One of the most important skills a good editor needs to develop is the ability to understand and manipulate the gaze of the audience member. The quality of every cut you make depends on your ability to determine where the audience will be looking before the cut and control where they look too after the cut. Many factors go into this including the emotional content of the scene, the composition, lighting and focus of the shot and the movement of objects within the frame. A lot of the time, this decision is made instinctually and you can usually feel if a cut is smooth or jarring (both have their place), but there are several things you can do to improve your cutting ability. One resource which has only recently developed is technology which can detect where your audience members are looking on the screen and log that information as data. The following video comes from a small audience watching a scene from There Will Be Blood. The circles on the screen represent where in the frame each audience member is looking. If someone maintains there gaze on one spot then the circle grows in size. I hope you find this as interesting and useful as I did.
Friday, 30 March 2012
Thursday, 9 June 2011
READ BOOKS!
I'm going to be in danger of sounding like your dad with this post but what the hell. If you want to be a writer/director/or filmmaker in any capacity, you should read more novels, not watch more films. Seems counterintuitive, I know, but let me explain a couple of reasons why I believe reading makes you better equipped to make good films.
Inspiration
With the amount of remakes, reboots, knowing winks and downright plagiarism (I'm looking at you Quentin Tarantino) in the world of cinema it is has become patently obvious that more and more filmmakers are only looking to films for their inspiration instead of the plethora of art forms available to them. This gives us a situation where the same ideas are recycled and rehashed over and over again, each time becoming weaker than the last like the page of a book that has been photocopied, and then the photocopy has been photocopied, and then the the photocopy of the photocopy has been photocopied and.... well you get the point. The reason I think books can be such a good source of inspiration for original filmmaking is simple. They can be far more specialist. Films take a lot of money to make and distribute and whilst there are some niche markets, they just can't aim at the narrower audiences that authors of books can aim at and still make a living because of the lower production costs of writing and printing (or kindling? that's almost a pun because paper can be used as kindling and amazon's reading gadget is called a kindle, get it? anyway moving on). You can quite easily buy a book about a couple who use a clone of the baby jesus as a but plug (imaginatively titled The Baby Jesus But Plug), but I'm fairly certain it's unlikely to get optioned by Paramount. If you can publish to a smaller audience, you can take more risks. Filmmaking often falls victim of the committee. Now, I'm not suggesting that you should make films with a very narrow audience, because you won't get the money to make it. But taking inspiration from something specialist and niche and adapting it for a mass audience can be fruitful, interesting and (most importantly) fresh. Similarly, don't see this as an excuse to adapt every good novel into a film.
Subtext
A lot of people talk about making their films more cinematic, and this phrase is generally interchanged to mean a lot of different things. They could refer to using wider shots so that it suits projection, using a wider aspect ratio like 2.35:1, shooting at 24 or 25p etc etc. For now, I'm going to cast the technical stuff like 24/25p aside, not because it doesn't matter, but because too many indie filmmakers get bogged down waiting to make their film until they have the right camera or whatever when you could just make that film and then make a better one when the Red Scarlet, that will so drastically improve your film, is released. The way I think of cinematic is based on what defines cinema as a medium. For example, cinema differs from radio and books in that you can show things to your audience rather than describe them. And cinema differs from theatre in that you can put every member of the audience at the same distance from the actors and you have almost total control about how great that distance is. The first one of these leads good script writers to the realisation that cinema is most powerful when it shows us a story rather than tells us one. Which is why action films are generally considered more cinematic than, for example period dramas. Some people take this a step further and seem to think that dialogue heavy scripts simply can't be cinematic but this ignores the way that cinema can project just the face of person on a 40 foot screen. The medium shot and the close up give us the power to show more than just what the actor is saying. So, even a dialogue heavy film can (in my opinion) be cinematic, if the emotions and story developments are shown rather than explained through dialogue, as they would have to be with theatre. This (at last) leads me to books, because what you need to make a dialogue scene cinematic is subtext. You need things for the characters to think, to want to say but never say and to mean when they say something completely different. A novel is one of the few places where you find subtext explicitly written down. In a novel you can write 5 paragraphs about the thought processes a character is going through before he or she responds to a question they have just been asked, even though in real time (and usually in cinema) the conversation would have continued at a normal pace. A lot of good novels are mostly subtext, because like making your film cinematic, this takes advantages of the characteristics of the medium. By reading novels and being more exposed to subtext you can become better at integrating it into your films Now, in a film script you don't (and almost certainly should't) write the subtext of scene down. But by knowing the subtext of a scene, by knowing that a character means yes even though they are saying no, by understanding that people might talk about something not because its relevant but because it can distract them from what they should but perhaps don't want to say, you will almost certainly write better scrips. And applying the same ideas when dissecting an already written script will also almost certainly make you a better director, actor, director of photography etc. By making a scene about the subtext rather than what the characters are actually saying, you instantly make it cinematic because you are showing rather than telling your story to the audience and taking advantage of some of the key characteristics of cinema.
