Expert Connections : Art of Editing Corner

Words of the Wise

Brad88 — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:05:00 GMT

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend an editing workshop with double Emmy award winning editor Kris Trexler where we looked at how he cuts the genre he’s most known for namely television comedy. Suffice to say I got a great deal from the two days he spent with us some of which I want to share with you today. But beyond that it got me to thinking... we may not all have Emmys, Oscars etc, which Kris himself says was a lot about being in the right place at the right time, but we do have hard earned experience on particular genres that surely is more valuable than any piece of silverware… so what about if we shared that?

There are many generic courses and workshops out there but in today’s fast paced high demand world we don’t have the time to plough through those copious materials to get to the 5% we actually need for our own projects. So with your permission here is what I would like to do... Let’s start creating our own volumes of wisdom genre by genre. The Avid community encompasses creative talents from around the world working on all sorts of programming be it for film, TV or other forms of media delivery. We each have faced and met different challenges either from a creative or workflow perspective the solution of which, while unique to us, could be of immense value to others in similar circumstances. So what words of wisdom would you share?

I can start the ball rolling with two, one of Kris’s and one of mine.

From Kris Trexler on television comedy: - To really sell the joke don’t cut away from the actors eyes until he has completely finished his delivery. I explored that idea while working with some footage Kris had for us to use and I found it to be so true. If I rushed for the reactions and laughter, even by a few frames, it really had a psychological impact on the line

And from me on editing in general: - Be very aware of when an actor looks at something because it effects what you can show next especially if he/she looks quickly.

I think this comes from thousands of years of not wanting our throats ripped out by wild animals in the jungle but when we see someone look somewhere, especially quickly, we want to know what they are looking at just in case its said wild animal. If your audience sees the eyes move they want to see what’s being looked at and if that desire is not satisfied they suffer which in terms of your edit breaks the dramatic flow. So watch the eyes.

Now I know I said specific genres but if you do think you have an overarching gem of wisdom we would love to collect those too. So please get writing. Send us your name, the genre, the insight(s) you wish to share down and any relevant details and let’s see if we can’t help each other to all collectively raise our games... And maybe one day be the right editor in the right place too.

Traveling with Marlowe in The Big Sleep

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:25:00 GMT

In The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks, director, Christian Nyby, editor) the viewer physically "travels with” Marlowe throughout the film – he is in every scene and we have little access to information not available to him or to events that he does not participate in. Most scenes in the film are structured the same way: the camera follows Marlowe as he enters a location, he has an encounter with one or more characters, and then the camera follows Marlowe as he exits. (Figures 1-4 below)

(Figs 1-4)

The opening and closing shots reinforce the principle that the viewer is traveling with Marlowe. This predisposes us to adopt Marlowe's emotional and conceptual attitudes. Our knowledge of the other characters is restricted to how they reveal themselves in their interactions with Marlowe. Moreover, the portraits of other characters are limited by their importance for Marlowe and his moral vision.

The Big Sleep generally uses the shot counter-shot structure (SCS) to depict Marlowe’s interactions with other characters. (See Figs. 2-3 above.) A standard structure used in films from the classic age of Hollywood filmmaking through contemporary filmmaking, the shot counter-shot sequence is typically used to portray dialog scenes. Also typically, the SCS exchange is established, broken, and re-established through the course of the exchange. The break in the pattern generally indicates a shift in the tone of the conversation or in the significance of the discussion for one or both characters. As the exchange reestablishes itself on a new plane and the relationship changes in some way, another pattern is established; it is clear that the shift by one person in the encounter is significant for both characters.

The shot counter-shot structure is used in this film to show each scene as both an "objectively" depicted social encounter and a way for us to have access to Marlowe's perspective and judgment. To create a sense of objectivity and neutrality, Hawks favors eye-level camera placement, a slight oblique angle for each party, either singles or over-the-shoulder shots, a similar distance to the camera, and a clear repetition of pairs of shot compositions. Generally, if the shot is repositioned, the counter-shot will be adjusted to compensate for the change. The film thus tactfully avoids tipping the balance too far in Marlowe's favor and also refrains from emphasizing Marlowe's partiality. On the other hand, the reaction shot holds a privileged position in The Big Sleep’s SCS scenes because it gives us access to Marlowe’s thoughts and emotional life.

Let’s take a look at an early scene to see how the shot counter-shot form is used to create access to Marlowe's perspective while maintaining the sense that we’re looking at the scene from outside any one character’s perspective. This will be a close analysis; we provide some frames from the DVD, but encourage you to have the DVD handy so you can have a look for yourself.

In this scene, Marlowe has his only encounter with General Sternwood, the elderly gentleman who hired Marlowe to investigate an act of blackmail against Carmen, one
of his daughters. The entire scene between Marlowe and General Sternwood proceeds by establishing and then changing patterns of the shot counter-shot form during their long conversation.

In his initial monologue, General Sternwood talks about himself, his milieu, and his problems, but interestingly, through the strategic placement of reaction shots, we also learn something about Marlowe.

There are three reaction shots of Marlowe in this opening sequence: when the General tells Marlowe he may smoke, when he describes the effects of his illness (Marlowe pulls his ear lobe, a gesture indicating his mental involvement), and when he talks of the orchid as a “nasty thing” (“their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption” he says as Marlowe drinks brandy) – a progression from physical to moral decay. (Figs. 5-7) The placement of reaction shots suggests that the General's descriptions are significant for Marlowe. They forecast his passionate response to the morally depraved characters in the film.

