There is a major divide between the film making process so far—the pre-production and the production, the gathering of information, knowledge and understanding, the filming of locations and people—and the post-production, the stage which now begins. In collecting together the material needed to make the documentary, the concentration has been on the exterior world of reality, as well as on the documentary maker’s interior world of the imagination. The documentarist has dreamed a film and has gathered its components. Post-production begins a completely new stage of the enterprise, with a completely new approach to the work. From now on the film will, in a sense, be made all over again from the beginning.
The second time the documentary is made, it will be in a different way, with a different approach, using different criteria. The preceding stages have put an emphasis on invention and innovation; the documentarist has been encouraged to imagine the impossible and then to try and achieve it. To this end, the efforts of many people have been contributing to the work, researchers, photographers, sound recordists, contributors, consultants. All have been putting in ideas, suggesting novel approaches. The concept will have grown from small beginnings—the basic notion—to an elaborate constructions of ideas, images and sounds.
All this has now been condensed into a pile of film cans or video cassettes. For this second film-making, that pile is the material that is to be worked with, nothing else. The possibilities are no longer endless. The resources are limited to what is in those film cans or on those videotapes. The project changes from an imaginative open-ended dream into a concrete, closed intellectual exercise: we have a collections of images and sounds—our job is to make the best documentary possible from them.
The task is more like putting together a model out of Meccano, with a limited number of pieces which can only be assembled in certain ways due to their individual design and construction. It is no good dreaming of building a replica of the Forth Bridge, when all you have is twenty slotted strips, four angled corner pieces and half-a-dozen assorted cogwheels. Yet the different permutations of the pieces, the number of ways in which the materials which are at hand can be put together, the number of different models which can be built from them, is still dauntingly large. The trick with Meccano pieces is to work out what is the very best, the most elegant, working model which can be assembled from them. The task when editing is to discover the very best film—one or perhaps more than one—which is concealed in the material, ready to be brought out in the editing process.
To approach the task of editing in this way, the documentarist must cultivate forgetfulness. The director must ignore the story which lies behind every shot, the difficulty of getting it, the cost of setting it up, the funny incident associated with it. None of these factors are relevant now. In fact, remembering them can prove positively detrimental to the assembly of the film. The only questions that count now are: what does the shot show, how does it look, how does it start and end. In short, does it work? No matter if the expedition to capture the view from the top of the mountain took three days and cost half the budget. If the shot wobbles all over the place, or does not reveal what it was intended to, then it will not be used. No matter if the contributor is a living witness to the events that led the Honourable Elijah Mahomed to found the Nation of Islam, if he can’t keep his false teeth in his mouth without holding them there with his fingers as he speaks, his interview will not be included. Editing is a stern business, best approached with a cold eye.
There will be content faults, and defects will be discovered in the realization of the material. These may be physical or they may be functional. The main centre of interest in the image, or even the whole image, may be out of focus; or the focus may change over time, never resting for long enough with any of the elements of the picture. The lighting may be uneven, under-lit or over-lit, significant parts of the image falling to opaque black, or areas burnt out to whiteness.. The framing may be bad, with the edge cutting off an important feature just in the wrong place; or—proverbial error this, but it does happen—with an object appearing to grow out of somebody’s head or, better yet, a chandelier in the background giving a male cabinet minister a pair of elaborate crystal ear-rings. Movement may be uneven and jerky; or the camera may never rest in one place long enough for there to be a stable beginning and end to the shot.
Shots which are in themselves unblemished may look quite wrong when joined together. Two panning shots intended to cut together are found to have been filmed at different speeds; a pair of matching shots of a conversation turn out not to match; in close-up, a character handles an object with the right hand, in a wider shot with the left; a minor but noticeable change of costume makes it impossible to chequerboard two shots into a single sequence.
Conversely there may also be unexpected blessings. A character who will later prove to be important in the narrative, happens by chance to have been caught strolling across a wide shot of the location; an interviewee makes an unexpectedly revealing gesture; a spot of bright colour at the end of one shot matches perfectly in both hue and position the patch of bright colour at the start of the next; a lens flare from the sun mimics a halo over the head of the open-air preacher.