That is all.
Inspiration
With the amount of remakes, reboots, knowing winks and downright plagiarism (I'm looking at you Quentin Tarantino) in the world of cinema it is has become patently obvious that more and more filmmakers are only looking to films for their inspiration instead of the plethora of art forms available to them. This gives us a situation where the same ideas are recycled and rehashed over and over again, each time becoming weaker than the last like the page of a book that has been photocopied, and then the photocopy has been photocopied, and then the the photocopy of the photocopy has been photocopied and.... well you get the point. The reason I think books can be such a good source of inspiration for original filmmaking is simple. They can be far more specialist. Films take a lot of money to make and distribute and whilst there are some niche markets, they just can't aim at the narrower audiences that authors of books can aim at and still make a living because of the lower production costs of writing and printing (or kindling? that's almost a pun because paper can be used as kindling and amazon's reading gadget is called a kindle, get it? anyway moving on). You can quite easily buy a book about a couple who use a clone of the baby jesus as a but plug (imaginatively titled The Baby Jesus But Plug), but I'm fairly certain it's unlikely to get optioned by Paramount. If you can publish to a smaller audience, you can take more risks. Filmmaking often falls victim of the committee. Now, I'm not suggesting that you should make films with a very narrow audience, because you won't get the money to make it. But taking inspiration from something specialist and niche and adapting it for a mass audience can be fruitful, interesting and (most importantly) fresh. Similarly, don't see this as an excuse to adapt every good novel into a film.
Subtext
A lot of people talk about making their films more cinematic, and this phrase is generally interchanged to mean a lot of different things. They could refer to using wider shots so that it suits projection, using a wider aspect ratio like 2.35:1, shooting at 24 or 25p etc etc. For now, I'm going to cast the technical stuff like 24/25p aside, not because it doesn't matter, but because too many indie filmmakers get bogged down waiting to make their film until they have the right camera or whatever when you could just make that film and then make a better one when the Red Scarlet, that will so drastically improve your film, is released. The way I think of cinematic is based on what defines cinema as a medium. For example, cinema differs from radio and books in that you can show things to your audience rather than describe them. And cinema differs from theatre in that you can put every member of the audience at the same distance from the actors and you have almost total control about how great that distance is. The first one of these leads good script writers to the realisation that cinema is most powerful when it shows us a story rather than tells us one. Which is why action films are generally considered more cinematic than, for example period dramas. Some people take this a step further and seem to think that dialogue heavy scripts simply can't be cinematic but this ignores the way that cinema can project just the face of person on a 40 foot screen. The medium shot and the close up give us the power to show more than just what the actor is saying. So, even a dialogue heavy film can (in my opinion) be cinematic, if the emotions and story developments are shown rather than explained through dialogue, as they would have to be with theatre. This (at last) leads me to books, because what you need to make a dialogue scene cinematic is subtext. You need things for the characters to think, to want to say but never say and to mean when they say something completely different. A novel is one of the few places where you find subtext explicitly written down. In a novel you can write 5 paragraphs about the thought processes a character is going through before he or she responds to a question they have just been asked, even though in real time (and usually in cinema) the conversation would have continued at a normal pace. A lot of good novels are mostly subtext, because like making your film cinematic, this takes advantages of the characteristics of the medium. By reading novels and being more exposed to subtext you can become better at integrating it into your films Now, in a film script you don't (and almost certainly should't) write the subtext of scene down. But by knowing the subtext of a scene, by knowing that a character means yes even though they are saying no, by understanding that people might talk about something not because its relevant but because it can distract them from what they should but perhaps don't want to say, you will almost certainly write better scrips. And applying the same ideas when dissecting an already written script will also almost certainly make you a better director, actor, director of photography etc. By making a scene about the subtext rather than what the characters are actually saying, you instantly make it cinematic because you are showing rather than telling your story to the audience and taking advantage of some of the key characteristics of cinema.
