8 Post-production aesthetics

 

1. Editing aesthetics: editing for genre

In the style of editing we are going to take a look at here, it will seem like there are more rules, more restrictions and less room for manoeuvre than in any other kind of editing. But stay with it. It is also the kind of editing that requires more subtle skills and because of its challenges leaves you a better filmmaker than before. In what we can call ‘genre editing’, we are going to leave no trace at all of our movements. Every trick, device and sleight of hand must quickly be hidden so that the audience have no indication at all of the craft you are practising.

What is genre editing?

This kind of editing is more often called ‘continuity editing’, and refers to the kind where its sole aim is to get the story (we don't see this style in non-narrative or abstract movies) moving along and get the audience completely immersed in the plot and characters. Hollywood movies have carefully developed this style over the years as the surest way to suspend disbelief in an escape-seeking audience. It draws no attention at all to the fact that you are just watching a movie. It highlights nothing about the mechanics of movie-making. Most of all, it provides the most seamless way for the world which the movie created in its first act to stay real to the viewer. As you can tell by now, it places the viewer before the director in terms of importance; directors' need to make a personal mark and reveal their hand as author is not as important as the viewers' need to get involved and to identify with the world they see on the screen. Genre editing makes you feel like it's really happening.

Figure 8.1 In this still from The Dark Hunter (2002) by Jonnie Oddball, the close angle requires a faster pace of editing.

Realism

Like much in the craft of filmmaking, realism and naturalness are achieved through completely unreal and unnatural means. In shooting, a natural effect of sunlight streaming in through a window is only achieved through huge extra lamps. Similarly, in editing the realistic effect of someone getting in a car and driving to a destination is achieved through a very unrealistic squashing of time and space through cunning editing. Going even further, filmmakers who decide they want a very real look to their movie and dispense with editing rules and tricks quickly find that their movie looks anything but realistic. So, the more trickery and devices you employ, the more the viewer can forget they are even watching a film and engage in a truly real experience.

The aims of genre editing

Continuity

In most genre films the aim is to make sure that no one notices the mechanics of editing. It should be like the silent scene-changer on a stage, whose presence you don't notice until something goes wrong. In continuity editing the aim is to create a perfect visage of realism, maintained through careful use of illusion. In this kind of editing the greater the realism you require, the more the editing has to be exact and conform to certain rules. Realism, in this case, means the way to draw the audience wholly into a story, enabling them to suspend their disbelief that a 2-D screen can become a 3-D world, and that periods of years or centuries can be compressed into hours. What we could call documentarystyle realism is also realistic, but its rawness reminds us that we are watching an artificial rendering of reality.

Go to: Chapter 6:2 for more ideas about narrative continuity.

At the core of continuity editing are a range of factors, including:

• consistency of what the camera sees - props, costumes and objects remaining constant
• accurate portrayal of space - using the edit to back up the camera's definition of a space
• consistent direction of movement - a character running through a location moves from left to right or vice versa
• consistent sound, style and colour throughout
• consistency of events - simultaneous events are edited in parallel, while edit devices such as a fade into and out of black before a cut can show past events.

Setting a scene

Editing is primarily concerned with time rather than space, but is central to enabling the viewer to understand a space. When we enter a new place, the editing must enable us to perceive it entirely. The wide shot is the shortcut to getting this, but the editing must then reveal key elements of the place. The dimensions are crucial, and the important characteristics such as door, furniture, windows help us to comprehend the relative distances between these objects. Longer cuts are usually needed at this stage.

Creating and controlling time

Temporal space, or time, is the domain of the editor. No other part of the filmmaking process can define when an event takes place in the frame of the story, nor show what else happened at the same time. The shots and images themselves are mute when it comes to showing anything other than what is in the frame. Almost any attempt at showing the passage of time - in ageing, or the seasons, or just within an afternoon - depends on showing at least two shots side by side. Almost all interactions between people depend on more than one shot, either by switching between shots of two people to show that they are talking to one another, or by showing the relative movements of each person.

Passage of time in particular is a primary consideration in genre editing. The whole idea of telling a story is based on the premise that it is not told in real time, so in children's books Red Riding Hood is shown at only certain dramatic points of her unfortunate trip. We don't have to see the entire journey to Granny's house, nor the entire detail of how the wolf gained entry to the house. Finally, while the wolf is making his excuses to little Red, we also see the woodcutter bearing down on the house, suggesting simultaneity. This way of telling a story is as old as fiction itself. The ideas of truncating events (‘later that day’) for dramatic effect and of cutting between two events (‘meanwhile, at the same time elsewhere in the woods’) are the basis of editing for genre.

Setting pace

The events of a narrative need to be fed at a carefully controlled rate to the viewer. A story related without the use of pace would be like reading a police report of the specific times when this or that event happened. The idea of pace is to increase the sense of meaning of each part of the story - for instance, by heightening tension or delaying an event to create suspense. It is a fundamental part of the storytelling process and can radically alter a story by the way it is used. For example, by speeding up events or compressing them in a shorter time frame, a part of the story can be made to seem less significant.

