NARRATIVE SCENE EDITING
WITH AVID MEDIA COMPOSER
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
01 GETTING ORGANIZED
Evaluating
the major goals of the project
Editing a
narrative film is an exciting and worthwhile adventure, full of creative judgments
and structural decisions. As you edit you'll have the opportunity to assess the
perfect angle of the perfect take for every line of your film, making sure your
story is told in the way that best meets the film's vision and intent. You'll
be able to perfectly control the timing and pacing of your shots, which will in
turn affect the pacing of your scenes and ultimately the flow of your film, and
you'll be able to combine different editing styles to give your film just the
right flavor.
In this project,
which is a film called Castles, we'll explore many of
these concepts, as we build scenes to tell the story of a frustrated architect
down on his luck. If you watched the previous movie, then you saw the film in
its completed state. While we won't be able to edit every scene, we'll be able
to focus on scene construction for three different types of scenes. A dialogue
scene, a montage scene, and a flashback scene, each of these different scenes
combines different editing techniques, and various stylistic considerations to
make the best possible film.
Now in order
to start out right, we'll first get acquainted with the structure and
organization of our project. Then we'll go over some important editing
conventions and rules so that we can get grounded in traditional narrative
editing techniques so that we can both follow the rules and break them. Then
we'll attack each of the three scenes in detail, first the dialogue scene, then
the montage scene, and finally, the flashback scene. As I said earlier, each of
these scenes will require different considerations and stylistic techniques, so
we'll have a lot to keep track of in the construction of our narrative.
And finally,
we'll take a step back from scene construction to determine how it fits in the
larger art of editing an entire narrative film.
Good project organization is an important part of knowing
exactly what material you have so that
you can make the best decisions for each shot in your film. This will allow
you to construct the most engaging scenes possible one
shot at a time. The last thing you want to have
happen is to lose your creative energy, because you are spending all your time looking for the perfect shot.
Now, fortunately for us, our project is already largely
organized, so we won't be going through all the
introductory steps in setting everything up. If
you are lucky enough to have an assistant editor, chances are you'll have
everything set up for you too.
Either way, however,
it's important to know where everything is so we can start the creative process
out well. So,
here are our exercise files, and inside of there, all of the chapters, and all
of the various things we'll need to complete the
exercises throughout this course. I am going to
close that up, because I want to take a look at the Project Assets. As you can see, there are ten scenes in this film, and some
B-roll. We are going to be focusing on Scenes 2,
the dialogue scene, Scene 3, the montage scene, and Scene 4, the flashback scene.
For your convenience,
the important footage from these key scenes has been duplicated into this group of folders
here. We've also got a Bin called Production
Audio, which has additional audio elements like, off
screen camera, voice over, and room tone. Finally,
we've got a folder called Scripts, and inside here you can see it's got several
scripts from some of the scenes that we're editing.
All of the master clips have been synced to the script
by a very cool process called ScriptSync, which maps the spoken word to the written word. We'll learn more about the usefulness of digital scripts in
the next movie.
Okay, so we've got a
relatively good idea where everything lives in our project. With this knowledge, plus a
few additional tips we'll learn, we're almost on our way to starting the creative process of scene construction. Again, we are going to just basically keep most of this shut
and work within the exercise files for the
duration of this course.
The process of Narrative Editing is greatly enhanced by the
use of digital scripts. This is for several reasons. One, you can search for any shot that you want, because each
line of dialogue is synchronized to the script.
And two, you can very quickly and efficiently analyze the best performance
of a given line or set of lines. Without a digital script you would have to manually load one
take after another to find the best material,
which is obviously a little slower. So let's see here,
we'll take Scene 2 and, as you can see, all of the clips have been mapped appropriately to the lines they cover.
Now already this is super useful because we can immediately find any line that
we want. However,
the real kicker with Narrative Editing is the ability to very quickly review
lines in succession to analyze the best
performance. Now first of all, if you'd like to
learn the proper workflow for how to format, import, and synchronize a digital script you can check out that workflow in detail in
my lynda.com course Documentary Editing with Avid
Media Composer. The process is the same in
setting everything up, whether you are working in Documentary or Narrative.
However, the actually
use of digital scripts is quite a bit different for narrative films, so I thought I'd show you all
about that now. All right, so you can see here
that the shots are mapped with these script marks, and if I want to just find this line of dialogue, I would just
double-click right here on the script mark, and
he is going to deliver his line, I'll press Play. (Mr. Dalton: So, how's the coffee?) Okay, so great. However, if I want to basically review every
single time that he says this line to see which
performance is the strongest then I am just going to lasso all of the script
marks that cover this line, and now I am going to press
Play again.
So
I'll press Spacebar, and we'll go from one performance to the next, both when Mr. Leavitt is on screen and
then also when he is off screen when we are looking at Joseph. Okay, we'll press Play.
(Mr. Dalton: So, how's the coffee? How's the coffee? So,
how's the coffee? So, how's the coffee? How's the coffee?) All right, so as you can see, this is a tremendous Timesaver.