That is all.
Saturday, 28 May 2011
Empathy
I have just started teaching a new group of students the joys of Avid Media Composer, through a series of 3 hour evening classes. Whilst we follow the 101 course laid out by Avid, I always like to mix it up with discussions about editing in general, so that I'm not constantly teaching them to how to push the buttons. In the first lesson we looked at the history of editing, which is very much tied in with history of storytelling in film.
Edwin Porter's early films were some of the first to explore the cut and also some of the first to explore many of the ideas we see today in narrative cinema.
Recently in their 4th lesson, I started a discussion about what qualities a good dramatic editor needs to have to cut well (there are many other qualities which an editor needs to help him work well with clients and meet deadlines etc). There are some obvious ones such as creativity, imagination, attention to detail, focus and concentration. Knowledge of the editing software is also important but I was quick to point out that I consider this a base level for editors really and probably the least important thing in making you good at cutting. I see the software simply as a tool to help you make the decisions you need to make. Knowing the software inside out is not guarantee of success if the decisions you make with it are lousy. There are also plenty of excellent editors who can do very little with the software they use other than just simple editing, as they are used having everything else done for them. It is the the decisions they make about what to put in the sequence and in what order that makes them excellent. So in relation to different software packages, the only thing you really need to consider is whether it allows you to make the decisions you want to make, easily and accurately.
Edwin Porter's early films were some of the first to explore the cut and also some of the first to explore many of the ideas we see today in narrative cinema.
Recently in their 4th lesson, I started a discussion about what qualities a good dramatic editor needs to have to cut well (there are many other qualities which an editor needs to help him work well with clients and meet deadlines etc). There are some obvious ones such as creativity, imagination, attention to detail, focus and concentration. Knowledge of the editing software is also important but I was quick to point out that I consider this a base level for editors really and probably the least important thing in making you good at cutting. I see the software simply as a tool to help you make the decisions you need to make. Knowing the software inside out is not guarantee of success if the decisions you make with it are lousy. There are also plenty of excellent editors who can do very little with the software they use other than just simple editing, as they are used having everything else done for them. It is the the decisions they make about what to put in the sequence and in what order that makes them excellent. So in relation to different software packages, the only thing you really need to consider is whether it allows you to make the decisions you want to make, easily and accurately.
So this led to a discussion of what I consider to be the most important quality that makes you a good editor, empathy. Don't confuse this with sympathy. You can be a complete bastard and still be a good editor. Empathy isn't about feeling sorry for people, it is about being able to put yourself in their shoes and as an editor, it is a skill I am always trying to improve. There are many different types of empathy, and two in particular come into play every time you make an edit. The first is kinetic empathy. Being able to feel and understand the movement of the characters on screen is vital every time you try and cut on an action. Accurately matching an action across a cut is integral to making the kind of invisible cuts that will allow your audience to seamlessly enjoy the scene unfold before them. The second type is emotional empathy. If, for example, you are editing a shot:reverse shot sequence of two characters talking to each other, you usually have a great deal of control over the spaces between when one person finishes speaking and other starts. Getting the gaps to sound fluid a seamless is one of the most important things to get right. This is where emotional empathy comes into play. If you can feel and think the way the character is supposed to be feeling then you can start to make decisions based on the emotional subtext of the scene. When a character asks another character a question, the speed at which they reply says as much or more than what they actually say. Are they reluctant to answer, are they desperate to answer having been waiting for the question to be asked for a while. Perhaps they even interrupt before the question has been finished/ The possible connotations are almost endless. The difficulty with this kind of thing is that there is no correct answer to how long the pause should be. I think this is why as editors we often have a tendency to talk about technology and software when we talk shop. But these are the things we should be considering, discussing and analysing. They are what make a truly great editor and finding ways to be better at should be at the forefront of our efforts to be be better editors.
I also wanted to discuss the empathy you must have with your imaginary audience, but this post is getting a little long, so another time.
I also wanted to discuss the empathy you must have with your imaginary audience, but this post is getting a little long, so another time.