Such pluses and minuses in the shooting will be the controlling factors in making the film for the second time. The originally envisaged film will have to be subtly or not so subtly, changed. This does not, of course, invalidate all the effort the documentarist has put into its pre-production, the devising of the story, the writing of treatments and scripts, the painstaking selection of the contributors. Nor does it devalue the hard work of production, tenaciously sticking to the task until the required shots are achieved. In fact it underlines the importance of all the preceding work. For only by meticulous preparation and single-minded execution can the documentary maker be in any way hopeful that the pile of rushes now awaiting attention in the editing room contains the film he or she intends to assemble—that film and that film only. The whole aim of the director’s work is to shoot material in so tightly controlled a fashion, in a manner so carefully related to the subject, that it demands to be assembled in only the one way. Of course no directors ever achieve one hundred per cent of their aims. But only by pitching for one hundred and fifty per cent, is there any likelihood of actually scoring in the high eighties.
Just as the director may also take the role of cine-photographer when shooting, so the documentarist may also be the editor of the film. The advantages are clear: direct control over the work, no arguments about intentions or realization, no time wasted in having to explain what is in the director’s mind, in having to persuade another person that the proposal is the best idea on offer. There are indeed documentary makers who act as complete one-man bands, entirely independent of anyone else, undertaking all the necessary tasks—research, shooting, editing—from the beginning of the project to its end. But such solo artists remain few. The disadvantage is apparent. It is that no other sensibility is available to contribute to the enterprise: no other point of view, no other source of ideas, no other angle or handle on the subject, no other style or creative approach. Whether this limitation is damaging or not depends on the genius of the film-maker. In some cases it gives the work a continuity and unity of vision which raises the result high above the quality level of the average. In other cases it can prove damaging. Composers are not always the best conductors of their own music, playwrights not necessarily the best stagers of their own dramas. Sometimes a new eye sees things the creator didn’t know were there. So directors are not inevitably the best editors of their own shot material—they are too close and too involved with the memory of the reality and what they meant to shoot, when all there is to make the film with is what appears starkly in the frames.
At their best, editors edit in two senses of the word: they edit the material physically of course. But they also act as editors in the literary sense: as a second pair of eyes to judge and constructively criticize the work as it develops. And just as even the most successful and able of writers can benefit from the opinions and suggestions of a publisher’s editor, so can a documentary maker’s work be improved by the contributions of a sensitive and supportive film or video editor.
The relations between a director and an editor are those of a partnership. In the inevitable arguments both need to have their say and listen to the other’s opinion. The first thing some editors give a director on the first day of working together is an invitation to: ‘go away and let me watch the rushes, and then I will tell you what the film is that you have shot.’ Some directors stand over the editor’s shoulder throughout, giving instructions on which shot to cut to which other, and where to cut it. Neither makes for the best documentary at the end. Directors are often reluctant to give up a cherished sequence even long after it is obvious that it won’t work as imagined. Editors are often tempted to believe, and sometimes openly make clear to anyone who will listen, that they could have shot the film much better than the director has. But though some film-makers routinely edit their own work with great success, most others would do better to accept an experienced editor’s judgement of what works and does not. And though there are a number of examples of film editors leaving the cutting room and becoming well respected documentary makers in their own right, most are professionally in the habit of working alone with only the footage to argue back, and often turn out to be temperamentally unsuited to dealing with imperfect human beings and to accepting the difficulties and compromises which are inevitable when interacting with the real world.
There are occasions when an editor’s fresh and uninvolved point of view can be very welcome. Filming is an uncertain business, and it is not rare for a documentarist to enter the cutting room in the depths of despair at the failure of the shooting to capture anything like what was originally intended. Many editors will recall times when they have been able to console the director: ‘It may not be possible to make the film you originally wanted, but there is another film in this material which may be as interesting and as valid, perhaps even more so, than the documentary you set out to make.’
Three technologies are currently in use for editing television documentaries. They belong, roughly, to the past, the present and the future.
The past belonged to 16mm film: prints of the shots culled from the rushes, viewed on an industrial machine, physically cut, put in order and stuck together with joining tape, the sound on magnetic track, edited separately from but in parallel with the picture. The present belongs—just—to off-line videotape editing: sections of shots from time-coded video-cassettes transferred from the master recordings, copied in sequence onto a programme tape using cheap and cheerful electro-mechanical equipment, the sound edited together with the vision. The future will belong to virtual editing: vision and sound, separate but linked, converted to binary codes, manipulated with total freedom and great ease within the electronic memory of a computer system.