We are able to see every single time that line is
said so we can make the best decision possible.
Now it doesn't just
have to be for one line. If I want to see the exchange between Mr. Leavitt and Joseph, I
would just lasso both of those. Okay, so you can
see that we are covering basically this expanse of the script, and I do the same exact thing. So
just lasso the number of script marks that you want to have included, and I am
going to press Spacebar to play, and we'll go
through both of those lines together. (Mr.
Dalton: So, how's the coffee?) Joseph: It's cold. (Mr. Dalton: How's the coffee?) (Joseph: It's cold.) (Mr. Dalton: So, how's the coffee?) (Joseph: It's cold.)
(Mr. Dalton: How's the coffee?) (Joseph: It's cold.)
All right, so you get the idea, this is a great way to
instantly zero in on the part you are editing and
figure out which performance best tells your story.
This is an important
part of staying effective in the creative process during scene construction.
02 KNOWING AND UNDERSTANDING
YOUR FOOTAGE
There are several important conceptual things to understand
before starting to edit our first scene. The
first thing I would like to address is scene coverage, which explained simply,
is the practice of covering a scene multiple times
from multiple angles. This results in the maximum
amount of seamless editing possibilities because of the complete overlapping coverage of the same exact action. You can literally piece together these moments in time, or
shots, from each of the camera angles to reconstruct reality. Now scene coverage allows us as editors to have the most
possible options when constructing our narrative.
Now these building
blocks, or shots, not only have a different look, but
most come with an implication, emotion, or intention. You can truly use shots as items in the recipe of film
language. Let's take a look at some common camera
angles. Now, long shots typically mean that the
editor wants to show the subject in its environment, either to show the relationship to the surrounding space or in
a relationship to other subjects in the frame. So
in general our long shots are generally are tools to give physical or emotional
context.
Medium shots are, for
lack of a better word, normal. Most shots in films are typically medium shots of one type or
another as they show the subject as the prominent
part of the video frame, but they also give a basic context for space and
environment. Obviously, the closer you punch in,
the more emotional impact the subject makes and the less the surrounding environment means. Close-up shots show the subject as the dominant part of the
frame. We use close-ups when we want to focus on
a subject either physically or emotionally.
Coming in that close
on the subject means that your focus shifts away from any inclusion of the environment, and you're
often zeroing in to hide in some type of emotional intensity. In general, editors start by editing a scene in some type of
long shot to give the scene context. Then punch
in closer to medium shots and then use close-ups when necessary. However, these rules can always be amended to fit the specific
scene. There are also a couple of other shots I
want to talk to you about. Point-of-view shots
give the viewer an intimate seat in the film, since you're basically being
shown what it's like through the character's eyes.
Point-of-view shots
are most often used me when you want to deeply connect the audience to the character, usually
during points of searching and discovery within the narrative. Cutaway shots give the viewer important information about the
relationship between the subject and some other
thing, or person, in a scene. If the editor
chooses to cutaway to another shot you can better believe it represents something significant to the scene. Okay, so that's a basic rundown of the intention and emotional
impact of shot composition. Now each of these
shots can be stationary, or they can have movement.
Lens and camera
movement typically promise the viewer that they will get a new piece of information or a new
understanding by the end of the movement. Otherwise,
it's an unmotivated move and can cause confusion. You as the editor must make the decision about whether
reconstituting the frame by way of lens or camera
movement is a better way to tell the story than by
simply cutting from one shot to another. Let's
take a look at some lens and camera movements that we will be exploring in this
course. Zooming is increasing or decreasing the
focal length of the camera lens which enlarges or
decreases the closeness of the image.
A focus shift is when
you adjust the focus from one focal plane to another. A pan is a side
to side motion of a scene from a fixed point and a tilt is an up and
down motion of a scene from a fixed point. This is a
tilt. And a crane shot is when the camera is
lifted and moves through space. Now there are
countless more types of shot analyses that we could do involving framing,
shot angle, focal depth, and so on.
And well we won't have
an opportunity to go through them all. Hopefully, this short explanation has made you realize that it
isn't just what looks good, instead we has editors use these visual cues as parts of the recipe for designing an effective
and emotionally appropriate scene.
Knowing the emotional indicators for shot composition is
important. However, it's also useful to be
aware of some basic editing rules, not only so we can follow them while editing conventional scenes, but also so we can
break them when we want to create a particular
feeling. When discussing these rules, we'll
primarily be talking about maintaining continuity. Continuity editing is the type of editing that allows editors
to reconstruct reality from all of the various
shots gathered during the coverage shooting process. Let's take a look. There are several elements within continuity editing that are
important to consider.
Continuity of mise-en-scene is the French phrase that means put on stage. In the film world, it simply
means that when you edit two shots together, you need to be mindful of shared shot content. This just means that when you're cutting from a long shot to a
medium shot, for example, you'll need to make
sure that the subject's location and positions are similar enough to look like it's from the same moment. You'll also need to make sure that all costumes, props, and
other objects are the same, and you need to make
sure to match continuity of lighting and continuity of sound.