Figs 5-7

The General’s reaction shot to Marlowe drinking brandy breaks the pattern and starts another SCS sequence; the camera has moved closer. (Figs. 8-9) The General’s reaction shot is quite dramatic, giving us a hint that he (and as we’ll see, Marlowe) are attracted and repelled by the corrupt world in which they operate. As Sternwood says later, “I enjoyed your brandy as much as you did, Mr. Marlowe.” The camera has moved closer, reflecting a closer level of intimacy between the two men.

Figs 8-9

Another SCS sequence is established (the camera moves to a closer MS of each man) when Marlowe and the General begin to talk about Sternwood’s two daughters. The change occurs when we cut to Marlowe as he says what he’s heard about them: “They’re both pretty (Fig. 10), and both pretty wild” (Fig. 11).

Figs 10-11

Later the two men talk about Sean Reagan, a man respected by both of them who has recently disappeared. The conversation directly concerns Sternwood's feelings, but the composition of the sequence also tells us about Marlowe.

This sequence begins by cutting back to a longer shot in which some exposition about Reagan is provided (Fig. 12) Since it conveys less emotionally charged material than the surrounding shots, the change of camera distance is appropriate. It’s also important for easing the intensity, so the return to the medium close shot (Fig. 13) has more impact. Remember, in order to heighten the emotion of a moment, it’s often a good idea to first ease the tension. (It’s similar to music, where musicians lower the volume at the start of a crescendo for maximum effect.)

Figs 12-13

The next shift is a major one: The composition changes as Marlowe walks over to the bar for a second drink. A long shot of Marlowe walking is followed by a new set-up of medium shot singles of the two men. This new SCS sequence continues to build the men's relationship as the General keeps discussing Reagan. (Figs. 14-16)

Figs 14-16

This sequence recalls the opening, with shots of the General speaking and Marlowe reacting. The theme here is “acting by proxy” – Marlowe and Reagan both do things that Sternwood can no longer do. This sequence again suggests that Sternwood's discussion has personal resonance for Marlowe. This is especially evident in the reaction shot of Marlowe as the General says of Reagan, “He was my son, almost.” (Similar to Fig. 15.) It is no accident that at key moments we hear the General and see Marlowe; the General talks of Reagan's doing things (sitting with him, “sweating like a pig”) while we witness Marlowe doing what Reagan had done.

We are thus subtly guided throughout this scene to begin to understand Marlowe's point of view. One of the main, if not the main, themes of the film is “indulging in vices by proxy.” The core of Marlowe’s belief system is his disdain for this trait; he hates Mars and Canino, the two primary villains in the film, because they do other people’s dirty work (Canino) or order others to do their own dirty work (Mars). On the other hand, Marlowe respects Jones, a petty criminal, for his personal code of honor, for his protection of his girlfriend Agnes, and for his refusal to get involved in other people’s business. (It is of course ironic that Marlowe earns his living doing other people’s business; it is the reason he needs to constantly play out this dilemma.)

So, we see that the shot counter-shot structure can be used to focus on a character's perspective during an exchange that is presented “from the outside.” Reaction shots are used to bring out the emotions/thoughts of a character, simultaneously placing actions/other characters within that person’s perspective. An event obviously meaningful to one character in the narrative (in this scene, the General) can also be revealed as significant for the character privileged through the use of reaction shots (both the General and Marlowe).

Copyright 2008, Ellen Feldman

Film frames provided courtesy of Warner Home Video.

The Conversation, A Study in Surveillance

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:07:00 GMT

The Conversation was made by Francis Coppola in the mid-70’s, around the time that the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King, and Nixon ordered surveillance operations on anti-war activists, civil-rights workers, and journalists on his enemies list. Secret operatives broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to retaliate against him for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the press. And there was the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel, which was the first of the “gate” scandals. Spying, invasion of privacy, and wiretapping were being ordered from the highest reaches of government. [This article is a shortened version of a paper submitted in 2006 for the University Film and Video Association's annual paper prize. The paper was awarded third place in the competition - ed.]

In The Conversation, Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman) is a man whose profession, audio surveillance or wiretapping, is marked by power without responsibility. He’s a hired gun, or rather a hired microphone, hired to keep his distance, follow orders, and not get involved. But Harry Caul is not the only secret observer in the film. The Conversation portrays a world populated by wiretappers, by people watching and spying on each other. There’s hardly a character in the film who doesn’t spy on others. The syndrome is presented as societal in nature—no one escapes with clean hands. In a few cases the watchers and watched are paired in a cycle of reciprocal mistrust, particularly Harry Caul and the Director’s Assistant (played by Harrison Ford), as well as Caul and his girlfriend Amy (played by Teri Garr), not to mention Caul’s client and the couple the client is paying Caul to spy on.

