Transcript Editing - Jadwin

Film Editing
Welles: “For my vision of the cinema,
editing is not one aspect. It is the only
aspect.”
3 key three aspects of editing:

technique (cutting and splicing)

craft (considering the shot in itself and in
relation to other shots)

art (how to arrange everything to create an
impression)
What is editing?
To EDIT is to select, arrange, add,
and delete things from a
document.
Film editing is a 2-phase process:
Selecting and arranging the available film into
the final visual form
 Mixing of the soundtracks into the master
soundtrack and then matching the soundtrack
with the visual images.

What the editor does
Works for the director shaping
many hours of “raw” film into a few
hours of “finished” movie.
The editor must create:
Spatial relationships between shots
 Temporal relationships between shots:
flashback, flash-forward, ellipsis
 Montage (Fr. ‘editing’) is a condensed series
of images that shows us a series of events
 Duration and rhythm - the length of time you
look at a shot; the tempo of the film (leisurely
or fast?). The tempo of edits can be
increased/decreased to speed up or slow
down a viewer’s perception of time.

Major Approaches to
Editing: Continuity and
Discontinuity
An editor’s arrangement of
a series of shots can create
or disrupt continuity
Continuity
in editing makes the shot appear naturalistic,
its elements connected (continuous), the
graphic, spatial, and temporal
relationships maintained from shot to shot.
It IS verisimilar.
Discontinuity
in editing, in contrast, seems jumpy and
disconnected (discontinuity, which calls
attention to itself).
It is NOT verisimilar.
Continuity-creating shots
Master shot - orients the viewer, sets the
scene; may be shot from different angles;
establishes the scene
 Screen direction/180 rule/axis of actionthe direction in which a figure moves on the
screen. The 180-degree rule or axis of action
- a hypothetical line that keeps the action on a
single side of the camera.
 Shot/reverse shot - Reverse-angle shots are
permitted as long as everything is kept
continuous.

Continuity shots: match cuts

Match cuts - shots intended to make us equate or
continue ideas. Shots with matching action, subject,
graphic content, or eye contact between characters

Match-on-action cut - the continuation of a character’s
movement through space without actually showing us
everything that happens

Graphic match cut - the shape, form, or texture of an object
is repeated in two different cuts

Eyeline Match Cut - joining shot A, a POV shot of a person
looking off-camera, to shot B, a reverse shot of the person
who is the object of the gaze.
Discontinuous Shots I
Point-of-view editing - camera moves from
character’s POV to the object of the POV.
Jump Cut - creates an instantaneous
advance in the action, creating ellipsis
Discontinuous Shots II
Fade-in, fade-out - from blank/black screen to or
from image
Dissolve - long-acting double-exposure in which
one image slowly dissolves into another.
Wipe
Iris Shot
Freeze-Frame
Split Screen
Discontinuous Shots III
Parallel cutting - intercalating two lines of
action that occur at different times in
different places.
Cross-cutting - intercalating two lines of
action that occur simultaneously in
different places.
Intercutting - intercalating multiple actions
so that they look like a single scene.