For the last five or six months, I have tried to read every article and watch every video about filming and editing that I can find. There are a couple of series that I really like that focus on why great movies are, well, great. Even though we do journalistic/documentary work, there are so many parallels to the way that fiction films are made. One of my favorite series is Every Frame A Painting. Some favorites of mine are “A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film”, “Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement”, and “How Does an Editor Think and Feel?”:
In this video, Tony Zhou, the narrator and co-writer/co-editor (with Taylor Ramos), tries to demystify the editing process. He runs up against the problem that there is no exact science to video editing and enlists the help of experts (Michael Kahn, Walter Murch, and Thelma Schoonmaker) and cinematic examples to try to explain.
Zhou breaks his explanation up into three distinct elements. The first thing he focuses on is eyes. He says that focusing on the subject’s eyes shows the editor so much about the emotion of a scene, and this focus can guide the editor to make the right kinds of cuts. Scenes where there is a lot of emotion in the subject’s eyes, he says, “are powerful because they work so well with other shots.”
The next thing he says is that “emotions take time.” When trying to clearly convey an emotion in a scene, Zhou believes that the best editors precisely time their cuts to allow emotions to develop. In documentary work, this can apply just as well. In the New York Times piece “Alone” that we watched in class, the scene that begins at 4:47 is a great example. This is the powerful scene with audio from the fight Aloné has with her family while the camera only focuses on the door. Aloné stands at the door for almost 9 seconds before she is let in. Her nervousness needs that amount of time to develop. The editors could have cut most of that time out, but Aloné’s trepidation would not have come through as well.
The third point that Zhou makes is that the editor feels the natural rhythms of life or a particular scene. He shows a scene from Creed (2015) where the rhythm is obvious. He then shows a scene from Pierrot le Fou (1965) where the rhythm appears obvious but the cut is very strange, subverting the natural rhythm. Zhou says that things like walking or a conversation have a natural rhythm that is easy to cut to. He calls these cuts “invisible”. Visible cuts, those that move the story along “in a jarring way”, can be used to convey unease or disorientation.
All of these ways to understand pacing in editing add up to a simple question that Zhou asks: What reaction do you want from people? He goes on to say that there is no way to get good at eliciting these reactions from people besides practicing. It seems that that’s always the way it is.
I’m sure you are all familiar with Nerdwriter but, if you aren’t, he has some great videos about how filming and editing work. Another favorite channel of mine is Now You See It. This last one doesn’t have a lot of videos yet but “Movie Geometry”, “Which Way Did He Go?”, and “How Film Scores Play With Our Brains” are some favorites of mine.