This article explores The Conversation, a film that dramatizes its opposition to government spying through the case of its lead character Harry Caul, the spy-for-hire. Caul begins as a mercenary, has a crisis of conscience, becomes engaged and finally takes responsibility for his actions, but he is ultimately destroyed. Caul’s personal traits are totally suited to his life as a professional eavesdropper, and the trajectory of his professional life is perfectly embodied in this private journey. He moves from alienation to engagement, from a willing to an unwilling outsider, from an observer to a participant. The paper examines scenes, dramatic moments, and film techniques that deliver the film's anti-surveillance message through the professional and private life of Harry Caul.

HARRY CAUL: OUTSIDER

The first few scenes of the film establish Harry Caul’s character. His portrait is developed bit by bit – building the primary qualities of alienation and secretiveness and separateness, creating the flawed human being who wills himself to feel nothing in his professional and personal lives.

His excessive secrecy is manifested when he repels his girlfriend Amy’s attempts to find out the most basic facts of his life. He says he has no secrets, but Amy knows better. With wily innocence she contradicts him, saying, “I’m your secret.” Even though they’ve obviously been together for a while, she asks first-date questions. She explains that since it’s his birthday, which he let slip in a moment of indiscretion, he should tell her something, anything, about himself. He relents, and tells his age, and we know he’s chipped off a couple of years. Throughout the scene, he tells her small lies to conceal the most basic attributes: his profession, whether or not he lives alone. His lies seem gratuitous, and his will to privacy is quite pitiful because he’s so guarded about revealing personal facts, no matter how slight.

In a later scene, Caul explains his professional philosophy to his assistant, Stan (played by John Cazale). As a professional eavesdropper, he claims to lack thoughts or feelings about his subjects. “If there is one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business,” he says, “it’s that I don’t know anything about human nature; I don’t know anything about curiosity.” Then he gets so emotionally worked up he stutters into silence.

UNION SQUARE: RECORDING THE CONVERSATION

The opening scene of the film establishes the tension between an authorial presence and the circumscribed perspective of the main character. This scene puts us into the middle of Caul’s current job – to eavesdrop on the conversation between a couple, Anne and Mark, walking around in Union Square, San Francisco.

A long zoom down into Union Square takes several minutes (fig. 1-4 show different stages of the zoom). Its movement recalls the opening shots of Psycho, in which the camera zooms from a wide view of a cityscape incrementally closer until we enter a hotel bedroom. In The Conversation, the trajectory seems intentional, but for a considerable time we cannot figure it out – our eye canvases the screen for a significant event or character. The camera picks up a mime who is, in a way, a personification of the camera, picking up one person and then another. It’s a universe where people watch and follow each other, and the most omniscient and powerful observer is the eye of the camera itself.

But the film does not persist with its authorial position. More like Rear Window than Psycho, the omniscient view is established at the beginning only to withdraw. Instead, we become locked to Harry Caul’s perspective. He is present in all of the scenes, and we follow him from place to place as he makes his way to some sort of self-discovery. Although we have no privileged information, the details of the drama give us clues about how to interpret Caul’s situation. He turns out to be an unreliable guide to this world.

So in the early scenes Harry Caul is presented, professionally, in a position of power, at the top of his game. But personally, and even professionally, he’s very isolated.

CAUL’S CRISIS

Suddenly… Harry Caul becomes a man of action! It doesn’t look like much – one could be forgiven for not noticing – but it’s the turning point of the film. Caul goes to drop off the finished tape at his client’s office, but he’s intercepted by the Director’s Assistant, Martin Stett, who insists that Caul leave the tape with him. He refuses, and after a brief struggle snatches the package from Stett (fig. 5). It’s hardly a heroic struggle, but in this world of alienation, it’s a start. Stett cautions him not to get involved. Harry takes the challenge and with it the consequences of abandoning his life of alienation.

In the next scene, Harry Caul is in his lab, back on the case, and this time he’s emotionally connected. He finds a region of the tape that had been previously indecipherable, and he jumps down the rabbit hole. This is the audio equivalent of a scene, like one in Antonioni’s film, Blow-Up (fig. 6), and another in Rear Window, where technical apparatus is used to take us from perceptual reality to a kind of super-reality or heightened, charged reality, where projection, or the mind’s eye or ear, trumps objective fact.

Caul grabs an audio filtering device, and uncovers the line, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” His fears are confirmed; the couple thinks that the jilted husband, his client, intends to kill them. During this scene, the fragment is played eight times! We get the point that this is both a personal and professional moment of crisis for Caul (fig. 7-10) .

The scene of the conversation in Union Square serves as the spine of the film. The film obsessively returns to fragments of the conversation in different contexts and treatments. These iterations function to trace the development of Caul’s interpretation of what he hears. For example, Harry Caul mishears a crucial line of his recording, hearing “He’d kill us if he had to chance,” and correcting it at the end of the film to: “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” The first reading is the one he wants to hear; it’s unreliable but authentically captures Caul’s desire to correct something from his own past and also expresses his pathological fear of intimacy.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY IN A WORLD WITHOUT ABSOLUTES

The Conversation makes a strong case for the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions, personal or professional. The film is concerned with Harry Caul’s growing realization of his own role in the probable murder of Ann. As his sense of responsibility grows, the film gradually moves deeper and deeper into Harry’s inner life.

At first Harry denies any responsibility for his actions, refusing to see any connection between his work and what may happen to the people he spies on. But during the development section, his denial becomes less sure and expresses defensive rage against others’ probes.

