Storytelling with video and film, part 3: editing techniques
In part 1 and part 2 of this series, we examined visual and sound elements in videography and filmmaking. Now let’s take a look at the basics of editing.
Common transitions
Cut: An instant transition from one frame to the next, this is the most frequently used edit.
Dissolve: This gradual transition from one image to the next softens the shot-to-shot journey and is often used to suggest the passage of time.
Fade: A gradual transition from video to a solid or graphic background. When you fade to black, then fade into another shot, it’s called “dipping to black.”
You can also combine techniques. A good example is what I call the “flashbulb,” in which you cut to white, then do a three-frame dissolve to the next image. Another is to blur one shot and dissolve as you find focus coming into the next shot. Or do the same thing with a fast pan of the camera on both sides of a dissolve or cut. Start watching your favorite commercial and long-form work, frame-by-frame, and you’ll see that tricks like these are commonly used to elicit specific feelings and pump up visual interest. You’ll also notice that it’s often okay—even desirable—to use short cuts. Really short cuts. One of my most enjoyable edit sessions took place a few years ago when I worked with an inexperienced editor who turned fully around in his chair and indignantly asked me, “You mean to tell me, you think you’re gonna cram 20 shots into a 30-second TV spot?”
Yeah, that’s what I meant.
Hollywood conventions
Let’s go deeper. Even with all our 21st century tools and shortened attention spans, most of the editing standards used in feature films today are still based on the work of Vsevolod Pudovkin, a Russian silent movie director who’s long since moved on to that big studio in the sky. The conventions he established haven’t changed because they’re grounded in the fundamental ways that humans perceive visual information. Here are the basics, as written by Pudovkin himself in 1926:
1. Contrast— Suppose it be our task to tell of the miserable situation of a starving man; the story will impress the more vividly if associated with mention of the senseless gluttony of a well-to-do man.
On just such a simple contrast relation is based the corresponding editing method. On the screen the impression of this contrast is yet increased, for it is possible not only to relate the starving sequence to the gluttony sequence, but also to relate separate scenes and even separate shots of scenes to one another, thus, as it were, forcing the spectator to compare the two actions all the time, one strengthening the other. The editing of contrast is one of the most effective, but also one of the commonest and most standardised, of methods, and so care should be taken not to overdo it.
2. Parallelism — This method resembles contrast, but is considerably wider. Its substance can be explained more clearly by an example. In a scenario as yet unproduced a section occurs as follows: a working man, one of the leaders of a strike, is condemned to death; the execution is fixed for 5 a.m. The sequence is edited thus: a factory-owner, employer of the condemned man, is leaving a restaurant drunk, he looks at his wrist-watch: 4 o’clock. The accused is shown — he is being made ready to be led out. Again the manufacturer, he rings a door-bell to ask the time: 4:30. The prison wagon drives along the street under heavy guard. The maid who opens the door — the wife of the condemned — is subjected to a sudden senseless assault. The drunken factory-owner snores on a bed, his leg with trouser-end upturned, his hand hanging down with wrist-watch visible, the hands of the watch crawl slowly to 5 o’clock. The workman is being hanged. In this instance two thematically unconnected incidents develop in parallel by means of the watch that tells of the approaching execution. The watch on the wrist of the callous brute, as it were connects him with the chief protagonist of the approaching tragic denouement, thus ever present in the consciousness of the spectator. This is undoubtedly an interesting method, capable of considerable development.
3. Symbolism — In the final scenes of the film Strike the shooting down of workmen is punctuated by shots of the slaughter of a bull in the stockyard. The scenarist, as it were, desires to say: just as a butcher fells a bull with the swing of a pole-axe, so cruelly and in cold blood, were shot down the workers. This method is especially interesting because, by means of editing, it introduces an abstract concept into the consciousness of the spectator without use of a title.
4. Simultaneity — In American films the final section is constructed from the simultaneous rapid development of two actions, in which the outcome of one depends on the outcome of the other. The end of the present-day section of Intolerance is thus constructed. The whole aim of this method is to create in the spectator a maximum tension of excitement by the constant forcing of a question, such as, in this case: Will they be in time? — will they be in time?
The method is a purely emotional one, and nowadays overdone almost to the point of boredom, but it cannot be denied that of all the methods of constructing the end hitherto devised it is the most effective.
5. Leit-motif (reiteration of theme) — Often it is interesting for the scenarist especially to emphasise the basic theme of the scenario, for this purpose exists the method of reiteration. Its nature can easily be demonstrated by an example. In an anti-religious scenario that aimed at exposing the cruelty and hypocrisy of the Church in employ of the Tsarist regime, the same shot was several times repeated: a church-bell slowly ringing and, superimposed on it, the title: “The sound of bells sends into the world a message of patience and love.” This piece appeared whenever the scenarist desired to emphasise the stupidity of patience, or the hypocrisy of the love thus preached.
Scenarist. Never thought of myself as “scenarist” before reading Pudovkin, but okay.
Here are a couple of other discussions on editing basics:
http://www.videomaker.com/article/1215/
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~lhanson/grammar.htm
See all you scenarists next week.
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