The sheer physicality of 16mm film editing its both its greatest advantage as well as its greatest drawback. For many editors who developed their skills on 16mm film, nothing can replace being able to pick up a piece of film, look at the frames against the light, judge the running time from the length in the hands, even the ritual movements of the film joiner giving a feeling of pleasurable satisfaction. Yet the inconvenience of the medium is considerable. It generates a large number of physical clips of every possible length from long sections to individual frames—the trims—which must be carefully preserved and filed; keeping the sound and the picture synchronized is a constant headache; after frequent making and remaking, the physical joins tend to come unstuck. Much time is spent looking for lost trims, trying to discover exactly where the sound goes out of synch, remaking cuts when they fall apart. Many hours are spent spooling backwards and forwards through rolls of film looking for particular images, and then rewinding them afterwards. No kind of junction other than the direct cut can be previewed. But editing on film is extremely flexible, since there is no restriction on the kinds of edit which can be made, and sections of the assembled footage can be removed from anywhere and inserted anywhere else.
Off-line video editing was never more than a stop-gap technique, devised as a cheap imitation of the high-tech means used to edit television studio recordings but using consumer quality videotape recorders and players, usually VHS. The assembly is built up by recording shots from the rushes tapes one after another onto the programme tape. Off-line editing is a self-contained operation which, unlike film, does not need extensive filing and storage facilities; only the cassette copies of the master tapes and the programme cassette itself are needed. But the disadvantages are many. Off-line edit controllers are usually not accurate to the frame. Sections cannot be removed or inserted without remaking the whole assembly from the editing point to the end. To overcome the difficulty, assembled material may have to be copied and recopied up to many generations from the original, becoming, in the end, almost completely indecipherable on the screen. The treatment of the sound is a particular problem as edits can only be identified by the picture. Should sound and vision not cut at the same place, no record of the exact location of the sound edit remains. However, because of its extremely low cost, convenience and general availability, as well as a simplicity of use that requires little experience, off-line editing has been and still is, at the time of writing, the most common technique in use for video documentary making.
It is certain that virtual, or ‘non-linear ‘, editing will soon replace the off-line editing of video altogether, as it is already supplanting the physical editing of 16mm film. The development of affordable virtual editing equipment has had to wait until recently for computer power and memory storage capacity to become sufficiently inexpensive. This is now already the case, and costs are still falling steeply; it is hard to guess how low they will fall in the end. By transferring everything from the master material, film or tape, to the virtual memory inside a computer, all the convenience and economy of electronics are added to the flexibility and intuitiveness of physically editing on film. Editing is, of course, accurate to the frame. All possible varieties of picture and sound junctions, cuts, fades, dissolves, wipes, superimpositions, can be previewed and instantly changed if necessary. However many times the cutting order is altered or shots put in and taken out, there can be no damage to the source material in the computer, as all editing is non-destructive; that is, the original shots remain untouched, only a listing of the order in which sections are to be played back is changed. The editing and mixing of the sound is carried out on the same machine and with the same flexibility as the editing of the picture.
When using the virtual editing equipment currently most commonly available, the final production of the programme master is done separately by a technique called conforming. The appropriate sections of the camera cassettes are copied to the required position on the final master tape in a process automatically controlled through an edit decision list (EDL) compiled by the virtual editing system. This is also likely to be an interim solution. The next stage is already in sight. When storage costs have plummeted still further and when techniques of compressing the picture information in the computer’s memory have become even more sophisticated than at present, the material will be stored, not as now in a somewhat simplified, low-definition form, but at full broadcast quality. As a result the virtual editing computer will itself be able to export the entire final film and sound to a mastering video recorder. The whole process, linking the camera-shot cassettes to the final master tape, will take place inside a single piece of equipment.
These developments will certainly affect the ways in which editing is carried out. It remains debatable whether they will strongly influence the appearance of the documentaries which are editing’s end result. This is an art which depends far more on an intuitive understanding of human perception and on sensitivity to the viewer’s response to the material, rather than to the technical possibilities inherent in the means at hand. If anything, simplifying the process can enhance the quality of the product. While trendy styles and flashy tricks will no doubt be taken up by some just because they were never before possible, all-electronic editing is in the end more likely to relieve film-makers of their concern with the technicalities of the process, and direct their concentration instead on the problems of the film making itself. Such a development can only be an advantage.
The first job in editing is to view the rushes. The director may well have already seen them before. In the past, film rushes, returned from overnight processing, were regularly viewed without sound on the morning after the shoot. Video has quickly outdated this tradition, though the director may have had to go through the material in order to compile a shot list.
