I have been so excited for the new Legend of Zelda game that I have been watching everything Nintendo for the last month. I have seen this video about Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto probably four or five times. During my last watch, however, I noticed a tiny move that the editor of this piece made that was really clever. Since The Legend of Zelda is all about finding the hidden treasures that allow you to triumph in your quest, I thought it was appropriate.
The video is about how carefully Miyamoto and his team have designed every aspect of their games to teach the player how to play, to tell an engaging story, and to remove any barriers that might make their games less immersive. When they’re talking about this last point, they discuss the design of the very first Nintendo controller. You know the one:
The narrator is trying to make the case that Nintendo’s decision to release a Mario game for iOS is in keeping with the ergonomics and the ease-of-use that the original controllers provided. With a clever editing trick, the video links these two design choices starting at 5:27:
Did you catch that? When the narrator finishes his part, the editor brings in the audio from an old news spot from 1988 about the original Nintendo Entertainment System. The camera pulls in close to a child’s hands using the iconic NES controller while the reporter says, “These controllers direct the characters. The better your eye-hand coordination, the better you do.” In the middle of this audio, however, the editor brings in a close-up shot of someone playing Run Mario Run (2016) on an iPhone.
In one move, the editor brings the philosophy of the past into the present. By leaving the words in the mouth of a 1988 reporter, but showing that those words are just as true now as they were then, the two eras of Nintendo history are linked. It’s probably especially effective because it’s the last shot of the video so it leaves the viewer really satisfied. Well, I know it left me pretty satisfied at least.
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.
Just why Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) is so haunting, I’ll never completely know. The film has a sense of urgency that fights with the looming feeling of surrender. I think the opening scene gives some clues as to how this tension is held throughout the entire movie. In it, the main character Johnny rides a frenetic horse while he narrates. He talks about how, when breaking horses, it is important to leave some of the wildness in them. This relationship between tameness and wildness floats throughout the film.
The way that the opening scene is shot, however, is tied closely to the narration and is mirrored in other scenes later on. In the opening frames, Johnny explains that, while breaking horses, it’s important not to run them too hard. He says that that will break their spirit. While he says this, he and the horse are framed by the trees and pickup truck with the sun setting behind them. The trees seem to hold them in. For a moment, at 0:17, the horse tries to walk away from the trees toward the hill. Johnny reins him back and they turn toward the trees again.
Eventually, after a minute or so, Johnny explains that “Anything that runs wild got something bad in them. You wanna leave some of that in there. Cause they need it to survive out here.” As he says this, he lets the horse start to trot toward the hill. “Here”, in this case, is the reservation that Johnny and his family live on. It serves as a meeting place for wildness and complacency.In the next scene, Johnny’s sister Jashuan walks up a hill. She is split in half by the grass and the open sky. In three minutes, Songs My Brothers Taught Me establishes the feeling of freedom and imprisonment that its characters feel on the reservation.
Around 22 minutes into the film, Johnny and Jashuan go to an open field that is surrounded by mesas. Some of the biggest conversations they have about life and the reservation happen here. Jashuan rides on Johnny’s back as they run across the field.
The freedom that they feel in the open field is followed immediately by a very wide shot where they shout at the mesa to hear their own voices echo.
It is almost impossible to see them they are so small. This framing shows how unable they are to leave and how that sense of imprisonment (at least for Johnny) is massive.
Spoiler alert:
Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a film about an Oglala Lakotan teenager that plans to leave the reservation and follow his girlfriend to Los Angeles. He doesn’t see anything especially sacred about the reservation while his younger sister does. In the end, he doesn’t leave. Bound by tradition, love for his family, and fear of not being able to survive in L.A., Johnny stays in North Dakota. The final scene shows how he has come to terms with the battle between freedom and imprisonment.
He goes to the mesa–this time in the dirt. He grabs a handful,
tosses it into the air,
and it floats above the hills into the sky.
This scene plays very similarly to the opening scene. The film establishes the two realities for life on the reservation and shows that there is not always an easy solution. In some ways, Johnny recognizes that he is trapped between the mesas. But, like the horse, there will always be something wild in him that allows him to survive it.
Mass Appeal’s web series “Rhythm Roulette” plays like a game show for hip hop producers. The premise is that an accomplished producer wanders their favorite record shop blindfolded and, sight unseen, picks three records. They then take those records home and look for samples, chop them up, and make a beat. There have been wildly successful producers on the show (e.g., Black Milk, Just Blaze, El-P), a producer who only samples from video games, and even the masked MF Doom. As a huge fan of sample-based music, I love this show. And one of my favorite episodes features 9th Wonder who has worked with Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child, Talib Kweli, J. Cole, and many others.
This episode, like almost all episodes of “Rhythm Roulette”, very neatly compresses the time it takes to make a beat. Producers sit in the studio for hours dropping the needle on record after record looking for the perfect sample. Even after a producer finds that sample, they play it fast, then slow, then backwards to find exactly how to sample it. Kelsey Smith, who edited this episode and a number of others, does a great job of using only what is necessary to show the process of making a beat. She uses matched cuts to make the session move smoothly. Her blatant use of jump cuts, however, reminds us that it takes time to make a beat.