Go to: Chapter 4:4 on story and structure to see how to embed pace into the planning of your movie.

Clarity of vision and sound

This is a more functional part of the editing process, rather than a purely aesthetic one. Editing suggests ideas, helps themes develop and leads the audience towards a reading of the film, but beneath any of this it must do its tasks with clarity and certainty. This doesn't mean that editing has to be overly pedantic or fastidious - as we saw in Chapter 6:1, ‘Better looking films’, shots that are unplanned or added on the spur of the moment can add an extra dimension to a film to make it less formal and rigid.

But a film must have a clear idea of what it is trying to say. Film has more in common with writing than other art forms in that there is no option other than to make a statement - there is either this cut or that cut, this length or that length of cut, this choice of fade. On the other hand, in painting, ambiguity is a part of the process; paint drips, smudges and other by-products of the art are accidents. In editing there are no such ambiguous moments; everything is a statement and there are no mute parts of editing where you can place a few shots and coast along until the next important part of the movie. The aim must be to have a clear idea of what a sequence is ‘saying’ and to make sure that every step of the editing for that part works towards your idea.

Devices used in the genre edit

Rhythm

As we saw in Chapters 4:4 and 4:5, on stories, finding a rhythm for your film gives you an overall flavour, mood and pace, and enables you to modulate this rhythm according to the needs of the plot. Rhythm is one of the most important devices in editing. Without it, a film lacks any ability to evolve dramatically.

Arrive at the rhythm of your film in advance, looking at whether the film is to be fast paced and action oriented or slower and more contemplative. When compiling a scene, arrange the shots in order and start assembling them, noticing the relative duration of each clip. Assuming that you are trying to cut for continuity, notice peaks in the action or dialogue. Keep most of the shots surrounding these points at a similar length, but change when you come to these peaks.

Rhythm in the timeline

Use a timeline chart to work out the relative lengths of clips and try to establish some consistency in duration. Label the peaks and devise a different approach for those parts. In some ways, the rhythm of these detailed scenes (what we could call micro-rhythm) should mirror that of the film as a whole (macrorhythm). In Kubrick's The Shining, individual scenes are edited with the same menacing, drawn-out consistency throughout. It takes a long, slow-moving pace towards the climactic action, like Frankenstein's monster, but this very consistency makes it relentlessly tense. It is easy to crank up the action a gear when necessary, by shortening the length of cuts and increasing the frequency of cutaways.

Juxtaposition

One of the most potent tools in editing is the use of juxtaposition - the placing of one shot next to another to alter the meaning of both. As we will see in Chapter 8:3, ‘Montage editing‘, this is an effect with many uses, delivering ideas and feelings not attainable through other editing techniques. Try to find better instances of using juxtaposition in your movie by approaching your footage in a less sequential way. Look for shots that collide with others rather than simply reinforce them; try to find shots that add extra layers of meaning to your images by juxtaposition with contrasting shots. One way to do this is to show widely contrasting emotions in characters, suggesting a different side to their motives. For instance, in Don't Look Now (Nic Roeg, 1973), we see two sisters offering psychic advice to a distraught Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. They undertake the process solemnly and with tact. After the couple's departure we cut to a brief shot of the two sisters in hysterical laughter. The effect is unsettling as it undermines our previous view of the sisters.

Purposes of editing

In genre editing, one of the central places to advance the plot is the action sequence, which acts as a condensed version of many of the devices we look at in understanding editing. These sequences push the plot forward, create new subplots, cram in subtext and heighten emotion.

As Ken Dancyger points out in his accomplished book on editing, The Technique of Film and Video Editing (Focal Press), the main concerns of this kind of sequence are:

• Identification
• Excitation
• Conflict
• Intensification.

Identifying with characters

The primary aim of a sequence must be to involve the audience and enable them to identify with a character, usually the protagonist. The aim of the camera is to get the audience close to the character, offering an intimacy where we become the character and start to emulate their feelings. At moments of high emotion the camera often takes on point of view or close-ups to enable us to see as they see.

Thrills and spills

Following on closely from identification is the process of exciting the audience. This is often related to a point of view as we get to know how our protagonist is coping with extreme conditions. But at this stage the point of view itself becomes too detached and the camera needs to become more subjective, using shots that are no longer descriptive but evocative - pans, swooping movements, hand-held shots and fast tracking shots. The aim of the editor here is to let these shots run away with the audience and accelerate the feeling of identification. Not only are we in the scene with the protagonist, but we experience a sensational reaction to what is happening. Montage is a major device in evoking this, but with very short shots of often less than one second.

Conflict is necessary

Conflict in storytelling terms is the bread and butter of the plot. Nothing advances without conflict - no character can change, no situations evolve, no aims accomplished without obstacles. For the editor, the device is to cut frequently between two situations, showing their contrasting aims, which should conflict with each to a high degree. For instance, the chase is a typical example of two conflicting aims: one person wants to catch while the other wants to escape. In Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) we see the hapless taxi driver Jamie Foxx trying to contact the next victim of assassin Tom Cruise. From where he stands he can see both victim and pursuer in the same building, but is helpless to prevent the confrontation.