There’s the critical scene of the small party in Caul’s warehouse following a convention of surveillance experts. Taunted by a competitor, Bernie Moran, Caul again denies responsibility, this time for a previous job in which his work resulted in the grizzly death of three men. He says, “It had nothing to do with me; I just turned in the tapes.” And then, “What [the clients] do with the tapes is their own business.”

As he makes his denials, Caul moves like a caged animal. A circular move begins as Harry walks away from Moran, his “tormenter,” moves along a chain-link fence, and ends with Moran back in the frame. He can’t escape Moran or his own past (fig. 11-15 show different stages of the camera movement).

Later that evening, Caul is alone in his lab with Meredith, a woman he’s just met that night. He plays the entire conversation, interacting very directly with it. He says simply, “Frightened….This is no ordinary conversation. It makes me feel…something.” When Ann says, “Oh, God,” he repeats her words, matching her tone. He is learning, through imitation, how to express his own fears. Thus he comes to grips, more strongly than ever, with his responsibility for the couple’s fate. Finally Harry says, “Oh, God, what I have done. I have to destroy the tapes. I can’t let it happen again.”

Harry Caul too thinks he has a second chance. But as he starts to come to life, become a man of action, right the wrongs of his past and present jobs, he makes mistake after mistake – both professionally and emotionally. There are two problems that ultimately cause his downfall. One is that he has no privileged knowledge of others, and makes some bad judgments. And the other is related to the first: he lives in a world where no one trusts anyone, and where everyone, even the most innocent, is guilty of deceit.

HARRY’S WORLD: ONE OF MISTAKES AND MISTRUST

The pervasive mistrust and spying themes are established early in this film by the mime who tracks Caul in the opening shot; by Caul’s assistant who photographs girls through a one-way mirror; by Caul himself as he watches the entrance to his girlfriend Amy’s apartment before entering. And Amy in turn has spied on Harry spying on her!

His mistrust leads to bad judgments. For example, Harry succumbs to Meredith, the trade-show model who goes to the party in his warehouse. As Harry confides in her about his treatment of Amy, Meredith says to Harry, “Sophisticated Lady” playing in the background, “Something is on your mind; I wish you’d tell me.” And unlike his refusal open up in early scenes, he does confide in her.

While he does so, an elegant trio of identical camera moves hints at intimacy, obsession, and imprisonment, the circular musical motif heightening the drama. Three times the camera moves in a half circle from Meredith to Harry (fig 16-17 show the start and end point of the movement). This movement is reminiscent of the wonderful 360-degree camera moves done by Hitchcock to show two characters in an embrace, where intimacy and control are intertwined, as in the embrace in Notorious of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman soon after their arrival in Rio. But in The Conversation, the half circle diminishes the romanticism of its predecessor, while still invoking the sense of entrapment. Harry confides in and sleeps with Meredith, letting down his guard when he should be at his most watchful.

In another tip of the hat to Film Noir, the beautiful, seductive Meredith betrays Harry. While he sleeps, she steals the tapes and later we might figure out that while Harry slept she also planted a bug on him (fig. 18).

CLIMAX

The film’s climax occurs when Harry Caul goes to the hotel to witness Ann and Mark’s murder. There are two climactic scenes. In the first he hears – and feels – the murder taking place in the next room. In the second, he finds the evidence of the murder (fig. 19-20).

The extended scene of the murder and Caul’s response is a masterpiece of discordance. It contains juxtapositions and connections of conflicting elements – visually, aurally, and dramatically.

The multiple conflicting elements in these scenes make it the most intense moment in the film. This is where it all comes together: Harry’s greatest fear – of being involved in murder – is realized, and he’s powerless to prevent it. He totally loses all traces of detachment.

DENOUEMENT

Near the end of the film, Caul watches Ann, Mark, and the Director’s Assistant leave the corporate headquarters. He quickly realizes that his client, the Director, has been murdered, not Ann and Mark. His assumptions have been turned upside down, and now he has to mentally rework the puzzle of what happened. It’s a terrific, fast-paced scene, relying on point-of-view editing and over-the-shoulder shots to situate us in Harry’s perspective as he pieces together what happened. The characters in the present are interwoven with the originally recorded event and scenes of the murder. What’s great about this scene is that it depicts Harry Caul’s process of thought visually and aurally, avoiding the static explanatory conversation so typical of a detective film’s ending.

Caul returns to his apartment, starts to play the sax, and finds out from a phone call from the Director’s Assistant that his apartment is being bugged. Bit by bit he dismantles his apartment in pursuit of the bug. The final pans around the room show Harry Caul playing his sax, once again utterly alone (fig. 21). But the scene is different from the one of him playing alone early in the film.

His apartment is now far from sterile – it’s a desolate wreck. Early in the film the apartment was a clean slate of a life unlived, it’s now a different kind of “clean slate,” one where all superficialities have been stripped away. His sax playing is more downbeat and discordant than it was in the beginning of the film; it’s coming from the depths of his soul.

Most important, Caul has been beaten at his own game. The film doesn’t give away the location of the bug, but Caul has stripped the apartment of any possible hiding place. So we have… the sax and his eyeglasses. The only one that makes sense is the glasses, since Meredith, who betrayed Caul, removed his glasses when she slept with him. And the glasses make dramatic sense: the bug is so close, so invasive; it mediates everything he hears and, at least symbolically, sees. For someone who works by invading others’ privacy, it’s a terrible turnabout.

