Alexander Vousden - Rule of 6

As we discussed in class, Walter Murch’s “Rule of Six” consists of six elements to building the story within an edit. He put the six elements as a list of priorities. These priorities can be used as a plan for your edit or a guideline to follow that ensures the audience’s interest in the film. I wanted to list them out and go more in depth with them.

The most important is emotion. Telling the emotion of the story is the single most important part when it comes to the editing stage. Murch says emotion “is the thing that you should to preserve at all costs”.

When editing, the editor should ask ‘does the edit move the story forward in a meaningful way’? Each cut you make needs to keep the story moving. If the story isn't advancing, its confusing or boring the audience.

Having rhythm is making sure cuts are put in a rhythmic sense. Cuts should be smooth and make sense to the story. Like music, editing must have a beat/tempo that gives it good timing.

Cuts affect the location and movement of the audience’s eye trace. An editor should always be aware of where in the frame you want your audience to look and cut accordingly.

The last two are the two dimensional place of screen and three dimensional space. This is where the 180 degree rule states that you draw an imaginary line in between your characters and keep the camera on only one side of that line. This also must be done in editing.

Diegesis, Mimesis, and Sound

There are two types of styles when it comes to filmmaking: diegesis and mimesis. Diegesis is the act of telling the story, whereas mimesis is actually showing the story. In short, it is basically storytelling versus miming. For example, reality television is considered diegesis over mimesis because the story is being told, not shown. Film, however, is more about mimesis and showing the story to viewers. 

Sound, voice, and music are very important components to most movie and television viewing experiences. Sound is there to enhance the scenes of a movie, and it can be an indicator of a mood change or help establish tone. Diegetic sound is noises and music on-screen that the character in the story is aware of and can hear, and non-diegetic sound is something only the audience can hear outside of the story. An example of non-diegetic sound, or sound that doesn't take place in the "world" of the movie, would be a narrator's commentary, or mood music. This comes from off-screen, or somewhere outside of the story. Diegetic sound would be the character's voices, or music coming from instruments being played inside of the movie/story. Sound effects can be both diegetic and non-diegetic, as well as music. 

Three important rules for sound editing is to make sure you have room tone in your scene and use it to your advantage, to keep your dialogue/narration and music separate from one another, and to mix your audio levels until you think they sound good in relation to one another.

Misdirection

Misdirection is about putting yourself in the audience shoes. You have to look at the bigger picture and not just one cut. Asking many questions like what is the audience looking at or what are they feeling watching that particular scene? An editor should be able to manipulate the scene and make the audience focuses on a different spot then originally intended. This is what Houdini would do so brilliantly in his edits. He would misdirect you like a magician. This is very helpful when editing because the details are important but what is also important is the whole edit and how that affects the audience.      

DNA Film Code Walter Murch

In “The Blink of an Eye” on page 13 Walter Murch compares editing film to DNA. I saw this in class with our Leverage cuts and Wedding footage because we were all given the same “DNA” to work with but each person created a unique final product. The story that was created in each cut varied because of cut selection, timing, and music selection. I also saw with the Leverage cuts how some cuts created what Walter Murch calls a Frankenstein monster. I created a “Frankenstein monster” with my own Leverage cut because my music selection was better suited for an action movie trailer when the scene that was being depicted was a slower paced dialogue scene. If I had some action sequences to match the intense fast tone of the music I would have had a better chance of creating something that did not look like a hybrid mix. I was trying to make a creature that I did not have the "DNA code" for. I should have stayed within the bounds of the footage I was given and chosen and more appropriate music selection. In digital video production we had control over the “DNA” because we were the ones filming and planning. The storyboard is the blueprint for what the final product should look like. We found ourselves editing and tweaking our storyboard as we went along to better fit the story we were trying to tell. As an editor you don’t always have control over what footage you are given and it is up to you to decided how the story should be told and what information to release to the audience and what time it should be released.