Even if the footage has been seen before, viewing the rushes at the start of the edit is undertaken in a different spirit. The aim is to get the measure of the material and come to some overall feeling about the potential of the finished documentary. As the shots unfold, the director and editor will be making notes about what they see, aides memoires to help them recall particular moments later on in the process when they may be needed. It is surprising what will be remembered later of this great swathe of material. Presumably it is because film-makers are visually oriented that our memory for images and sequences of images is so strong.
By the end of the viewing, both editor and director will have an overall view of what material is available to make their documentary with. They will have an idea of the strengths of the material as well as its weaknesses. They will know the parts which are likely to be hard to make work and the parts which should fall easily into place. They will have recognized the shots and scenes needed to bring out the theme, the thread of the production.
Now the construction can begin. The target of the first stage is the rough cut, an approximate assembly of shots and sequences into the envisaged order and, the film-maker hopes, at roughly the projected length. There will be passages which are missing—a graphics sequence or two, perhaps, or some long awaited archive material—and there will probably be many awkward places and junctions which don’t work. But at this early stage, as with a painter’s first rough under-drawing, the initial am is to create no more than a framework, a first view of the shape of the whole.
The rough cut may be delineated by discussion and mutual agreement between director and editor. More often, the director initially takes the lead and provides the editor with a suggested cutting order, a list on paper of shots and sequences and the order in which it is proposed that they go together. This cutting order is not to be thought of as engraved on stone; editors will often find it necessary to make changes when converting fine theory into messy practice, particularly where the director’s cutting list is derived from notes on paper rather than directly from images on the screen. In any case, a cutting order is generally only the opening move, a place to start, a suggestion to get the work going. It is put forward in full expectation that a response will come from the material itself, which frequently makes its own demands on the way it is to be assembled.
The assembly doesn’t have to start at the beginning, go on unto the end and then stop. In fact, it is often helps to work in a different order. Many film-makers and editors begin with the key scenes, the formative sequences, the passages which give the film its structure and its high points, like peaks standing among plains giving shape to a landscape, or perhaps like the principal gemstones in a piece of jewellery around which the setting will later be constructed.
The nature of the key scenes will be different in different kinds of documentary work. Where observation of the world is the major motive, the key sequences are likely to be those on which the dramatic narrative hinges. Where a documentary is built around an idea, the key scenes may be those through which the argument moves forward. Where the retelling of history is the principal aim, the key scenes may be the testimony of outstanding witnesses. The key scenes may not necessarily work as designed on paper. The material may have to be manipulated in ways not entirely foreseen in the shooting. But at this stage it is not necessary to perfect any of the sequences. All that is needed is sufficient assurance that, perhaps with some further effort, the key moments in the documentary will do the job they were intended for.
By first constructing a framework from the key scenes, the filmmakers, director and editor, will be able to evaluate the flow of the film and the test the balance between the different elements. They will be able to tell whether the order and position of the scenes is appropriate to their content and their function. Moreover they will know where scenes will need to be prepared for by including extra material before they begin, and where sequences will need conclusions to be drawn out or need tensions to be relaxed by adding further footage afterwards.
With the key scenes in place, and the flow of images and ideas thus determined, the matrix in which they are set can now be filled in piece by piece. As with the key scenes, there may be secondary sequences or linking shots which don’t do what they were intended to. The editor and director will work on them, trying different ways of using them, changing them where necessary, until they fulfil their task: carrying the film’s narrative thread from what went before to what comes after.
The key scenes together with the secondary sequences now for the first time make up a complete film: the rough cut, which can be watched and analysed in its entirety. At this stage, the sound will be for the most part that which was recorded with the vision, though there may already be some passages in which synchronous dialogue from one scene is laid over the images of another. Sequences to be accompanied by music are also frequently envisaged early on, the music thought of as a support for, or replacement of, the footage’s synchronous sound.
Most documentary makers do not rely on a commentary to make the flow of scenes in the rough cut work. Commentary is an easy a way to avoid confronting problems in the film which are better faced up to and solved. When the scenes in a documentary story have been knitted together well enough not to need verbal explanation, any commentary recorded later can be devoted to its proper task: adding what the images can’t show, rather than lamely having to explain the meaning of the pictures.
The rough cut will usually be rather longer than is intended for the completed documentary. In part this will be because the transitions and junctions have not yet been worked on and fully perfected, but also because at this stage most material which is in any way relevant will have been included. Sometimes the length will be as much as half as long again as the target duration. Most film-makers would agree that at this stage it is far better to have too much in the assembly, which can later be pared down to only the most successful and most essential scenes, rather than too little, in which case the work may have to be inflated by a number of at best flawed, and at worst irrelevant, sequences.
