Piecing a Film Together

I think I should start by acknowledging that this post is delayed. So that means that there is a lot to catch you, my loyal blog audience, up on. For one i didn’t have the opportunity to assist my adviser at a shoot this week but I did have time to look into one of the most important processes when making a movie: editing.

One of my last assignments as a BASIS senior was to create a Spanish movie for Señora Williams. Though we managed to splice the film together in time for the grades due date, Matthew and I decided that we could make the movie better. Our group had gotten a bit carried away with the project and we shot nearly 4 hours of footage for a movie that only needed to last 15 minutes.

This is how I found myself editing Los Paisajistas, our movie, at Chipotle. We decided that the best way to edit the movie would be to watch what we had already spliced together and stop it where we thought we could make changes. Every time we stopped the film, we talked about what footage could fit better or how to fix a cut that seemed a little jumpy. After every discussion, we would write down our consensus on the scene in a little notebook. Of course, neither of us are professional editors so I decided that it would help to read something from the perspective of someone who was.

After our meeting, I began reading In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. Walter Murch is an acclaimed editor that has won various accolades for his work in The Godfather Part II & III and The English Patient among his other films. In the second edition of his book, Murch not only gives insight to his unique perspective on editing but also expanded on how he thinks the industry will adapt to the prevalence of digital editing, which was becoming more popular around the time of the second edition’s publication in 1999. Though his love for the physicality of mechanical editing is apparent in every chapter, his advice is helpful regardless of the method the reader uses to edit films.

The single most important lesson I can think to share from In the Blink of an Eye is what Murch takes into consideration when making a cut for a film.

“An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and ‘right’; 4) it acknowledges what you might call ‘eye-trace’ - the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects 'planarity’ - the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line, etc); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another)” (Murch 18).

In fact, he makes his priorities even more clear by arranging these six traits in a list of descending importance:

1)Emotion 51%

2)Story 23%

3)Rhthym 10%

4)Eye-trace 7%

5)Two-dimensional plane of screen 5%

6)Three-dimensional space of action 4%

Walter Murch believed that preserving the emotion of a scene was the most important consideration when viewing film on the chopping block and that if necessary editors should sacrifice these 6 traits in ascending order to preserve that emotion. I hope to stay true to this teaching when I share what I hope to be the final cut of my Spanish movie with you next week.