At 5:01, for example, she shows 9th Wonder listening to the Jermaine Jackson record. Jackson sings, “Have I told you that I’ll love you forever?” Wonder finds something he likes in the sample and, without showing the process of recording and slicing the sample, Smith jump cuts to Wonder tapping his sampler with the word “forever” playing over and over again. She then jump cuts to him quickly tapping a single note. This is followed by yet another jump cut to Wonder bouncing his head up and down to a breakbeat. It looks at first like he’s tapping the drums on his sampler just out of frame. But Smith is actually showing him warming up to tap the Jackson samples over the drums that he has already made. The jump cut goes almost entirely unnoticed but still shows how much time it takes to put a simple loop together.
While the jump cuts show that some time has passed between the different stages of making a beat, they also give us a glimpse into the thought process of a producer. At 8:51, Wonder drops the needle on a track, speeds the record all the way up, and then Smith cuts to him listening to the track. She jump cuts to him playing bass notes on his sampler and then both the sample and the notes are audible. Hip hop beats are often made in pieces with random cutaways and noises woven throughout the final product. By showing this disjunctive process, Smith is staying true to the art of beatmaking while allowing us to see it happen quickly.
“The film is made in the editing room. The shooting of the film is about shopping, almost. It’s like going to get all the ingredients together, and you’ve got to make sure before you leave the store that you got all the ingredients. And then you take those ingredients and you can make a good cake – or not.”
-Philip Seymour Hoffman
You had to know I was going to do a post about The Blair Witch Project (1999). It’s my favorite movie and it’s a good blend of fiction and non-fiction storytelling. In nearly every scene, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez (the film’s directors and editors) make compelling editing decisions. They had over twenty hours of raw footage and they managed to cut it down to 81 minutes.
I do have to offer a brief defense of this post. The Blair Witch Project is, of course, fiction. But it’s important to note that Myrick and Sánchez gave their actors very loose scripts and geographic locations to reach every day–and then proceeded to hide in the woods and (actually) scare the hell out of them. It was, essentially, a completely fictitious, mostly unethical documentary. After filming, the directors then had four different types of material to sift through. Here’s the list:
Video from a Hi-8 camera
Film from a 16mm camera
Audio from the Hi-8 camera
Audio from a DAT machine
They had to make very deliberate decisions about how to put all of these types of media together. The way that they chose to do it disorients the viewer while, at the same time, gives us clues about the locations of each character. Take the final scene of the film, for example, in which Heather and Michael are looking for their lost friend Josh:
Heather has the 16mm (black and white), and Michael has the Hi-8 (color with audio). They no longer have the DAT machine so all audio comes from the Hi-8. That is to say: all sound is being recorded by Michael. This scene starts off quietly because Heather (who is being loud) is holding the 16mm with no audio. She can only be heard when she gets closer to Michael. She asks, “Mike where are you?” and, as if to remind us that we can only hear through Michael’s ears, Michael says, “I’m right here!” Throughout this entire scene we get two visual representations of space while only getting one auditory perspective.
Myrick and Sánchez create this dissonance just in time for Josh, who has been missing for a few days, to call out to his friends from a distance. (Unless, of course you don’t believe that that is really Josh!) Michael says, “I hear him. I hear him. I’m going upstairs,” because sound is the only way that Michael, Heather, and the audience can figure out where the characters are in relation to each other.
But it’s the next part of the scene that is probably the most skillfully crafted sixty seconds of the film. In the attic, Michael believes he hears Josh in the basement and runs to find him faster than Heather can follow. Myrick and Sánchez cut back and forth between the Hi-8’s video and the 16mm’s film, but they are still forced to only use the Hi-8’s audio. So, without wide or establishing shots, the directors are able to give us a sense of increasing distance between Heather and Michael. They do this by showing that her screams get quieter and quieter as Michael bolts to the basement while she slowly moves down the stairs, paralyzed with fear.
After Michael’s camera is knocked out of his hands (thereby no longer providing useable video), we can only see through the 16mm and we can only hear through the Hi-8. We don’t need to know the exact layout of the house to know how close Heather is getting to what we know will be her death. Her voice gets louder and clearer as she descends the stairs, rounds the corner, and is overtaken by the Blair Witch.
The late Philip Seymour Hoffman said that films are, “made in the editing room.” There are few films for which this is more true than The Blair Witch Project. (Turner p. 30) Even though Myrick and Sánchez had a somewhat clear idea of what they wanted their film to be, they left almost all of the camera work to chance. It was their decision to carve a compelling narrative out of the footage that makes this film work. Because, in the end, the directors did have the final say over what images and what sounds came through, and they were able to mold that material into a kind of film that had never existed before and has yet to be duplicated.
While set design is often the obvious choice for establishing geographic space in film, using shallow depth of field and careful blocking can also show the viewer where one space ends and the other begins.
