Just as pauses in a scene can intensify the moment, shortening, or pulling-up the pauses in a scene can help pick up the pace. Whether you’re cutting out the “ums” or trimming entire lines of dialogue, you can usually find a lot of “fat” in a scene once you start looking for it. Be careful, though—not every scene needs to be “tight” to be good.

Hard Sound Effects and Music

A hard sound effect is something short, precise, and fairly loud—a knock on a door, a burst of applause, a screech of tires. These sorts of sound effects startle the viewer a little bit and make it easy to hide a rough edit or smooth a jump cut. If your scene has music, it’s a good idea to add it early on as you refine the edit. Music can change the pacing, add emotion, intensify action, and tell the viewer how they should be feeling. Many editors have a supply of film scores that they bring to a project as temporary soundtrack elements.

In the previous tutorial, you created a rough cut of the Salsa Dancing scene. In this tutorial, you’ll use some of the techniques we described earlier to refine the cut. Open your project from the last tutorial and make a duplicate of your edited sequence. Call the duplicate “Salsa Rough Cut” and save your project.

STEP 1: OVERLAP SOME AUDIO

Load your sequence into the Timeline by double-clicking on it. The wide shot of James practicing his dance steps is fine, but the cut to Sherrie in the doorway might seem a little abrupt. By rolling the audio of Sherrie’s shot back, we’ll be able to hear the sound of her feet approaching, and the cut to her won’t feel so unnatural.

Select A3 and A4 (the audio for Sherrie’s single) and position your cursor near the edit. Then select the Trim Mode tool from the Timeline tool bar (see Figure 14.15). Now you can simply drag the end of the shot backward or forward in time to create an overlapping audio edit.

Go through the sequence and look for other places that overlapping audio can help the cuts.

STEP 2: ADD SOME CUTAWAYS

The shot called Cutaway-feet-LR.mov is a nice shot to enhance the scene. Drop it onto the V2 track at first to see where it works best and use the techniques described in the first tutorial to drag it around until you find the right spot for it. To get this shot to work, you’ll need to match the action between the cutaway and the master shot. Play around with it until it looks good; then drag it down to V1.

Similarly, although the wide master is highly functional, you might find a more interesting shot to start the scene. One option is the medium master, which starts with a shot of James’ feet and pans up to reveal his face.

STEP 3: CLEAN UP THE TRANSITION TO DIALOGUE

The next area to work on is the transition from the dancing to the dialogue that occurs in the mirror. Notice that the tone of the performances is quite different between the wide master and the two shot in front of the mirror. This is due to a choice the director made on the set. They are very different in pacing and energy, but it’s still possible to make the cut between the two shots work.

310 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Figure 14.15

Use the Trim Mode tool to roll the audio on A3 and A4 back so that you can hear the sound of Sherrie’s footsteps approaching.

Luckily, in the wide master, Sherrie turns her back to the camera so you can get away with cheating dialogue here because we can’t see her lips. Adjust the edit and roll the dialogue back to smooth the cut.

STEP 4: ADD SOME MUSIC

It’s hard to watch a scene of two people dancing without any music. Go to the File menu and select Import and then navigate to a clip in your personal music library and import it. Edit it onto A5 and A6 and use it to cover both the beginning and the end as well. Try adding the wide master for the end of the scene since it allows us to clearly see the action (dancing) that

Watch Our Cuts

On the Chapter 14 page on the companion Web site, there are two files: Salsa Rough Cut and Salsa Final Cut. Click on the links to watch our cuts and compare them to yours.