CONCLUSION

By the end of the film, Harry Caul has gone full circle from wiretapper to wiretapped, from perpetrator to victim, and on a personal level he goes from total alienation to making some connections, encountering private demons along the way. He loses his privacy just as he invaded others’. He loses the power that technological omniscience gave him. He sacrifices the neutrality demanded by his profession to become a person with a conscience.

In the process he learns about responsibility, guilt, regret, and empathy. His perspective is limited and circumscribed by his actions and desires; his knowledge is far from god-like. He takes risks, he makes mistakes, he suffers. What can we say about Harry Caul at the end of the film? That he is deeply wounded, but also that, paradoxically, he is deeply alive.

This paper began by talking about the limitless power of the U.S. government to investigate citizens and inhabitants without accountability and in secrecy. Harry Caul is just a bit player in this game. But writ large, we can see the consequences of his actions, both for himself in his own suffering, and for the society at large where surveillance begets mistrust, deceit, isolation, and lack of community or shared responsibility.

Images from The Conversation courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Images from Blow-Up courtesy of Warner Home Video.

Art of Editing Corner: Wonder Boys

Anonymous — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 07:09:00 GMT

Wonder Boys was edited by the “grande dame” of editing, Dede Allen, best known for her groundbreaking editing of Bonnie and Clyde. In that film she used jump cuts to elongate a moment and rapid cutting to create incredibly kinetic action scenes. She won several Academy Awards for editing, and was nominated for Wonder Boys, directed by Curtis Hanson, with Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Robert Downey Jr., and Tobey McGuire. It also happens to be the first film that Allen edited on the Avid.

Wonder Boys seems an unlikely candidate for the Academy Award for Editing. It doesn’t have great action scenes or an epic structure. It’s a dramatic, sometimes screwball, comedy, about an English professor (Grady Tripp, played by Douglas) who has lost his personal and professional bearings, and spends the film getting into a series of mishaps on his way to self-understanding. I’ll discuss two dialog scenes, both on Track 5 of the DVD. The first is between Grady and his gifted, troubled student James (McGuire); the second is with his lover, College Dean Sara Gaskell (McDormand). In both, the pacing of dialog and editing make the scenes come alive. Also, a few techniques are used to slightly disorient the viewer, not meant to overwhelm the viewer, but to provide a low-key zing appropriate for a non-action film.

This first scene is actually a string of a couple of mini-scenes. James has just shot a dog that attacked Grady in his lover, Sara’s, house (itself a comic mimicking of Hitchcock’s editing style). We cut to James and Grady in a car. But audio precedes picture in this transition: we hear James says, in voice-over, “Professor Grady,” while the picture remains in the house, on the wounded Grady taking the gun from his student. It’s a nice ironic touch, this mismatch of the word “professor” with Grady’s undignified demeanor in this scene.

In the car, a fairly straightforward shot reverse-shot structure is used. But notice how the shots are cut precisely at the end of a line of dialog, without a frame to spare. Unlike many screwball comedies, however, the line readings themselves are not hurried. The rhythm of the scene comes from the sharp edits at the end of a line in counterpoint with the more measured pace of the dialog. (The comic punch line, “I have tenure,” is the payoff of the scene – Grady’s shorthand explanation of why he, not James, should take the blame for killing the dog.) This is a 30-second gem of pacing.

The scene continues as Grady and James get out of the car to put the dead dog in the trunk. They have another brief encounter: James is inducted by his teacher into the pleasures of Codeine with a whiskey chaser. This key comic moment – James becoming Grady’s “disciple” – is elongated by including lots of reaction shots. Further, in the central action, James “hurls” the Codeine tablet and whiskey, which hit Grady’s jacket. The film gets this action in two shots. Look carefully and you see that the cut on movement is not a perfect continuity cut. Instead, there’s a slight overlap of the action, stretching time. It’s the audio that carries us across the cut, making it appear as a seamless event. The technique used here, and elsewhere in the film, of introducing a bit of discontinuity by breaking up a single action into several pieces, creates a sense of energy and urgency to the characters’ plights.

We’ll skip the next scene in an auditorium on campus, where a successful, but exceedingly pompous writer (Rip Torn) is giving a speech about how to make it as a writer (by the way, we enter the scene in another nice ironic audio-first transition). Grady almost faints and goes out into the corridor, where he actually does faint, and wakes as Sara stands over him. (Watch for the XHA shot of Grady as he faints, another off-beat unexpected shot, with a symbolically-loaded Madonna-and-child statue in the foreground.)

The ensuing 3-minute dialog scene between Grady and Sara is a key moment in the film. Each has news to tell the other (Sara that she’s pregnant, and Grady that he shot her dog). Lots of silence is built into this scene. It’s the scene of maximum misunderstanding – and maximum vulnerability – between the two characters.

The editing (and shooting) choice is strange, and I think can only be understood in the context of the dramatic content of the scene. The camera constantly crosses the 180-degree line, primarily during the shot reverse-shot conversation between the two lovers.

The most jarring instance is the series of three shots it takes Grady to stand up, each cut crossing the axis, again stretching a moment, this time to emphasize Grady’s helplessness.