In this scene from his 2012 film The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson uses meticulously placed characters and a shallow depth of field to separate the in-group of the Cause’s meeting from an inquisitive intruder. The scene begins after the woman in blue regains consciousness after going through “processing”–a hypnosis-like interview–with Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). As Dodd debriefs her on her experience, the camera has an extremely shallow depth-of-field and focuses primarily on the two characters. Furthermore, every other character is either out-of-focus or partially obscured by out-of-focus objects. At 0:18, for instance, even though there are two other people on the couch with the woman, one is partially covered up by red clothing, and the other is behind the arm of a couch and a bouquet of flowers. At this stage in the conversation, Dodd and the woman are the two main points of focus. Anderson blocks his characters and places his cameras to force us to focus on them while being aware of the space they are establishing.
Anderson reveals the intruder at 0:27. He is obscured by Dodd’s shoulder. Even though he is in focus, we do not feel that he is in the group to which we should be paying attention. He says, “excuse me,” and the scene immediately cuts to the perfectly in-focus shot of Dodd thereby closing the intruder out. At 0:37, we see the intruder again–this time over Dodd’s right shoulder. Anderson is establishing that Dodd’s shoulders mark the edge of the group and the edge of the space. Anderson almost lets the intruder in at 0:57 when he says “excuse me” again. Dodd moves his blurry left shoulder and, just as the intruder is about to be completely unobscured, the scene cuts back to the in-focus shot of Dodd.
At 1:23, Dodd finally acknowledges the intruder and nearly moves out of frame to include him into the in-group’s discussion, but an out-of-focus lamp and Dodd’s wife’s shoulder still stand in his way. The camera almost assumes the intruder’s point-of-view and shows that, in fact, Dodd’s shoulder is the edge of the space. The out-of-focus couch and Dodd’s awkward posture show that the Cause’s conversation begins and ends with him.
After a few minutes of arguing, Dodd stands up to fully engage the intruder. At 3:11, Dodd’s wife’s blurry head moves out of frame and leaves nothing standing the intruder’s way. When the scene cuts back to Dodd, his wife’s out-of-focus head obscures part of his body thereby protecting him from outsiders.
At 4:57, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) throws food at the intruder from behind the out-of-focus couch. He is the first and only character to physically move from the in-group to the out-group. This proves to be a central theme in this film.
In order to tell a compelling story, filmmakers are charged with the task of compressing time to make an unrealistic chronology seem natural. Using visual match-cuts and crossfades, filmmakers and film editors use a visual code to guide the viewer from one moment in space and time to another, disjointed moment. But there are times when films need to feel as true-to-life and as real as possible; times when the audience must see the action exactly as it is happening. In spite of its occasional heavy-handedness, directors and editors opt for the long take or “slow cutting” to show things happening in real time.
Most film fans are familiar with long takes. They can be seen in hallway shots in the TV show “The West Wing”, in John Woo films, and in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rope”. Long takes are often used for action sequences (which is precisely why directors like Woo and Quentin Tarantino love them), or to give the viewer a much more in-depth sense of the space and geography of the film’s setting. They provide very little relief from the tedium of an action, the fear of a situation, or the emotion of a character. The 1992 documentary “My Brother’s Keeper”, which follows three reclusive brothers while one of them is on trial for the murder of a fourth brother, uses a long take to illustrate all three of these moments.
While interviewing Lyman Ward (one of the brothers in the film), the filmmakers ask why he seems nervous (near the 7:30 mark of the documentary). Ward responds that he is always nervous and has been that way since he was young. He starts to edge away from the film crew while continuing to answer questions. He gets increasingly anxious and begins walking toward the dilapidated home he shares with his brothers. The filmmakers do not cut the film.
All told, this scene lasts for around two minutes and seven seconds. It shows the lengths to which Ward will go to escape his nervousness. Because so much of this scene is spent following Ward wordlessly, his desperation to be alone is clear. The shot also gives the viewer a strong scene of setting. The tractors, old cars, weeds, and broken door—all grouped together in a single take—give the audience an unbroken taste of the squalor in which the Ward brothers were living.
Even though long takes are used for very different reasons in different kinds of films, they always insist that the viewer must be acutely aware of the action of the scene. Most long takes are tracking shots that give the viewer some clue about the character’s actions and his or her place in the larger setting. Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film “A Clockwork Orange” has a famous long take scene wherein Alex is walking through the music store. There are two long takes in this scene, the first is a tracking shot that lasts for one minute and the second is a static shot that lasts for one minute and nine seconds in which Alex is framed by two women
Caution: NSFW
Quentin Tarantino also uses a long take in his 2003 film “Kill Bill: Volume 1” to show the interplay between all of the characters in a huge space.
Long shots are very easy to overuse. But they work wonderfully if there is a specific goal that they achieve. They force the viewer to stay in a moment and experience its lingering emotion. And when the director finally says, “cut”, the relief is palpable.