Hyping it up

Finally, the use of intensification is crucial at the climax to a scene. Shorter shots and an increase in pace produce a sense that events are leading toward a conclusion. Editing becomes sharper, using shorter shots and devices such as parallel montage to show events converging. So, at the climax to the scene in Collateral described above, we get to see a use of hand-held camera to give us further identification, subjective camera angles to push us further into Foxx's viewpoint and sense of frustration, frequent cross-cutting as we see Cruise and close in on the victim, and finally a dramatic conclusion as Cruise fails in his task, but putting further danger in the way of the protagonists.

Tools

Say it economically

In narrative film, one of the purposes of a scene is to convey information. Your job is to show how a scene progresses in terms of the motivations of characters, events that have happened or any other detail needed to understand the plot. Your primary tools are the angle and movement of the camera, but how long do you allow to make sure that the audience have taken on board what is going on? The length of a cut is impossible to prescribe and the answer must contain the proviso that you may not want to hand the plot to the audience on a plate. Sophisticated audiences want to be made to work a little to uncover the goodies you are offering; films that demand something of you are often the more satisfying experience. As a starting point, however, close-ups will take up less screen time than long shots, for the reason that less information is contained in the former, more in the latter. The relative lengths of these will vary according to the pace and rhythm of your film, but you can decide in advance that a certain number of seconds becomes a benchmark.

To begin, you could start with the idea that for medium shots in an action sequence ask yourself to justify the length of a shot lasting beyond three or four seconds, while dialogue will determine the length of cuts in other scenes, but even here you can break edits up into several shots, from varying viewpoints. However a scene is conveyed, whether it is oblique or straightforward, try to make the edit only as long as it needs to be to convey the necessary information, and this is equally true when that ‘information’ is more ambiguous or abstract. Cut away as soon as you can.

Show clearly what is happening

Unlike reading a book, the viewer will only get one take to ascertain what is happening in a scene. Although your aim is to edit economically, you also have to convey clearly what you want the audience to see. How much you want them to see is up to you: do you imply what is happening in a scene or describe unambiguously? As we will see later, montage is one way of opting out of this argument and making each shot quite plain and defined, but juxtaposing it with others, suggesting more layers of meaning than otherwise would be conveyed.

Use the close-up

As a starting point for describing action clearly, the close-up is the most useful tool. It draws the attention of the audience towards one aspect of an action and therefore tells them that this or that part of the scene is the most important to see. If you are in doubt about whether a part of a scene is prominent enough, use a close-up. Balance this with frequent medium and longer shots, so that the audience can get their bearings as to where the action is and who is involved.

Each clip progresses the action

Equally important is the progression of the action. If a crucial part of the action is missed out or not given enough prominence, then a scene can be rendered meaningless. Take as an example a scene involving a chase through empty train carriages, with no dialogue. The aim of this scene is to show who is being chased, who is doing the chasing and what obstacles are going to get in their way. If we lose track of the information at any stage we lose interest in the film. The main instructive shots in this case are those that show the relative distances of the escapee and the pursuer to each other and those showing how, for instance, the escapee jams a compartment door shut, opens a main door and climbs up to the roof. We need to see how the pursuer releases the door and finds the escape route. In fast action sequences, it will be crucial to make the delivery of information as punchy as possible. Therefore, in these shots, the close-up is going to be the most economical way to shoot, enabling us to see the essential part of the frame without having to scour the screen for it.

Don't use a shot just because it looks good

When you have invested time and money it is tempting, and inevitable, to become emotionally attached to it. You may start to enjoy the footage as individual bits, as great-looking scenes. You may also look at how well certain scenes go with pieces of music you have earmarked for the film. As any artist or writer will testify, being seduced by the work you are in the middle of constructing is a certain way to lose track of it.

Without doubt some scenes turn out to be better than expected and start to assume a more prominent role in a film, but this does not necessarily mean they take up more screen time. A scene on a beach with two characters is going to look even better when, unexpectedly for you, a great sunset appears from behind the clouds partly obscured by a flock of birds. All this does is to make that particular moment more memorable; it does not follow that you have to extend the duration of that cut. This should also apply to scenes that proved unexpectedly difficult to shoot, or cost more than you had planned.

Make a director's cut if you can't decide what to edit out

If you have great shots but you know deep down that you really can't include the full glory of them, then go ahead and make a ‘director's cut’, knowing that this is an experiment. Reserve the cut-down version for exhibiting but retain what you have in the extended version. Noting which shots you consider to be better than others is crucial self-knowledge and will help you next time around.

Check how your ideas change during editing

Further to this, you may start to notice that the parts of a film that you really like are not ones you had first thought when preparing the film. If you have made an action film but find that you actually want to spend more time on the slower, more reflective sequences in between the action, then you have gained an important piece of information about what makes you different as a filmmaker. In truth, however, if you have a change of heart and try to turn a film into something quite different during editing you are likely to get into difficulties. You are still likely to learn a lot from the process of completing a movie, even though it no longer perfectly reflects your ideas. So make your movie as you first intended, but keep track of what you liked about those reluctantly discarded shots.