Like all artistic constructions, documentary films have a natural length, determined by their content and the manner of their realization. But only if the documentarist is totally independent will he or she have the luxury of working to a length dictated solely by the material. Broadcasting institutions work with rigid time slots, designed to permit simultaneous junctions between programmes on different channels, and allow little leeway on either side of the commissioned length. Even private commissions will usually dictate a particular length for the production, related to the purposes for which it is to be used, though a minute or two either way will mostly not be a problem. This target duration will have been in the film-maker’s sights from the very start of the project, and will have been borne in mind throughout the research, the development and the shooting. But the uncertainties of filming can make the target hard to hit. Only at this rough-cut stage will the documentarist know for sure how hard it will be to edit the film as shot to a length which coincides with the demands of the commissioning organization. If there is going to be a difficulty with the length, it is best to recognize it now, while a plea to the client for clemency is still possible, or more likely while a radical rethink of the documentary’s structure is still—just—manageable.
The rough cut will give the film-makers not only an idea of the length of the completed work, but also a first sight of the film’s overall significance and its message. As with other artistic constructions, the whole of a documentary is often greater than—or at least different from—the sum of its parts. Up to the point at which an analogue of the film has been assembled, no matter how roughly, the film-makers have just been working with individual pieces. Now they have an opportunity to look at the work as a whole. Surprise at what they find is not uncommon. The ideas in the mind of the documentarist, when mediated through the appearance of people, events and locations, may turn out to be quite other than expected. Synergy between the different characters who appear on the screen, between the associations, implications and suggestions of different scenes, when seen as now ‘in the round’, sometimes creates an entirely new and unexpected meaning.
This can be difficult for a film-maker, who may be tempted to manipulate and massage the material until it conforms more closely to some originally envisaged pattern. But such disloyalty to the shot footage is more likely to damage a documentary’s integrity than to improve its quality. Documentarists must sometimes simply grit their teeth and follow the dictates of the material, just like the novelist whose characters escape from their predetermined fate and take on a life of their own. Sometimes, the choice is hard. There can be difficulties if the work has been commissioned for a particular purpose by a particular organization. A critical look at management style may not go down too well when rousing encouragement of the workers was ordered—though it was the poisoned relations in the factory which turned the attempt at encouragement into a critique. In such cases it may not be up to the film-maker to decide whether contractual liability or artistic integrity should have priority.
Mostly the disappointments will be more personal: the filmmaker set out to depict a certain man as a hero, the documentary turns out to portray him in a less than flattering light; the filmmaker intended to tell the story through the eyes and thoughts of one particular woman, the documentary proves to direct the viewer’s attention towards a different woman altogether; the film-maker aimed to fill in the background to a particular scientific development, the documentary reveals an imminent ecological disaster.
Yet, in keeping with the doctrine of cultivating film-maker’s forgetfulness, the documentarist’s original intention belongs to history. A film has been brought to the rough cut stage and now the task becomes one of making sure that the completed work is not only as effective, economical and elegant but also as true to itself as possible.
The completion of the visual side of the documentary is achieved in the fine cut. Decisions over the precise length of the shots, the definitive position of the dissolves, the exact places to cut, have been postponed in the interests of building a complete film structure. Having reviewed the rough cut and made any needed alterations—sometimes trying things in a number of different ways—now is the turn for the finer judgements to be made. In the process, every detail of the documentary will be examined and as far as possible perfected and polished. The aim is to create a flow of images with no gaps, no glitches, no infelicities, the shots trimmed to the right length, the sequences built up to the proper emphasis, the sections shaped to their appropriate value. This is work for an editor rather than a director. The concern will no longer be with the content or overall meaning and shape of the film but only with its technical surface features. If director and editor are the same person, from now on he or she will have to forget being the former and concentrate solely on being the latter, avoiding the temptation to keep tinkering with the content and concentrating on the presentation alone.
The fine cut operates principally on the visual elements of the film. At the end of the rough cut stage, picture and sound begin to go their own ways. Though they can never be considered entirely in isolation from each other, the two require rather different treatment as their technical needs relate to the special characteristics of their particular medium. The fine cut both specifies and puts into effect the final pattern of the images. It also specifies the sound, but postpones its physical assembly to a further stage.
