Moving Images, Understanding Media

316 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Media

by a tendency to shoot more footage and a rise in the number of cuts in

movies. Even if editors are no longer using splicers and trim bins to handle

their footage, there are new tasks to manage the sequences made during the

editing process. A key time-saving tool with such products as Avid soft ware

is the edit decision list (EDL), which archives editing choices to recover

previous work.

From the early years of editing, many of the essential tasks of assistant

editors have revolved around logging and recordkeeping of the footage from

principal photography, and this is still true today. Codes must be attached

to the shots in the motion picture right down to individual frames, and it is

the job of the assistants to identify and keep track of this information. Th is

must correspond between formats, particularly between fi lm negative and

digital transfers that are used in editing. Assistant editors must ensure that the

editing process runs smoothly, and this involves a great deal of management

of the footage as it comes in and is subsequently cut.

Discussing her work as an editor, Th elma Schoonmaker explains,

You take one shot and connect it to another shot, and if you don’t

feel that little jolt of electricity that happens when you cut two shots

together you know it’s not working. So you reject that shot and try

another one... Th e job is to get the best out of the actors and what

the director has laid down, and get a rhythm going between them.

In the way you overlap lines, or how long you pause aft er someone

says a line. It’s all just a matter of very careful, very detailed work

that you have to keep reviewing, refreshing, and refi ning day aft er

day. Th en you go away from it for a couple of days and cut another

scene. In some ways it’s just nuts and bolts, but in other ways there

is a lot of subtlety and emphasis that you can give with editing.

The Big Picture

In editing, you can see this process of breaking apart pictures and building

them back together again in interesting, surprising, and satisfying ways.

Th is can be on the scale of a thirty-second commercial whose production

personnel is focused on a short span of images, or it can be observed in the

sprawling range of missions on a blockbuster movie.

Whatever the scale of production, it returns to the vision that springs

from human experience and imagination. Sometimes the creation is in the

form of a highly personal narrative brought to screens by a single creator or

small core of collaborators. In other cases, a team of professionals may be

fulfi lling a contractual demand from a client in which they need to devise

a strong visual interpretation of a product. Whatever the source, motion

pictures can be powerful expressions of the realities, dreams, and physical

creations of humankind.

VIEWFINDER

“The truth about success

in fi lmmaking is that it

is mainly attributable to

hard work.”

–Tom DiCillo–

Director and writer whose

movies include Living in

Oblivion (1995), Delirious

(2006), and When You’re

Strange (2009), and whose

fi rst credits were as a

cinematographer

Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).