Assembly - Put together; fit together; connect; link; join; chain

• Editing is an integral aspect of post-production

• Selecting different scenes/clips to design a movie, motion picture and/or video

• Creation of sequences by selecting shots

• Digital technology

• Editing allows film to flow

• Audiences are interested by what they see

• Narrative of time (use of camera angles, pace & narrative structure)

• Essential for telling a story

• Create desired mood, atmosphere and theme

Editing Concepts

• New shots should always present new information

• Visual (Characters, locations)

• Aural (Voiceover, Narration, important sound)

Kuleshov Effect - A cognitive event in which viewers derive more meaning from interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation

How to use

• Add reactions to script

• Give characters chance to react to dialogue

• Reinforce emotions, beliefs & world views

• Use close-ups for reactions.

• Focus on character’s face

• Emphasise emotional reaction

• Tells audience how to feel about on-screen action

• Emphasise emotions in Post-Production

• Abundance of strong close-ups and reaction shots

• Give editors freedom to cut scenes together

• To achieve/guide towards specific feeling

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Pure Cinema”

• Developed Kuleshov Effect

• Added reaction shot to Kuleshov’s close-up & POV shot sequence

• “Pure Cinema” - conveying information about story to audience through images, movement of the camera and editing

Shot Composition 

• Vital in making a scene make sense & keeping scenes continuity fluent

• How elements of a scene are arranged in a camera frame

• Arrangement of visual elements to convey intended message

• Arranging clips in an order that helps shot keep conventions of the genre & film in general

180-degree rule - Guideline regarding on-screen spatial relationship between characters or objects within a scene

Continuity - Providing smooth, seamless continuity across transitions

• Making sure sequence makes sense

• Keeping scene interesting

Editing -The Role

• Combining shots to create sequences

• Transitions such as, Jump cuts, fades and wash outs

• Important roles

Early Film Editing

• All done in camera

• No editing involved

• Film would play in order

• ‘The Great Chain Robbery’ (1903)

• Used techniques including cross-cutting, double exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting

“The Great Trio”

• David Griffiths

• “Father” of narrative cinema

• Techniques such as parallel editing

• “Classical Hollywood”

• Lev Kuleshov

• Soviet filmmaker

• World’s first film school - Moscow Film School

• Editing a film is like constricting a building

• Sergei Eisenstein

• Student of Kuleshov

• Montage as a dialectical means of creative meaning

• Contrasted unrelated shots, he tried to provoke associations  in viewer

• Five methods of Montage in essay “Word and Image”

Five Methods of Montage

• Metric - Where editing follows specific number of frames, cutting to next shot no matter what is happening within the image

• Used to elicit most basal and emotional reactions

• Rhythmic - Cutting based on continuity, creating visual continuity from edit to edit

• Tonal - Uses emotional meaning of shots to elicit reaction from audience even more complex than metric & rhythmic.

• Sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation

• Overtonal / Associational - Accumulation of metric, rhythmic and tonal montage to synthesise effect on audience for abstract and complicated effect

• Intellectual - Uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning

Seven (+) Laws of Film Editing

1. Watch every frame of footage twice

2. Nurture relationship with director and team

3. Get historical references, develop a common film language

4. Organisation in paramount 

5. Good and conscious time management

6. “Nothing is set in stone”

7. Audio is as important as image

8. Cut but with the whole film in mind