Every cut will be considered. If it is to be an action cut, the question is: does the action flow smoothly and continuously across it, both without a hint of a jump from one position to the next and with no suggestion of either repeated action or a tendency to stall at the moment of change of image? Does the centre of interest have the same screen position in both outgoing and incoming shots, so that the viewer’s eye is not required to move between the two? Moving the position of the cut can mean choosing a different frame at which to leave the outgoing shot or selecting a different frame at which to join the incoming shot, or both together. The judgement will be made by running backwards and forwards across the cut, perhaps moving the position a frame at a time, until the junction has been rendered as near to perfect as can be achieved—perfection in this context meaning that the cut is effectively unnoticeable and invisible to the innocent eye.
If the cut marks the end of one scene and the beginning of another, the editor will make sure that the moment of leaving the outgoing shot gives the right feel of finality, of action completed, of business concluded, while the incoming shot will be timed clearly to imply the start of something new. When making such non-continuity cuts, from one scene to another for example, the editor will ensure that there is enough time available at the commencement of the incoming shot for the viewer’s eye to search the screen and identify a new focus of interest. Quite a few frames can effectively be lost to sight in this way and the editor will wish to ensure that nothing essential is missed by kicking off with the action too soon.
Dissolves will also be carefully timed, both for their length and their position. Here the technology being used for the editing makes a great difference, for only with the computer-based virtual editing technique will it be possible to preview the mixes and judge their effect. If editing on 16mm film, the dissolve is represented by a cut, with a diagonal wax-pencil mark made on the film itself on either side. As the marks move through the mechanism they appear to sweep across the screen. This gives the editor at least a symbolic representation of the dissolve effect. Off-line video editing has no way of simulating a dissolve.
Just as with a straight cut, any action that continues across a dissolve should maintain its speed, flow—and usually direction too—as smoothly as possible. By moving the centre point of the dissolve, the editor will try to ensure that location of the focus of interest on the screen coincides in both outgoing and incoming shots.
The preferred length of a dissolve is related to the tempo of the film at that point, the pace of the sequences it joins, the picture quality of both outgoing and incoming shots, as well as to the individual needs of the pictures being mixed. Fast moving sequences demand shorter dissolves than those which are slower and more dreamily paced. Sometimes interviews are edited with very swift dissolves between different sections—softened cuts really—to make an honest declaration to the viewers that material has been omitted. Sometimes, however, the length of the dissolve is determined not so much by aesthetic ideals but by practical limitations. There must be sufficient length of shot available to mix. This means that for a slow, sixty-four frame dissolve, not only must there be a minimum of sixty-four frames of the shot remaining after the start of the mix, but nothing must happen in the course of those sixty-four frames which would disturb the dissolve effect. A new action beginning in the outgoing shot just before the end of the dissolve, even if perceived only very faintly, can be sensed as a blip, a disruption of the smooth flow from one scene to another. The editor may have to adjust the length of a dissolve to make sure that no extraneous movements are caught in the dissolve unintentionally. Exactly the same constraints apply to fades out to black or fades up from black. As far as possible when such visual devices are used, the frames which are overlapped or faded should approximate to a still picture. If the length available for a fade or dissolve is insufficient, it is sometimes possible to extend the shot by freezing it. As long as a freeze occurs in the course of mixing or fading, it is unlikely to be noticeable.
In the process of perfecting the visual half of the documentary, the fine cut will necessarily establish the precise relationship between picture and sound, where each begins and ends, where they need to coincide and where they need to run unconnected but in parallel. Most sequences in most documentaries have their own synchronous sounds: sounds directly related to things happening on the screen. Actions take place—a person speaks, a hammer hits a nail, a car drives off—which the viewer expects to be accompanied by its particular sound. It goes without saying that in such cases, the vision and the sound should be synchronous, ‘in synch’, with each other.
In certain places, however, the close association between images and their sounds makes difficult decisions necessary. The start or completion of an action, a door closing, for example, is often used to motivate a cut from one scene to another. Such an action will have an associated sound. But there are a number of differences between images and sounds which complicate the matter. A visual moment is instantaneous while sound is spread over time. The sound of a door slamming only begins at the moment the action, the door striking its frame, is complete. Thus if the shot of a slamming door ends as it should visually, at the moment of closure, the sound will have not yet have begun. But if the shot continues long enough for the sound to be fully heard, the picture cut may seem to come too late, some frames after the preferred moment. It is often hard to find the best solution to this problem. Many editors will allow the sound to continue to its completion after the cut in the picture to another scene.