We may not notice this break from convention on a casual viewing of the film, but it undoubtedly has an effect on us. It throws us off balance, subtly recreating in us the disorienting feelings experienced by the characters. This pattern of shots also encourages us to see the two characters as doubling each other. The literally replace each other on the same side of the screen, accentuating the fact that they’re both working through very personal problems (for Grady, it’s not just that he “shot” her dog, but that he’s falling apart).

And how do we know that this violation of the axis isn’t simply a mistake? First, Hanson and Allen know better. But more important, this is not the only time this violation is made. It’s also done early in the film, at the first moment of anxiety for Grady: he meets his editor, Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.), who immediately asks how his book is coming along (it isn’t). As Grady dissembles uncomfortably, the shot reverse-shot construction defies the 180-degree axis.

The moral of the story for editors: You can enrich a film by using all kinds of story-telling techniques – including ones that might seem more at home in other genres – to build drama and character.

Wonder Boys stills courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

A Chat with LOST Editor, Stephen Semel

Anonymous — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 02:14:00 GMT

LOST Editor, Stephen Semel, answers questions about editing the popular television show (on Avid).

How much do the editors on LOST discuss your different approaches, any cool techniques you’ve developed, what you want to avoid, etc.?

The longer we work together, the more trusting we become with those kind of collaborations. Each of us has something to learn from the other two editors, so why not take advantage of that? We often eat lunch together, and that's normally when those conversations take place. Occasionally I'll be asked to watch another editor's cut of a scene, or vice versa, to see if our perceptions of how the scene plays are in agreement.

In each episode, one character is the focus of attention (and gets some backstory) for each episode, but many of the others also continue to be developed. I’m sure a lot of that balance is provided in the script. But what do you do as you cut to evaluate how much attention to give the main character for the episode vs the others?

The initial task is to make each scene work, without trying to judge whether or not a character will end up with enough or too much emphasis in a given episode. Once we (the producers, the director, the editor) look at the show put together, and assuming that time must be lost from the cut, we might pare down a character's screen time if the flashback is not that character's story.

Do you have a favorite episode?

I have quite a few favorites. From Season One, the Pilot, which constitutes the first two episodes; Walkabout, in which we find out that Locke was crippled until he reached the island; Outlaws, for which I won the ACE Eddie award; and All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues, which has the amazing scene of Jack and Kate cutting Charlie down from the tree.

I am curious how much the editors were in on script meetings and how much the LOST experience/"fandom" aspect of things impacted editorial decisions.

The editors are not involved in script meetings. We first read the same draft of the script that the network reads for approval. If we have notes they are communicated directly to the show runners. The editors do participate in tone meetings, in which the show runners, the writers, the director, and the line producer go through the script, scene by scene, and discuss dramatic approach, visual design, special requirements of any scene, or whatever topic arises. On occasion, editorial decisions are made with the fans in mind, for example choosing a shot that may contain some arcane bit of information which the fans will go back to and still frame, but in general those kinds of nuggets are integrated in the visual design of the scene so that their presence does not require special editorial compensation.

Many editors don't receive much feedback from stakeholders until the rough cut screening -- (then, of course, the onslaught of comments usually begins). Are you fairly removed from outside influences during the construction of the rough cut, or do you collaborate with anyone during this time?

Depending on my relationship with the director, I will share my feelings about the dailies with him or her. The assistant editor and I talk a lot about the dailies: performances, appearance, story issues - pretty much everything.

Now that we have, in Season 3, received a glimpse of the future/present of the characters, how might that affect overall structural decisions when editing? To be more specific, since the flashbacks are such an integral part of the unfolding of the storyline of LOST, I am curious how the flashforwards might be incorporated in an editorial sense and in terms of bleeding out clues/information on the characters.

I think this is more of a question for the writers. Though the placement of flashbacks and revelations about characters is a synthesis of both script and the re-writing process that happens in the editing room, certainly the master plan is held by the writer/producers.

Open question: Is there anything you’d like your audience (us) to know about cutting LOST?

Where do I begin? I can't believe how lucky I am to be involved in a project that people will watch and discuss for years and years to come. Though we work long hours and weekends, I don't think there are many ways to earn a living that are as much fun as editing LOST. Finally: it's all about the writing. No matter how good we are as actors, directors, cinematographers, or editors, we all end up living or dying based on the quality of the writing. That's what distinguishes a show like LOST.

Art of Editing Corner: United 93, Part 2

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:05:00 GMT

United 93
Edited by Clare Douglas, Richard Pearson, and Christopher Rouse
Directed by Paul Greengrass

In Part 1, I explored how parallel editing is used to structure the film. In Part 2, I’ll discuss Cinema Verité and some techniques used to somewhat disorient us and at the same time keep us connected to the action and the characters.

The film’s style has been described as Cinema Verité, and I know that used today the term is associated with a sense of immediacy caused by hand-held camera movement.

But I want to go back to the early days of the Cinema Verité style, and see what United 93’s style has in common with it. I went back to a classic CV film, Primary, 1960, by Robert Drew, to check out the relevance of the association. (The camera people on that film were future star documentary filmmakers Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter), D. A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back), and Ricky Leacock.)