Cut on movement

This means ending a cut while the subject or camera is still moving. It encourages a fluid transition to the next shot, sustaining continuity and flow, and is going to help maintain rhythm. In many of the points described here, the aim is to hide the mechanism of editing, to place the plot or theme to the fore in the viewer's attention and not draw attention to how the film is constructed. Often called ‘continuity editing’, this is the dominant mode in cinema. Part of the aim of covering your tracks as editor is to make the potentially jarring cut from one image to another as smooth as possible, and cutting on movement is one way to achieve this.

Don't plan too rigidly

Cutting together the shots for your movie has to involve, frequently, a certain amount of listening and watching. However well you have planned the film, there will be changes and fluctuations as it passes through the hands of the people you are working with during shooting. Your own ideas may have altered and what was once the main theme in the film is now a sub-theme, or subplots may start to take more prominence. It is not uncommon for a director to continue changing a part of the script even as the previous one is being recorded. Viewing the daily takes give you a more objective view about how you are interpreting your material; it could remain very much as it appears in your plans or it could start to deviate. Be aware of these shifts in emphasis and don't reject them out of hand.

The need to remain with your plans and to see them through to fruition, no matter how tempting it is to deviate, is an important lesson, but it is true that the film does not finish evolving at the planning stage. A film in its early planning stage is often a blurred, overall plan, without detail. The main themes, main events and outcomes are evident. But what we might miss at this stage are the ideas lurking in the background which might come to the fore during production. It is possible, of course, to prepare a film so thoroughly that every conceivable angle has been considered, but this degree of planning can sap the life out of a film at an early stage, and many filmmakers would argue that it is, in fact, desirable to make available some aspects of the film to be resolved during production and editing.

Allow, then, for alterations to occur when deciding how to edit. To put it in perspective, this will probably be more the shifting of priorities within the film rather than bringing in completely new concepts.

Edit in sympathy with the film

A key concept in editing is to be appropriate: that every aspect of a film must lead back to the aims set out by the director. Editing filters what goes into the film, so it is the most important opportunity you have to forge each aspect into a coherent whole. If you have, for example, a short, fast-paced action film, you would expect to edit using faster cuts. If parts of this network of filmic elements are out of sync with others then the film may fail, although, of course, there are times when out of sync is what you want, so even this is under the rule of appropriateness. Ensuring this is maintained throughout the film is achieved partly through having and retaining a strong vision of what its core ideas are.

This fault was more common when the filmmaker was less in control of the final stages and needed to pass on editing to a third party, perhaps unconnected to the project until that point.

The exceptions to this rule are the occasional necessary diversions (more often in feature films), such as subplots. But even here, the relative infrequency with which sub-elements appear will confirm the dominance of the main direction of the film.

What makes a good editor?

As an artist you need to be a great technician in order to be in control of your film. Achieving this is down to practice; the more hours you spend coming up against problems and overcoming them, the more you will be able to handle every task. To become a good editor takes practice. To become a great one means becoming aware of the pull between two opposing forces when you are editing: the forces of reason and the forces of instinct. It sounds dramatic, but good editing exists exactly between these two sides and you have to steer a course between these two rocks - if you stick to reason too much you risk making a film that is too rigid and soulless, while moving too much towards instinct may make a film too mannered. In practice it means knowing your tools inside out, knowing about structure and knowing when to break the rules.

The Crunch

• Editing is good - you are in control once again
• But the wide range of options are tempting - be decisive and sure-footed, rejecting ideas that seem to divert you from what you set out to do
• Avoid editing too stylistically - editing is subservient to your aims
• Use rhythm to order your editing and take your cue from the overall rhythmic structure of the film
• Become a technical master of your equipment or software - it stops you having to depend on someone who doesn't understand your film
• Don't let your attachment to certain takes lead you to change your plans
• Improvisation is OK
• You won't always know what you are doing - sometimes it is enough to say that a particular arrangement of shots ‘just feels right’
• Be aware that the arrangement of themes and ideas in the film may have shifted during filming - edit according to what you have.

2. Editing aesthetics: non-narrative

Working on a narrative movie demands different approaches from a music promo, VJ performance or other non-narrative video. Many of the ideas looked at in Chapter 8:1 are going to be of limited value when working with material where there is no attempt at continuity, where stories are absent and where the demands of the market are wholly different.

In this kind of editing an extra dimension comes into play, where signs and meaning can be conveyed through the style of editing itself rather than simply through what is shown on screen. The very mechanics of editing become as important as the images.

What genre editing can't do

There comes a point in genre or continuity editing when you run out of tools and devices and need to resort to other means. The rules and conventions of the edit start to feel restrictive and prevent certain ideas from coming into play.

When does this happen? One instance is when the ideas mentioned near the start of this chapter of identification and intensification become stronger than the plot. At these points the plot takes second place to the desire to involve the audience. The emotion in the sequence becomes heightened only if we share the protagonist's emotions. At this point we may see a diversion away from the plot entirely, where we encounter a montage of shots with sounds or music, designed to produce an effect of visceral sensation.