Visual and auditory stimuli seem to take different lengths of time for the brain to assimilate. Pictures are noticeably faster to recognize than sounds. It is as if visual images are directly and instantly decoded by the brain, while sounds go through a two-stage process: the sound being first stored in a raw state, the brain then ‘replaying’ the raw memory to analyse what the ears have heard. We often remember telephone numbers by memorizing the raw sound of the words and only decoding them into numbers later. Most of us know the experience of failing to understand something somebody has said, perhaps in an unfamiliar dialect, and ‘replaying’ it in the head to try to interpret the unrecognized words. The consequence of this double sensing of a sound in contrast to the immediate recognition of an image is that where sounds need to be related to pictures in a film, the sound may need to begin before the image. If a scene or a shot begins with a noisy action, many editors will let the sound start some fractions of a second before making the cut to the new picture.
In the fine cut, sound is usually accommodated to picture, the montage submitting to the demands of the visual material. But there are some places in which the vision will need to take account of the sound. In those sequences where music underlies the pictures, the sound will play an important part in determining exactly how the visuals are cut together.
There are two kinds of music sequences: those where the music is incidental to the visual sequence, running along underneath to add emotional and atmospheric depth; and those where the music is the main sound associated with the pictures. The first needs little special treatment. Assuming that the music has been chosen, or composed, with proper sympathy to the pattern of images and is not the most prominent audible feature, the visuals can generally be fine cut without constant reference to the musical accompaniment. But where the music is the main sound, it must be treated almost as if it were a form of speech. For like speech, throughout which a continuous thread of meaning must be maintained, music cannot be cut and joined with the freedom of pictures. Instead, the pictures have to be carefully tailored to work in synch with the sound. Such a visual sequence will be timed to, and cut to, the music.
The music will determine the exact length of the sequence, which will end where the music rather than the vision dictates; simply fading or cutting the music off at the end, with no proper musical conclusion, is disturbing and crass. The music will also indicate where the cuts from one shot to the next should be made. This is not a simple mechanical process. Always cutting to the next shot on the main beat of the musical bar has an overly predictable and pedestrian effect. As with other forms of rhythm, cutting to music involves picking out an ordered deviation from the steady pulse. The cuts will make reference to the musical background without slavishly following it. The content of the images will be only one of the determining factors in choosing exactly at which point in the musical bar each cut should fall. The other will be a feeling for the rhythm, the beat, the swing.
The cuts in a music sequence need to be made in time with the music because of an unexpected equivalence of sound and vision. Rhythm in film terms is established by events. A change of picture is perceived as a film event and so is a sound. A cut from one shot to another is felt by the viewer as the same class of phenomenon as the beat of a drum. Thus a rhythm can be marked or filled in by picture cuts as well as by sounds. In a musical phrase such as a bar of note-note-rest-note (
) a picture cut at the moment of the musical rest (
) can be used to complete the rhythm and satisfy audience expectation, just as a sound event can replace an expected visual moment. (Take the idea yet further and imagine that the musical accompaniment consists entirely of rests and no notes at all. What remains to supply the rhythm are the visual events. Hence the sense of rhythm that editors strive for in the visual montage of all sequences.)
Music which is secondary to other accompanying sounds, where the score is incidental to a sequence rather than its driving force, gives the editor more liberty in its use. When released from the burden of giving a sequence structure and form, it can contribute more of what the pictures cannot: non-verbal suggestions of association, emotion and meaning. Music is used to help the audience recognize where a scene starts and where it ends, to introduce atmosphere, to suggest mood, to give emphasis to particular moments, to make comments. The editor will try to place the music so that the musical logic matches that of the action. Some subtlety is called for when placing the music so as to get the wanted effect. A musical running commentary, such as TV melodrama depends on—a drumbeat for every footstep, a glissando for every fall—is a form of authorial voice and is perceived as such by the audience, who may not welcome constant instruction in how to interpret what they see. In documentaries, musical reference rather than illustration is often more successful.
Music which underscores a scene may begin before the scene or with it. If before, it acts as a bridge linking the one to the other, emphasizing continuity. If music and scene start together, the implication is more of beginning something new, a break from what came before. If the score has been especially composed for film, there will be specified points at which it is designed to fit. The end of the music will usually match some screen event, a panning shot reaching its destination perhaps, or somebody entering into vision. This will have the side-effect of drawing the audience’s attention away from the music’s disappearance. When music is well placed and timed, its ending often goes unnoticed by the audience. Its beginning, however, even if faded up gradually, can’t help raising audience expectations for some parallel change in the screen world.
