together a bunch of shots of baby animals, young children, & blooming flowers, a sunrise, happy lifegiving colours like green, like yellow, you’re immediately going to be thinking of something like new beginnings, maybe springtime hope, the joy and the essence of life, all of these things. Whereas if you put together shots that had a completely different thematic quality, you would have different images evoked in your mind and different connotations would be coming through to you.
With this technique, cuts in your edit are matched to music as it builds and swells and falls and rises, and to its beats. They’re matched to sound effects and to onscreen actions. It can be used to great effect to create an incredible sense of building and excitement and anticipation in your edit. This is why it is most commonly used in movie trailers (now that I’ve mentioned it you’ll never be able to unsee it).
Continuity editing is part of editorial grammar: in other words, the rules that we use to structure an edit the way that we would structure a sentence. It seeks to maintain “continuity” so that the viewer is not taken out of the piece that you have constructed.
While this might seem a little bit boring, it’s very important that we understand these principles and how to use them before we go ahead and break them in order to advance the plots or create a dramatic effect.
What does continuity editing actually consist of though? There are five key considerations that an editor must keep in mind when attempting to maintain continuity in their video.
The first of these considerations is eye line. The editor must always be aware of where their subject is looking so that they can ensure the audience always knows what the subject is looking at, or maintain the sense that they are making eye contact with another subject in the scene. This involves choosing your camera angles very carefully and always cutting between your shots in a way that makes sense.
T180-Degree Rule in terms of editing imagines that there is a line that runs down the middle of a scene. How this plays out practically for you as an editor is that you want to ensure that when you’re cutting between various camera angles capturing the same scene, they all exist on the same side of the line.
The 180-Degree Rule in terms of editing imagines that there is a line that runs down the middle of a scene. How this plays out practically for you as an editor is that you want to ensure that when you’re cutting between various camera angles capturing the same scene, they all exist on the same side of the line.
Essentially, what you’re trying to do is keep your viewer oriented in two-dimensional space and ensure that they’re not teleporting back and forth across the line when you’re putting together a dialogue scene, for example, Now this rule is one that is made to be broken, particularly in instances where you want to disrupt, where you want to show the viewer that something has changed. Maybe a power dynamic has shifted. However, in general, when you’re just editing together a conversation, we want to seek to maintain that line so the viewer doesn’t feel disoriented.
The second is eye trace. The editor is responsible for guiding the viewer’s eye to the most important information on the screen. This influences how long your shots are and where objects of importance are positioned on the screen relative to shots before and shots after. Essentially, the editor has to direct the viewer’s eye through a sequence of shots so that they always end up looking at what is most important.
The third principle is matching action and cutting on action. Two principles that are separate, but go hand in hand with each other. The first ensures that there is continuity of action when cutting between two shots that capture the same action. This looks like finding an exact frame match for that action in both of those shots before you put them together.
The second — cutting on action — sounds more complicated than it actually is, but it is simply a technique that is used to smoothly transition from one shot to another. When the same action is being captured and displayed over those two shots, using this principle plays out as simply as making sure that you cut while your subject is still in motion, rather than before the motion has started or after it has ended.
The fourth principle is continuity of objects. The editor is responsible for paying attention to objects that are in their given shots so that things don’t disappear and suddenly reappear when they’re cutting between various takes. This is meant to be the responsibility of the person who is the script supervisor on set. However, you as the editor are the final barrier against any continuity errors involving objects when it comes to putting together the video. You don’t want to end up in a situation like Game of Thrones with that infamous Starbucks coffee mug.
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