In individual scenes, then, there is a need to occasionally break out of continuity editing. But what about on a larger scale, when the entire movie needs help from outside these conventions? In some films, you may want ideas to enter into the film that are not present solely in the story. You may want to use different kinds of structure to push the audience towards other meanings in the film. For instance, Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) raises questions about who we are, to what extent we can trust our memories and what this means for the way we deal with the world. The plot unfolds in reverse order as the protagonist, Leonard (Guy Pearce), goes further back towards the memories he cannot reach given his short-term amnesia. By placing the effect first and the cause second (for instance, Leonard finds a warning note to himself but cannot recall why; we then go to the day before to see what provoked this warning), Nolan lets us experience Leonard's amnesia.

What is non-narrative editing?

In music promos editing has evolved to keep pace with changes in music, as dance-based music and other urban styles have influenced promo directors towards a more surreal or even abstract approach, having no lyrics to work with as starting points. Editing in these films is about revealing the editing process by scratching and layering shots together to echo the manipulation of DJs with vinyl.

Another influence has been the pressure from cable music channels — or more accurately from audiences via the channels — for more eye-catching videos. The result has been to ‘micro-edit', where smaller parcels of information are contained in each shot. In a feature film there are signs all over the frame as to the story or theme, including colours, camera framing, composition and so on. But in this kind of movie, shots can be on screen for less than a second and inevitably contain less than is crucial. But this does not necessarily mean we are coping with less information in these films. Instead, it uses montage techniques (see Chapter 8:3) to almost literally pile the shots on top of one another, in what Eisenstein called ‘vertical montage’.

But what makes this kind of video work interesting is that it plays with different audience expectations. The same person can see a feature film and then a music promo and read them in very different ways. The feature film has a certain structure (see Chapter 4:4), which asks us to order events and to expect a certain pattern to these. But in non-narrative work the desire to order what we see is less. We don't need to figure out who is who or where we are. We take in the images without prejudice and let them move around our perception until a shape of sorts emerges.

Figure 8.2 In this still from Bauhaus's Corps Incorporated, text and image are layered to create a dense visual mix.

Aims of the non-narrative edit

Sensation

At the upper end of the scale for aims of this kind of editing is the need for sensation. Music video, particularly in the West (Japan has very different approaches), has thrived on shock tactics and revulsion. Often subliminally used, these have the effect of grabbing attention, but also sometimes of incorporating political points with snatches of provocative images. In the club atmosphere, VJ performances use video screens on three walls to envelop the audience in the film and induce strong perceptual reactions. Big screens of colours, lights, text and images fill the vision and ensure total sensory inclusion. It is intense and visceral.

Go to: Chapter 6:4 for ideas on how VJ movies work.

Abandonment of reality

In these films there is no attempt to remain within reality or sometimes anything resembling it. Editing is a powerful tool in removing our sense of what is happening and when. If continuity is a way of sustaining a new reality for the viewer, convincing them that 50 years have passed in one minute or that hundreds of miles have been travelled, then it seems right that non-narrative filmmakers use the same techniques to distort reality. So clips are broken up with other clips, text obscures what we see, and images clash and contradict other images.

Non-narrative simply inverts genre editing to subvert reality.

Space for the viewer to inhabit

Although there is an abundance of imagery and information being thrown at the viewer, non-narrative films are not quite what they seem. A description of the kinds of editing seen would suggest that they are the equivalent of the swinging pocket-watch, hypnotizing the audience. But instead these films tend to use what we could call ‘structural space’. This means that the films offer a space for the viewer to enter the structure of the film. The surface of the film is not flawless as in features, where the suspension of disbelief is all; in VJ-ing there are glitches where video images stop, synchronize, break apart and then start up again. Another way of achieving this space is through repetition, where images recur and are echoed from screen to screen so that the viewer starts to see them as rhythmic devices and takes part in predicting them. In these films you identify not so much with characters, but with rhythm and images.

Figure 8.3 Non-narrative work, such as this piece by polymedia group Raya, demands a different approach to editing.

How to do it: devices in non-narrative editing

Strong rhythm

In music promo and VJ-ing, rhythm is often the driving force due to the use of music. Promos tend to be restricted by the rhythm of the song in question, but VJ-ing tends to use music in the same way as a band uses a drum beat: it uses the music as a way of building up layers of images, again through repetition. The music keeps rhythm but images can be used against rhythm or with it. It is a foil for the development of the images as they cut in and out and then finally reach a cumulative climax.

In Wild Man of New York by The Light Surgeons, for instance, footage of a homeless man in the streets of New York is interspersed with cuts of consumerism, TV culture and urban environments. We start with the man himself, and these other images enter slowly, at first for just a few frames but then dominating the sequence until the man has disappeared. Near the end of the piece, the images diversify and we are returned to the man again. His importance in the film is underlined by his recurrence and we start to relate all the other images to him, creating ideas from juxtaposition. It’s classic montage but uses structures borrowed from dance music culture.