Throughout the processes of rough and fine cutting, the editor will have been identifying and collecting the sounds which are intended to go with the sequences. By the end of the fine cut, a full specification of the required sound will have been made. Some of the sound will come from what was synchronously recorded on location, some will come from sound effects disks, some it may be necessary to go out and record.
The sound specification is physically realized in the process of track laying. The phrase refers to the magnetic tapes used to carry sound when editing 16mm or 35mm film. Track laying involves selecting the sections of required sound and connecting them together in proper time relationship with the picture and with each other. The end product is a number of rolls of magnetic tape which all play together in synchronization as they are mixed down to the final complete sound track in a dubbing theatre. The same results are now more often achieved with virtual tape tracks on computer-based sound editing systems.
This is the time when the sound world of the film is created. Many tracks may be needed to build up the wanted atmosphere, beginning with the synchronous location sound, joining sections together, substituting new sounds for on-screen events where the location sound is inadequate, mixing in other sounds to enrich the ambience, sometimes underscoring with a music track, sometimes overlaying with a commentary track, sometimes both at once. Thirty-six tracks is not an unusually high number.
It is not that there are necessarily so many different sound sources to add together at the same time. Working in stereo, as many productions now do, automatically takes twice the number of tracks as monaural sound. But in addition the nature of sound and the response of the human ear make clearly audible any instantaneous change from one sound to another, or from one acoustic to another, or from one sound atmosphere to another, even though the two may seem identical when heard separately. So most sound cuts are executed as fast mixes, which also doubles the number of tracks needed. Dialogue, for example, is almost always prepared as two separate tracks, an ‘A’ roll and a ‘B’ roll, one to each alternate speaker, for mixing from one to the other between speeches.
Such doubling can demand considerable preparation. To allow for the chequerboarding there must be enough spare sound available on the tape before the moment of change to accommodate the time needed for the mix. It may be necessary to edit extra passages of location atmosphere onto the beginning and end of many sections of speech, for example, to make mixing in and out possible. (It is here that the film-maker will bless the foresight of the sound recordist in ensuring the provision of an ‘atmos’ track from the location.)
Film sound mixing, dubbing, was traditionally undertaken in a dubbing theatre, where a projector ran in synch with a battery of magnetic track replay machines, which delivered their sound through a multitrack mixing console. To change the timing relationship of any one track required the sound engineer to get up, go to another room, and move the track physically backwards or forwards on the player. Today, sound dubbing is increasingly being undertaken on computer. The old style film dubbing theatre will soon only be found in museums of film technology.
The mix, or dub, is usually done in a number of stages. There might first be a premix of a selected number of tracks, if a good balance of levels and adjustments between them is difficult to achieve. The sound engineer will try to give all the elements the best possible sound by ‘equalizing’ them—filtering the frequencies to achieve the most realistic and ear-pleasing effect—both separately and in combination. Using today’s digital technology there should be no degradation in quality between generations of copies. In the United States, this process is usually called ‘sweetening’, though sweetness is not necessarily the sought-after effect. To the premix are then added other tracks to create the music and effects track, the ‘M and E’. This carries the entire sound of the production with the exception of the commentary.
The commentary is frequently recorded and added last of all in a separate process, as there may later be occasion to provide a different commentary—in another language, for example. The existence of an M and E makes this possible without having to recreate the entire sound from scratch, hence the alternative name: ‘international sound track’. Though it may seem that leaving the commentary recording to the end forfeits the possibility of fine adjustment in the cutting room, in fact the flexibility of a live human performer, who can speed up, slow down, change intonation and pause at will, more than makes up for it. Commentaries are recorded with the voice artist watching the picture and listening to the final mix through earphones. This allows for the most exact control of timing and tone of voice. Just as with effects and music, however, the delay in assimilating the spoken word, compared with the near instantaneous recognition of a picture suggests that words which are linked to particular moments in the film should normally precede them by some fractions of a second.
Such adjustments, like others made in the course of post-production, will not necessarily be obvious to the audience. And perhaps they should not be. The many accommodations a filmmaker has to make with human psychology each influence the overall effect of the work, each making its own small unrecognized contribution to a whole which is far greater than the sum of its parts.