By the time you get to this stage, you’ve probably been working on your project for a long time: writing, researching, planning, and shooting. Now it’s time to play with it. The history of filmmaking is rife with examples of films that have been rebuilt, restruc-

tured, and sometimes resurrected in the editing room.

If the script is weak, it is the editor’s job to try to find a way to make it work. If the director was tired one day and forgot to get the cutaways, it’s the editor’s job to cut the scene regardless. The notorious “cutting room floor” has saved many actors from the embarrassment of a weak performance, and many cinematographers from the embarrassment of poorly shot footage. There’s a saying that editing is a no-win situation—if the editor saves the film, the director gets the credit, but if the editor fails to save the film, the editor takes the blame. While it’s true that for many people, editing is an invisible art, it’s also well appreciated by those who know better, and it can be lots of fun.

Editing Basics

Motion picture film was invented in the late nineteenth century, but editing as we know it today developed slowly over the next 40 years as new technologies were introduced and more sophisticated ways to tell stories became the norm. The earliest films, like the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), consisted of nothing more than shots, the most basic building blocks for an edited sequence. Turn-of-the-century French filmmaker Georges Meliès introduced the use of in-camera special effects such as slow-motion, dissolves, fade-outs, and super-impositions. These “magic tricks” developed into the rudiments of a filmic language: fade-ins to signify the beginning, dissolves to transition between one shot and another, and fade-outs to signify the ending.

Around the same time, Edwin S. Porter made The Great Train Robbery (1903), a film considered to be the beginning of modern editing. Porter developed the technique of jumping to different points of view and different locations, something we now take for granted. In the controversial Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith took the concept of editing a step further, introducing the use of the close-up, the long shot (long as in length of time, not as in camera angle), and panning to develop story and intensify emotion. He also innovated the intercutting of scenes and parallel plot lines.

Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein took Griffith’s techniques even further and invented the concept of montage, as exemplified by the famous Odessa steps scene in The Battleship Potemkin (1925). In 1929, another Russian, Dziga Vertov, made the early cinema verité film, Man with a Movie Camera, documenting daily life in Russia with fast-cutting to create intensity and energy.

The invention of sync sound added an entirely new level of sophistication in filmmaking, and this turning point is exemplified by Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), which used off-screen dialogue, voice-over, overlapping dialogue, and music to enhance the mood and power of the story. Editing styles and techniques have continued to grow and change since Citizen Kane, but the early history of film and editing is repeated on a small scale in every editing room as films are cut together using dissolves, close-ups, cutaways, intercutting, montage, and sound to build the final cut (see Figure 14.1).

292 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Figure 14.1

If we first show a shot of the San Joaquin Valley Swiss Club and then show a clip of our actor, he looks confused or disappointed (top). However, if we show a clip of a knife-wielding maniac, and then show the same clip of our actor, the actor will appear terrified (bottom). The same images “edited” two different ways yield a very different emotional impact.