Editing is the story

This idea seems like a riddle perhaps, but this may be because we see editing as a tool for the final stages of a film rather than as an end in itself. Much of VJ-ing is about using editing as the first and last tool. This means that the way images appear is as important as the actual images themselves. As in much VJ work, the better analogies are with music to really understand how it works. In some music the melody is not important and not especially memorable; instead, it is the way different sounds are arranged that is the important element.

In editing, then, try to favour adding rather than taking away clips, building up rather than reducing the effect. And the way that you arrange the shots has a sort of meaning all its own, so you don’t necessarily need images to carry much meaning. Take a look at dance music and also look for similar patterns in the music of American composer Steve Reich (who incidentally is seen as the grandfather of sound sampling through his experiments with tape in the early 1960s).

Imitation of the dream

Another common element of this kind of work is the way the editing borrows from dreams. This doesn’t mean that they are all surrealist, although many music promo directors do favour the dreamlike or nightmarish above other themes. It means that they borrow from the structure of dreams, where continuity is not necessary because the flavour of dreams is based on sudden change and alarming juxtapositions. There is no chronology that we recognize and events seem to occur out of nowhere; cause and effect either disappears or is reversed. This kind of structure favours the music video and VJ more than any other, for two reasons: first, it allows the film to rely just on images and jump straight to the next symbolic shot; second, because it results in a film that constantly grabs the attention, which is exactly what the market needs for MTV and similar channels. To understand dream structure, look at Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, which gets this kind of structure just right.

Symbolism

Symbolism is rife in the non-narrative genres. Symbolism is the less definite sign, more open to interpretation and more stimulating to see. Universal symbols such as fire, darkness, speed, the colour red, the sea and more urban ones such as empty streets, rough sleepers and police sirens are typical examples used in these films. To the non-narrative filmmaker they are like actors and characters — ready to be brought on stage when needed.

Go to: Chapter 3:3, ‘Film language and how to speak it’, to see how symbols are used throughout film.

Disorientation

The live mix by a VJ is nothing less than virtuoso editing, responding to the film as much as generating it. Disorientation is a by-product of this kind of so-called ‘accelerated film’. The scale of the screens and the enveloping nature of the experience make it unlikely that any other sensory information can get through against the wall of sounds and images. This degree of sensory manipulation is profound and means that the slightest disruption of images and sound is enough to disorientate the audience. And as we have seen, it is precisely this kind of discontinuity that the non-narrative filmmaker prefers. For editing in music promos and VJ work, the effect will be disorientating if you follow the ideas above — particularly of editing with rhythm where this can be suddenly disrupted. The free use of sampled images from other movies also means that the unexpected is a constant factor, disrupting not only the structure of the video but also the nature of the images. Anything can happen and that makes for a nervous experience.

Figure 8.4 Editing with images such as these demands a different approach to conventional editing, as in this still from Daniel Levi’s promo for Massive Attack, Butterfly Caught.

Figure 8.5 Hardware such as Pioneer’s DVJ-X1 enables direct scratching of DVDs to create VJ shows, emulating the way DJs use vinyl.

What this project is for: to investigate filmmaking for cell phones or hand-held devices

Time: allow a few days to plan, a week to shoot and a week to edit

What this project is about

The aim of this film is to create a moving image product that goes outside your expectations of video. We need to try new ways of using video, to respond to new ways of watching video.

Go to: Chapter 10:2, ‘State of the art: expansion and convergence’, to find out more about polymedia movies.

Stage 1

Choose from the following ideas:

• A sequence of viral movies to accompany a political message (designed to be seen on phones and hand-held devices)
• A sequence of virals to market a new band or record company.

In both ideas, the aim is to create short films of less than 30 seconds each which compress well — see Chapter 5:5 on shooting for the web and compression for how to do this. In the 2004 US presidential campaign, volunteers went from house to house showing voters short films on palm-tops to swing their opinions, with different films available for the volunteer to choose from according to the voter’s race or age.

Music company virals are becoming commonplace as costs of promos force labels to reconsider how to target more directly to consumers. Your viral is being sent to someone who likes another group from the same label and has given their cell phone number for marketing purposes.

Start by planning a series of short storyboards that have strong, bold images.

Stage 2

Shoot uncluttered and clear shots that will translate well to cell phones. Work with hard lighting to achieve strong shapes and shadows. Avoid fast movement with the camera. The virals should relate to each other clearly so that they each seem to belong to a single campaign. To achieve this, use consistent lighting, camera angles and colour in each. Create a visible style which connects each one. For the political viral, make it explicit what you are stating by adding text.

Go to: Chapter 5:2, ‘Lighting’, for help on getting the right effect.

Stage 3

Editing may be a short process given the length of the films. Use montage techniques and avoid long, lingering shots. Virals tend to work well when made in an enigmatic way, leaving the viewer curious and eager to find out more. For political shorts, be succinct, punchy and get to the point immediately.

Evaluation

Show your friends the movies you have made and find out how well they convey what you intended. An equally important question is the results of compression. Try putting the movie through heavy compression at around 5–10 frames per second and view on a camera LCD monitor. Freeware is available for compression for cell phones.