Monday, 25 April 2011
Dynamic Trimming
I mentioned the other day that as my experience has grown as an editor I have strayed from the step by step way of crafting a scene and instead fluidly move between the different stages as I edit. That got me thinking about how else my editing style has changed since I first started. One significant thing I have noticed is that I use dynamic trimming (or trimming on the fly) more and more when refining a sequence. For anyone who doesn't know, trimming is a way of adding or removing footage to the beginning or end of clips in a sequence. So in a dialogue scene, it can be used to remove a word that shouldn't be there or add a word that should. But perhaps more importantly, it can be used to control the length of the gap between the lines of dialogue. For me, controlling these gaps is one of the most important part of making a scene feel natural and right. They can also add a layer of subtext to the dialogue itself. If someone takes a moment to think before answering a question, it can add a new layer of meaning to their response. Perhaps they are lying? Or maybe they just don't want to answer? When I was a teenager learning to play guitar, my dad would often say to me "It's not the notes that are important, its the spaces in between." I apply that logic to my editing today. So how does this link to dynamic editing? Well early on in order to control the length of the pauses between lines I would trim using numbers. I would preview the edit by looping it and then remove or add a set number of frames, then preview again. This gave a good degree of accuracy and I would always find the frame eventually, but there was a significant amount of trial and error. Dynamic trimming allows me to hit play on an edit point and wherever I hit pause, the edit will move there. Sounds simple enough, but this allows me to feel where an edit should be, rather than find where it should be through trial and error. I know that using this method has sped up my work, but I also think that it has improved it. Hopefully it has made my work more emotional and less mechanical which, in filmmaking, can never be a bad thing.
Friday, 22 April 2011
FCPX
A quick aside from all the Turing Enigma stuff, to comment on the details that are floating around about the new version of Final Cut. A lot of people have been commenting on it after the NAB supermeet, and I have been putting off forming an opinion. Firstly, late me be clear that I am an Avid editor first and foremost but I do use FCP and I am soon to become an Apple certified trainer. I use FCP for corporate's and documentaries and find it works really well for fast editing where I am just simply assembling things on a timeline or where I want to create flashy sequences over music. I don't mind it for music videos and I also grade in Color, so I often use FCP to prep sequences for grading. But my ambition lies in editing feature films. And when I do that (as I am doing at the minute2) I want to do it in Avid because frankly, its perfect for it. I honestly can't understand how people craft dramatic scenes quickly in FCP. So my main reason for watching the sneak peak at FCPX was to determine whether this situation will be changing anytime soon. Short answer, no. FCPX looks like a great tool and will likely make what I use it for now, even easier, so I may even start using it more. But for editing features, it has moved further away from what I want. I'm sure there will be keyboard shortcuts but the focus is definitely on drag and drop editing, even more so than FCP7. And I don't want to drag and drop. I will race anybody, anytime, editing a rough cut of a dramatic scene if I can use the keyboard and they only have a mouse. There will also only be one window for viewing clips and sequences and it will alternate depending where your mouse is. Which sounds great, for when your editing a corporate on a laptop and screen space is minimal, but again, when I edit dramatic scenes I want to see the last frame of the sequence, when I'm finding the first frame of the next shot. Surely thats a must for any cut on action? The randomly appearing "magnetic" tracks also disconcert me because they will remove the idea of keeping the same stems of audio on the same track. That's important for me, when I build indivual scene sequences and then want to assemble them into a master sequence. Who knows, maybe I'll be proved wrong and by editing corporates on FCPX i'll be converted, but these are my initial thoughts. Anyone else?
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
Black & White
So yesterday was day 4 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot and today we have the day off (so a chance to recuperate after going till 4am last night). Now we have changed tic-tacs (or tactics), we are keeping up with production pretty well. I have edited 11 scenes of the 12 they have shot (number 12 wasn't finished till 4 so I'll be editing that tomorrow) and there are some amazing looking scenes coming out. The longer scenes especially are seeming really slick. Some screenshots after the break.
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Crafting a Scene
Yesterday was day 3 of "The Turing Enigma" shoot. After spending the night before retranscoding the rushes from day 1, it occurred to me that we had been wasting a lot of our time on day 1 and 2, watching the blue transcoding bar creep across the screen. So we decided to leave leave transcoding unless there was time for it and focus on syncing so I could start editing. As it happens, the crew were working on some fairly complex scenes and so footage came in fairly slowly, but from now on, we will likely leave transcoding and just set it going after the day is over.
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