Chevrolet Commercial Kuleshov Effect

I saw this commercial on television and noticed it used a variation of the Kuleshov effect. The commercial shows 2 photos to different focus groups to determine how the same man standing in front of a sedan is viewed in comparison to standing in front of a pick up truck. The man's expression, clothing, stance, lighting and environment remain identical in each photo. The only thing that is altered is the type of vehicle he is standing in front of. The focus groups included a wide range of categories including kids, young single women, rich housewives, men with beards and mature people. From the single change they make judgments about the man based on his vehicle. The man with the truck is seen as being more dependable, rugged, handsome, resourceful, and more likely to have an awesome pet. That is a lot of information to infer about a person without ever having known them. The images and the way it is depicted to the audience can go much deeper than what is being seen. Just from looking at a man standing next to a truck people begin to put together pieces in their imagination of what the story behind the man is. His personality, hobbies, and character are things that the focus groups begin to formulate in their minds. The kuleshov effect can be applied to photographs or film. The subjects environment and objects surrounding it should be taken into consideration when trying to convey a specific message.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was a famous film director and producer. Born on August 13, 1899,  he was born in Leytonstone, England and was the youngest of three children. In the 1910s and the 1920s, Hitchcock worked for the British film industry. He started out as a title designer for the London branch of what later became known as Paramount Pictures. He worked in several positions for many films for producer Michael Balcon and and director Graham Cutts. Those films include Woman to Woman (1923), The White Shadow (1924),  The Passionate Adventure (1924), The Blackguard (1925), and The Prude's Fall (1925). He was the assistant director for The Blackguard, a co-production between Gainsborough studios and Universum Film AG. While working at UFA, Hitchcock was influenced by the German Expressionist filmmakers, in particular F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. Alfred Hitchcock's first American film was Rebecca in 1940. It was set in Hollywood's version of England's West Country. The film was based on a novel by English author Daphne du Maurier. The film starred Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. The 1950s and 60s saw the release of many of Hitchcock's well known films. These films include Dial M for Murder (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). Hitchcock is known for making brief appearances in his films. Hitchcock died at 80 years old in Bel Air California on April 29, 1980.

Geoffrey Quist
Alex Bordino
Non-Linear Editing
Spring 2015

The Importance of Montage in the Baptism Scene of The Godfather

The Godfather, a film that is critically acclaimed throughout the whole world as one of the best films of all time. Throughout the film, there are a tremendous amount of scenes that are so impacting and influential towards the audience. One scene, in particular, goes down as one of the most impacting scenes of all time. This scene is the baptism scene. In the baptism scene, Michael Corleone is attending the baptism of his god son. While this is happening, he ordered his henchman to murder the members of the rival mobs. Throughout the scene, Coppola provides a montage that displays the contradiction of light and darkness by constantly switching from a new born baby being baptized to men killing each other. Providing this switch emphasizes the killings and chaos more than ever. Also, Coppola considers sound when constructing this scene by having the baby cry when the killings start occurring. The montage of scenes emphasize the darkness of the film more than any death prior to it. Coppola's genius work and creativity influenced other directors to create scenes that emphasize light and darkness as well. To conclude, the baptism scene was one of the most impacting scenes of The Godfather and it will continue to create this impact for future film makers.

Cutting a Dialogue Scene

Brianna Bosco

Non- Linear Editing

Blog

April 23, 2015

                                                            Cutting a Dialogue Scene

            Editing a dialogue scene is something that every editor encounters more than any other scene. Many people believe for a good dialogue scene that camera must always be focused on the character talking. But this is not the case; to have a good dialogue scene there must be a flow between the person talking and the person listening. Normally the people shows emotion while listening and if the camera does not show the listener it just feels like the one talking is talking to themselves. The editor has to make the scene tell a story and without showing both or all characters it is not portraying a story. An example of a good flow would be to start on the wide shot, then go to the person talking, and then back to the wide shot. When you are in a classroom and a person is talking you are not focuses on that person the entire time. You are looking around at the other people in the class to see what their reaction is to what they are listening to.

            When an editor is editing there are three primary aesthetic decisions and editor should make: when to use a wide shot, when to use a close up and when to use a reaction shot. When we edited Leverage, we had to make sure to get the right reaction shots to go with what the character was saying. Going back to the wide shot helped by giving the audience watching to gather their thoughts on what they just watched. Editors have to make sure the scene makes sense and make sure the dialogue is not repeated or misplaced.

Editing an Action Movie

In class, we learned a lot about the technique and skills of editing an action sequence in a movie. We were asked, "why is action good in a movie?" My answer is that action is good to include in a movie or a scene because it is intended to keep the audience interested, as well as makes it more exciting. Action can leave a viewer on the edge of their seat, eager to see how the action sequence turns out. Editing action can also mean taking an inanimate object and making them animate.

An action sequence includes conflict, emotions, physical action, and character arc. Some other key points and things to include when you're editing an action scene would be point of view, close ups on actors and objects, attention to screen direction (meaning where are people or objects going, or if they are intersecting each other), and thematic editing. By editing together a montage of seemingly unconnected shots, you can evoke different emotions from the viewer and make an action scene even more interesting.