I want something more challenging

This is a pretty tough assignment because of the restrictions imposed, but if you want to push yourself further try making a movie where you work with a real-life client, perhaps for a company that wants virals for a marketing campaign. Contact design agencies — not companies direct — and find out whether any are planning this sort of addition to their clients’ campaigns.

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3. Montage editing

Montage is one of the most significant devices used by filmmakers in editing. Many editors see montage as a definition of editing, while others see it as just another device to bring in when other more rational ones don’t work.

At the centre of this debate is the view that there are two essential approaches to editing, at least in a theoretical sense. It seems too simplistic perhaps, but does stand up to analysis of editing styles. It could be summed up as being between:

• Those who think editing is about taking away shots to make a sequence vs
• Those who think editing is about adding shots to make a sequence.

The predominantly Hollywood-style editing is concerned with the first method. Shots are placed to advance the story and anything additional to this is extraneous. Action depends on short cuts with information that the audience can digest quickly. These shots are delivered in ‘single file’ as it were; they are linear in the sense that they each tell a part of the chain of information we need to understand the story.

But there is another school of editing which says that you need to add more shots. It is derived from the approach to editing devised by Sergei Eisenstein, who many would say practically invented the language of editing in early films such as Battleship Potemkin. He talked about ‘vertical editing’ and suggested a parallel with orchestral scoring, where instruments are layered on top of one another. This kind of editing is concerned with adding shots, to bombard the senses in what Eisenstein called a polyphonic sequence to get ‘a synchronization of the senses’ (The Film Sense, Faber & Faber, 1943).

Figure 8.6 How montage creates new meaning out of combining seemingly unrelated shots.

This section is about how to edit in this way and what it can mean for your films.

In keeping with the spirit of montage, the rest of this section will look at a range of ideas in a different way, putting forward ideas without order. Feel free to mix them around, add them up later and make your own versions of this chapter.

In essence, montage centres on the idea that shots do not have to match in order to be placed side by side, but can show seemingly unrelated images with the aim of heightening the emotional or dramatic impact of a sequence. The idea is simple: shot 1 is placed next to shot 2 and gives birth to a third representation, this time in the mind of the viewer. In this way, montage achieves the multiple layers of meaning it wants because there is a net result of more ‘meanings’ than there are individual shots. It quickly becomes bewildering.

For example, shot 1 is a car journey at night and shot 2 a burning house in daylight. Both have separate and quite individual meanings and have potentially lots of symbolism. We may consider as separate the journey in shot 1 or the event in shot 2, but edited together they trigger all sorts of ideas. Together they create a synthesis that is now greater than the effect of either shot independently:

Imagine a scene:

Burning house + more shots of house = burning house Car + more shots of car = car

But if you try :

Burning house + car + burning house + car + man looking scared = Did he do it? Why is he escaping, if he is escaping? Is he the occupant of the house, reliving the memory? Is he alive? Is he dead?

Montage has become more sophisticated since its beginnings in Eisenstein’s movies. In its infancy, montage was criticized for being too literal, inserting shots that did not add to the meaning of a scene but merely underlined what we already knew, such as a cutaway to a shot of a lightning strike when a character falls in love.

Later montage began to fulfil its potential — namely, to create a third meaning out of two shots. It is this ability to conjure up new meanings by simply juxtaposing one image with another that has revealed an enormous untapped reservoir of poetic subtlety in film.

• Working with montage is somewhat easier with non-linear editing systems, which by their nature encourage the user to try out shots against other shots and view the possibilities. Digital editing wants to become montage editing.
• Montage is a kind of anti-editing, in that it is concerned with building up a sequence, amplifying meaning and effect through multiple cuts and images, whereas more conventional editing, in its classical sense, is concerned with discarding, with deselecting images.
• It has a geographical bias in that its greatest exponents are found in European film, while Hollywood has tended to view it as a disruptive influence, upsetting the steady flow of shots in classical ‘continuity editing’.
• Montage is not a device as such to add some complexity when a film seems like its becoming too obvious. Instead, as Scorsese’s film professor and mentor Haig Manoogian put it, montage ‘is the source for a film’s power; it is editing’ (The Filmmaker’s Art, Basic Books, 1966, p. 215).
• As with any other tool in post-production, montage editing is driven by the content of the film itself.
• With montage, more is better. Montage is a kind of anti-editing.
• Formula for Hollywood editing: a—b—c—d—e—f.
• More is better, anti-editing.
• Thesis + antithesis = synthesis. In this, the letters ‘the’ are signs of the ever-present theme in each shot.
• Formula for montage editing: a—d—c—b—e/a—b—e—a/d—a/f—a/a. Note the rhythm as ‘a’ recurs.
• Meaning of shot 1 plus meaning of shot 2 equals new meaning.

Figure 8.7 In this sequence by New Zealand filmmaker Charlotte Clark, a series of images are held together in a fast-moving montage.