By 1960, portable cameras and sound equipment freed documentary filmmakers to follow events without interference, and without asking people to pose or re-enact events. These filmmakers believed that truth arises from the minutia of daily life rather than from grand events. So even when shooting the 1960 presidential primary race between John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, Drew’s photographers film small events: from Humphrey taking a cat nap in a car to Jack and Jackie Kennedy shaking a multitude of hands after a rally (caught in a signature long shot: Jackie flexing her hand between handshakes). The takes are often long, letting us see how a scene plays out. And the handheld camera is held steady; the cinematographers took pride in their ability to hold on a scene without using a tripod.

United 93 maintains some of the impulses of Cinema Verité, particularly in shooting long takes (but unlike in Primary, the long takes are rarely retained in the edit). In Primary, a terrific long take with hand-held camera close behind John Kennedy as he goes through hallways to enter a rally makes us feel like a privileged witness: we feel the excitement of moving through the crowd, strongly identifying with the eye of the camera as it moves through space.

Like other dramatic films and TV shows that want to create a documentary feel (24, Oz, Celebration), the camera’s erratic movement creates a sense of excitement, but does it really call attention to the camera as participant-observer as the traditional Cinema Verité film does? It seems to me that the focus is all on what’s happening in front of the camera.

There’s another difference with traditional Cinema Verité films: the hyperactive camera is used to shoot static subjects; it’s not just used to “keep up with” moving subjects. It energizes and animates the relatively static scenes in the ATC centers.

The term Cinema Verité has by now been largely (unfortunately?) freed from its specific historical context. It has come to be used, interchangeably with “documentary feel,” to describe dramatic narrative films with shaky camera movement and hyperactive editing. Ironically, these same stylistic features have been adopted in some documentary films to give the same “documentary feel” (see Born into Brothels).

The hand-held camera movement in United 93 is the perfect visual approximation of the anxiety that increases throughout the film. Many other tactics join this one in creating a sense of disorientation: jump cuts, quick cuts, mismatches, swish pans, people blurred out, moving across the frame inches from the camera, asynchronous sound (dialog of one person overlapping visual of another). All of these tactics contribute to creating a world where you have to work to get your bearings, as exemplified in this series of shots from the United 93 DVD, Chapter 8. They are six consecutive shots (in 20 seconds) of Ben Sliney (playing himself) at the National ATC center. He’s just been told they’ve lost a plane, and the film cuts to him in all parts of the frame, from all angles, in a hugely discontinuous, and dramatically key, moment.

United 93 article on avid.com

Post by Ellen Feldman

Art of Editing Corner: United 93 (Part 1)

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:04:00 GMT

United 93
Edited by Clare Douglas, Richard Pearson, and Christopher Rouse
Directed by Paul Greengrass

Part One

United 93 represents a complex editing feat, with a structure based on parallel cutting combined with an edgy, hyper-cranked “Cinema Verité” style, a style that disorients us but doesn’t prevent us from grasping lots of necessary exposition and identifying with many characters.

In the Art of Editing Corner, I’ll explore how both techniques are used in this film. In this issue, I’ll explore parallel editing, and in the next issue I’ll discuss Cinema Verité and some techniques used in United 93 to create a sense of dislocation.

Parallel cutting, or intercutting between scenes or locations, is one of the earliest film editing techniques, invented before continuity cuts with a scene. It was used from the start for last-minute rescues and for depicting simultaneous events. Later it was also used for building comparisons. Parallel cutting avoids the challenges associated with classical continuity cutting within a scene, which took years to develop and refine: following the 180-degree rule, cutting on a character’s action, maintaining continuity of time/place, and so on.

Parallel cutting gives the editor lots of freedom of choice. It enables the editor to move from place to place, creating a sense that multiple events are unfolding simultaneously, as they do in United 93. But the marvel of parallel editing is that you can use it to stretch or condense time while making the sense of time seem utterly continuous and “real.” While you’re on the current scene, the film “covers over” or “masks” what’s happening in the parallel scene. This may account for one reason that people watching United 93 say that the film takes place in “real time.”

In addition, parallel cutting is often considered an excellent fix for a scene that’s not working. “Let’s intercut this scene with another, and both become more dynamic,” is a frequent solution for a slow-moving scene. (To give one example, it was used in The Departed to enliven a too-static scene in the psychiatrist’s office.)

As anyone knows who has watched a Hitchcock film, parallel editing can be used to create tension and suspense, stretching time until the climactic moment. (In United 93, a Hitchcockian tension is created by cutting between unsuspecting innocents and either the perpetrators of violence or the people on the ground gaining knowledge of terrorism in action.) It can also be used to bring out the commonality of dissimilar events or characters (in M showing the underlying similarity between cops and underworld characters). And it’s used to bring out a darker reality below the surface (in The Godfather, between a Mafia wedding and planting a dead horse in an enemy’s bed; in Cabaret, between a decadent stage show and the violence of Nazi thugs).

Parallel cutting is used throughout United 93. In the beginning, it is used to differentiate between terrorists, unsuspecting passengers, and flight crew as they prepare on 9/11 to take the United 93 flight from Newark to San Francisco.

Then more poignantly, the film cuts between various centers on the ground as they move from suspicion to investigation and the people on United 93 going about their ordinary business.

