Assembly, Edit, Montage
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
Watch every frame of footage twice
Nurture relationship with director and team
Get historical references, develop a common film language
Organisation in paramount
Good and conscious time management
“Nothing is set in stone”
Audio is as important as image
Cut but with the whole film in mind