• But randomness is the enemy of montage.
• Juxtaposition must seek out similarities of theme in opposing images for it to work. It is about creating a unification of theme so that the unseen meaning in shots 1 and 2 becomes the meaning of both, even though the two images may have little in common at first sight.
• To make sure you have a unifying theme to your juxtaposition, take each shot from the same source.
• Thesis + antithesis = synthesis. In this, the letters ‘the’ are signs of the underlying theme in each shot.
• Accelerated montage creates what is invisible: in Hitchcock’s Psycho there are no shots of the knife striking the victim in the shower scene. Shot combinations and speed convince us we have seen it.
• Thesis + antithesis = synthesis. In this, the letters ‘the’ are signs of the central theme in each shot.
• A montage sequence can convey ideas, emotions or a series of events more subtly than through purely verbal means, and the director is then free to add a particular twist to the scene, depending on the kind of shots included.

• Use montage in an almost improvised way, selecting and using clips intuitively.
• Add more than you discard.
• Thesis (the shot) + antithesis (another shot which juxtaposes it) = synthesis (a fusion of both as the theme present in both is revealed and elevated by repetition).
• ‘Parallel montage’ allows the director to show simultaneous events or stories by cutting from one to another and suggesting shared meanings.
• Film theorist Christian Metz suggested eight different types and described the interactions and uses of each.
• In ‘accelerated montage’, a sequence is built of a succession of fast clips showing a bewildering array of images, trying to effect a particular response in the viewer.
• ‘Involuted montage’ allows a story to be told without regard to chronology, letting the filmmaker reveal parts of the plot and draw the viewer into a more complex reading of it than a simple a-to-bto-c of events.
• Thesis + antithesis = .

The Crunch

• Montage looks weird but try it — it is unpredictable and adds something extra
• Montage takes many forms — try out each method and see what it can offer you
• Look for montage in movies you watch — it’s everywhere
• Why should you tell a story straight? Give the audience something else to think about other than the story
• You don’t have to be in control — improvise when you compose a montage sequence.

What this project is for: to try montage editing techniques

Time: allow about one week for planning, shooting and editing

What this project is about

The aim of this movie is to investigate the full effects of montage editing. This movie is not descriptive and is not trying to make any statements or tell us any messages. Instead, it is aimed at producing an almost physical, sensational effect on the viewer. It takes its inspiration from the movie The Ring, and in particular the piece of video tape which forms the centre of the story. In this movie, a video is said to be so potent that it condemns anyone who sees it to death. But can you work magic with a piece of video? If so, can it be like a spell, capable of making someone fall in love, give away all their money or change their life? This movie is going to aim for the jugular in the audience and perhaps produce some startling effects. We will need all the tools picked up so far in montage editing, lighting, sound, structure and composition to produce the desired effect.

Stage 1

Describe the ‘spell’ that you would like to perform. Then describe in simple descriptive words the effect that this may have on a person. For instance, love may be described in words like warm, rapturous, nervous, anticipatory. Fear could be described as cold, empty, fast, compelling, piercing and so on.

When you have described the feeling you want to induce, make a list of these words on a page and draw images that you think link to them. These will be entirely open to interpretation, but bear in mind that they need to be fairly universal to reach the audience. Then devise a separate list of words which also link to the main idea but are opposing evocations of it. For instance, in love, there are also feelings that are less predictable: hopelessness, change, sudden doubt. These add another dimension to the feeling and will provide us with juxtaposition to add to the spell.

Stage 2

From these images you have a basic series of visualizations. With each image, try to conjure up an intense aspect to it. Always opt for the most dramatic and intimate aspect of a particular word. Go over the top.

Go to: Chapters 4:7 and 4:8 to see how to work with these visuals to create a shooting script.

Outline a plan of where to get these shots and then draw more sketches to define how they could look.

Stage 3

When shooting, keep looking out for images that could fit your movie. Try to avoid perfection, and avoid following the chapter on good composition too closely. The images we need for this movie will benefit from a bit more spontaneity, so try compositions that are deliberately not quite ‘correct’ in terms of good framing. Consider how much more interesting home-movie footage of UFOs can be; even though they are fakes, they grab the attention by being faint, blurred and uncertain. M. Night Shyamalan used this technique in the movie footage sequences of aliens in his movie Signs to use the device that imperfection equals truth.

Stage 4

Cutting for this movie will be better if you follow the ideas in non-narrative editing, Chapter 8:2. Also check out Chapter 8:3, ‘Montage editing’.

Evaluation

For this movie, its success is judged by the effect it has on viewers. Show the movie to friends and see how they react. Note where the moments are that affect them most strongly and see whether other sections could be re-edited to emulate them.

Look for whether there are any lessons here in editing for narrative movies. Can you see ways of editing action scenes like this? Could moments of intense feeling be conveyed in montage sequences like this? The most important question here, though, relates to the whole purpose of filmmaking: can you strongly manipulate the audience’s feelings and induce strong reactions?

I want something more challenging

Try relying less on quick editing to get the effects you want. A more difficult version of this film would be one that uses images less frenetically, with longer cuts. Is it possible to hold attention strongly through images that are captivating rather than piling up images that are individually less interesting?