Later in the film, parallel cutting is used to move between the primary civilian and military centers: the National Air Traffic Control Center (where Ben Sliney, playing himself, ultimately shuts down all air travel over the US) and the Air Defense Command Center (the military center where they quickly move from a military exercise to a “real world” event).

We continue in this vein, alternating between the air traffic centers and between the centers and United 93. The parallels form and reform throughout the film’s development.

At crucial moments, this basic structure is modified or violated.

For example, in the beginning of the film passengers and terrorists are presented separately until the passengers and terrorists both enter the airport waiting area. Then depth of focus and camera movement are used to join the two groups in single shots; their fates are now linked.

As another example, in the early scenes of the centers, they are quite distinct. Even so, there is a common theme threading through them all – that of disbelief as they hear that a possible hijacking may be taking place. (Also, as the film progresses, phones are used more and more to emphasize the links between all involved groups.)

When the second plane flies into the World Trade Center, for the first time we cut swiftly from one center to the other as we see the people’s reactions. In fact, it may be difficult to tell that we’ve cut from one flight center to another. The centers at this moment become a single organism.

For the film’s final act, we are back on the plane, where the passengers and crew are intercut with the terrorists. The passengers/crew attempt a last-minute rescue, and the film cuts between the body of the plane and the cockpit. The last-minute rescue, such a staple of film history, is typically used to invoke suspense and anxiety which is released by the success of the rescue. In this case, success is denied; the only positive outcome, and it’s significant, is the knowledge that the passengers fought courageously to thwart the goals of the terrorists, and to live.

For an article on the making of United 93 on avid.com, see this link.

Post by Ellen Feldman
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Art of Editing Corner: Three Cuts

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

To launch this column, I’ll write about three cuts from three movies. Two of them are bravura cuts, stand-outs in the history of editing. The third is smaller, less noticeable, but its impact on the future of editing may be just as great.

The first cut is from Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). It breaks the very famous four-minute-plus long take that opens the film. Just to remind you: The opening shot begins with a bomb being planted in the car of a local big-shot driving with his girlfriend. The camera travels through the honky-tonk border town, moving between this car and just-married Susie (Janet Leigh) and Mike (Charleton Heston) walking to the border. After they all pass from Mexico into the US, the car moves off-screen and Susie and Mike share a private moment.

They kiss:

look toward the sound

and in a split-edit POV cut, the film cuts to what they hear: the bomb exploding.

It’s a cut to match the spectacular opening long take. Sex and violence, two primary motifs of American cinema, are joined by this cut, and their intersections are explored through the course of the film.

The border that’s just been crossed isn’t just the line separating two countries, but also the thin line between the law and corruption in the film’s criminal investigations and the equally thin line between the "legalized sex" of matrimony and "transgressive sex" of prostitution, extramarital relations, and the violence implied in the Grandi gang’s motel "party."

And remember, this first cut is not between two neutral events: the kiss followed by the explosion. The explosion is shown from Mike’s and Susie’s point of view; they are somehow connected to this violence. Both characters become personally embroiled in the seedy world they enter. Susie, who has such a straight-laced façade, plays into the hands of Grandi, the local gang leader, and his band of grotesque hoodlums and druggies. She acts the ignorant, provocative fool in response to their weird taunts. And while Mike is portrayed as an incorruptible cop, his drive to save his wife from the clutches of Grandi’s gang threatens his objectivity, drawing a clear parallel between him and the corrupt (but formerly law-abiding) police chief, Hank Quinlan (Welles).

The cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) is from a bone thrown in the air

to the starship

The bone is thrown into the air by a primate on the cusp of becoming human, cut to a starship about to launch a post-human species. The cut essentially elides all of human history, cutting from pre-human to post-human life.

It’s a simple continuity cut, cutting on movement, one of the basic techniques in classic Hollywood editing. However, instead of its conventional function, maintaining space/time continuity across the cut (for example, using it to cut from a medium shot of a person getting out of a chair to a wider shot of him standing), the continuity cut here crosses millennia. The use of slow-motion as well as the elegant nineteenth-century waltz enhances the magic of the moment. (For a similar use of continuity cutting, see M (Fritz Lang, 1931): continuity of gesture joins intercut scenes between the police and underworld as they meet in their respective conference rooms to discuss the threat posed by the rogue child murderer.)

The third example I want to discuss is actually not a single cut but a series. It’s the jump cuts during two car rides in Godard’s Breathless (A bout de soufflé,1960). (If you watch on a DVD, the two scenes are on tracks 7 and 14.) Godard probably achieved the effect by extracting frames from a long take of the car ride.

These jump cuts are one of many techniques Godard uses to break free from the studio style of post-WWII European film. He takes the camera into the streets, is comfortable with scenes that ramble, and includes self-conscious references to other films, especially American film. The jump cuts add rhythm to essentially static shots. They are playful and jazzy, a nice visual complement to the jazz on the sound track.

So there you have the cuts, all great moments in the history of film. They avoid, in one way or another, the traditional "invisible" edits of so much of American films of the 30’s through the 50’s (no judgment is intended, just observation). Two of the films, Touch of Evil and Breathless, are on the edge of a new era in film; 2001 is firmly entrenched.

Touch of Evil stills courtesy of Universal Studios; Breathless stills courtesy of Fox Lorber; 2001: A Space stills courtesy of Warner Home Video.

Post by Ellen Feldman