How To Make A Successful Trailer

To go along with our current project of creating spoof trailers, I found a blog that gives tips on how to make a successful trailer. In it, film maker and trailer editor Ross Evison gives his advice on how to make a trailer that works. Though a trailer will not necessarily make or break your film, it definitely can have a huge impact on the hype, anticipation, word of mouth, and turn out of your movie. Evison explains that one of the biggest mistakes filmmakers make is putting too much footage in their trailers, often because they are so attached to everything they film and, thus, are slightly biased. I can see how this would apply because even in my high school film classes, my teacher would always tell us our videos were too long. She, too, said that because we loved and worked so hard on everything we filmed, the most difficult part was cutting some of it. However, having too much footage can hinder your film more than help it. And this is even more so with trailers because if you show all of the good things in the trailer, no one will want to go see your movie. Thus, the best thing to do is hire a third party to cut your trailer if you can afford to do so. An ideal length for a trailer is ninety-seconds to two minutes, or two minutes and thirty-seconds at most. Evison also stresses that your trailer does not need to be exactly like your film. You can change things in your trailer to even give the movie a slightly different feel if you think it will be more appealing to people. At the end of the day, trailers are simply marketing tools. A musical score can also have a big effect on your trailer; it completely alters the feel of it. Evison suggests trying to find eager musicians looking to get their names out there. Perhaps offer to film their music video for them in compensation; that way you both get something out of it! Pick a storyline and tell it, without introducing a bunch of unnecessary characters or showing too much, and play to your film’s strengths. Above all, Evison gives this very wise advice: “Never forget you’re telling and selling the story. If you’re still having trouble, imagine you’ve made your film and someone asks you what it’s about – listen to how you explain it, did you get it across, was it engaging for the listener, do they want to see it? If so, then that’s your trailer, you just told it to someone, now go cut it.”
http://www.chrisjonesblog.com/2012/02/how-to-edit-a-trailer-for-your-movie…-but-the-guy-who-cuts-trailers-for-movies.html

The Five Types of Documentaries

People have pondered over what makes a documentary a documentary for years. Obviously it is supposed to be unstaged, non-fiction, and an objective account of real life events, but the counterpoint is raised that it is impossible to be truly objective in film because every angle, cut, editing choice, etc. in essence makes the material subjective. Bill Nichols, American film critic and theoretician, came up with the explanation that there are different types of documentaries that use different techniques and serve differing purposes. One type is expository documentaries which have an incorporeal voiceover that either discloses information that the images don’t display or explains things the pictures do show but that are not common knowledge. Observational documentaries, on the contrary, have no voiceovers, interviews, or intertitles. Rather it aims to observe real life events in real time with the filmmaker being as uninvolved (in the events themselves) as possible. In this way, observational documentaries might be closest to what we normally think of for documentaries: a relatively unbiased documentation of real life events as they unfold. This completely juxtaposes with interactive documentaries, which purposely make the presence of the filmmaker known. It focuses around interviews (with the filmmaker as the interviewer) and people’s interactions with him or her on camera. The filmmaker can also coax certain topics and comments from the interviewees by purposely bringing it up in the interviews. Reflexive documentaries focus less on the people or events filmed and more on the filming process/way they are filmed. It is respectable, though, that they are openly showing how manipulated everything that is filmed is; they embrace the subjectivity. The final type of documentary is performative. Performative goes even further in stressing subjectivity by stressing style and appearing similar to a fiction film. Overall, it is clear that documentaries are not ‘one thing’ or ‘one way.’ Though they have common characteristics that make them all documentaries, they can be divided into five categories that each have their own approach and style.  

Montage Editing in Under The Skin

In "Under the Skin" Scarlett Johanson plays a nameless alien who's trying to understand what it truly means to be human. She is an outsider trying to understand why people act the way they do, and what humanity truly is. To convey this, director Jonathan Glazer uses almost exclusively montage editing throughout the film's entirety. The use of montage editing allows us to see the world from our protagonist's point of view, jumping around schitzophrenically from person to person, not staying focused on one thing long enough for it to mean anything or to make a connection. This constant switching from subject to subject causes the viewer to feel as disjointed and confused by the images and events as the protagonist does. Just by the use of montage editing, the director has strengthened the connection between the viewer and protagonist in such a way that wouldn't be possible by other means.

Sound

There are many different types of sounds in films. There is dialogue, narration, abiemence/room tone, effects, non-diegetic ambience, and music. There is diegetic and mimetic sound. Diegetic sound is visible and present on screen. Such examples are voices of the characters and sounds made by objects that are present. Diegetic is is also referred to as actual sound. Diegesis is storytelling. Mimesis is showing. Film is not mimetic. Cinematic element can be diegetic or extradiegetic, which is commonly referred to as non-diegetic. Diegetic elements exist for the purpose of the audience and for the characters. In film, non-diegetic elements exist solely for the audience. Images and sounds in films exist to affect the audience. When it comes to editing with sound, there are three different rules. The first rule is to make sure you have room tone and use it. The second rule is to keep dialogue, effects and music separate. The final rule is to mix the audio levels so everything sounds good in relation to each other and the output decibel level is between -12 and -4 dB.