Maintaining continuity
of performance is also important. You need to make sure that you're appropriately matching
performance, pacing, and emotional range. Often,
actors can change the way in which they deliver lines, so you want to make sure
that the performance matches as you cut from the medium
shot to the close up, for example. Additionally,
you need to be aware that the spectrum of the human voice is very wide, and it can sometimes be tricky maintaining consistency from
shot to shot and day to day. Continuity of spatial orientation, or the 180
degree rule, means you also need to be aware of how objects are oriented in the frame from shot to shot.
This simply means that
when you're editing shots together, you need to make sure that the camera that recorded the
scene is on one side of the axis of action. This
means that if a subject is facing left or right in the long shot, you can't
suddenly switch to a shot of him facing right to left as it confuses the viewer. The one exception to this is if you cut to a shot of the scene
along the axis of action first. Then you can
viably cut to a shot on either side of the 180 degree
line. But bottom line, you pretty much want to
orient your subjects all from one side. If you
switch back and forth, it becomes unsettling.
The 20 millimeter 30
degree rule means that when you cut from one shot to another, you need to vary the two shots by
a focal length of at least 20 millimeters and 30 degrees. Now, this can sound confusing, but basically, this just means
that you need to cut between shots that are
different enough in size and angle. That will
hide the edit adequately enough to cut between the shots. This means you can't cut between shots that are too similar,
like between two medium shots. It will feel like
a jump cut and will be jarring. Finally, you want
to make sure to cut on action as much as possible.
All this means is that
you often want to begin a certain action in one shot, and then allow the subject to finish the
action in the following shot. This too is a
terrific technique to make the edit as invisible as possible. If you instead cut when the subject is perfectly still, the
edit is more detectable. So, as you can see,
there's a lot to consider. Now, if the director,
actors, and production team did their jobs absolutely perfectly, you wouldn't have to worry much about this stuff at all.
However, it's nearly
impossible for each of these elements to be perfectly the same each and every take for each and
every camera angle. So you as the editor just
need to be acutely aware of the stuff while you're editing so that you can recreate the scene as best as possible. And of course, as I said earlier, these rules are great to
know so that you can either follow the rules to
create a viable reality or break the rules when you need to.
03 EDITING A DIALOGUE SCENE
Okay, so now we're equipped with the tools and concepts to
begin laying down an initial assembly of our scene. Let's take a look at our script and get acquainted with the
scene so that we can begin making the best choice
as possible. Again, this is a film about a
frustrated architect, Joseph, who is under a hard deadline from his boss Mr.
Leavitt. The first scene we'll be editing is the
introductory dialogue scene between these two men where Leavitt asks Joseph to deliver a big plan by the end of the day.
If he doesn't, he will lose his job. So, in the beginning of this scene, there's an emotional
distance and tension between these characters.
Once the conversation
begins, Mr. Leavitt is clearly the emotionally dominant character. Visually, we need to see him
as stronger than Joseph. We then need to show
that Joseph becomes visually agitated, and we need to fuel his motivation
for his controlled frustration, and then we also need to
show the equally motivated aggression delivered
in response by Mr. Leavitt. So, if I were to map
out a very general order for this scene, here's what I might do. I'll start with a tilt up from Joseph's drafting table to
Leavitt coming down the hall.
Mr. Leavitt's dark
form should set the stage well here.
Then I might cut to a wide shot to emphasize the
distance between the men both physically and emotionally. Then I think I'll cut to a long shot of Mr. Leavitt and then to one of Joseph, something to show their presence in
the space but not emphasize it. They won't be
speaking here, and Joseph won't even be looking at Mr. Leavitt. Now, this deliberately edited silence should help build the
tension. This is one creative strategy, because
even though there doesn't exist much actual time here,
we're going to create this time through the editing process.
So then, I'll cut back
to Mr. Leavitt as he finally delivers the first line of "so, how's the
coffee?" And then we can cut back to Joseph in a close-up as he looked at Mr. Leavitt
and mutters "cold." So, you can go on
like this for an entire scene, again just generally forming the sense of how to map out the shots. But
to be honest, you don't truly know what shots to use until you analyze the
performance for each take and each line. And that's what we'll do is we build this scene line by line
to construct the best possible narrative that
satisfies the vision and goals of the scene.
Now that we have a plan of attack, let's get started with
laying down the first shots of the basic assembly. Now just a reminder, one of the most important parts of the
preparatory process is screening your footage
very carefully. You should take great care in
doing this, making sure to take good notes. This
will give you a good sense of the direction you should take in laying out your
first shots. So, as we said in the last movie,
we'll start out with an over the shoulder shot of Mr. Leavitt's looming form coming toward Joseph from down the hall. Then we'll cut back to show the physical and emotional
distance between the men, and then we'll draw out
the tension by first cutting to a shot of Mr.
Leavitt, and then to Joseph who can't even look at his boss.
Okay, so let's go
ahead and open up the _Scene 2 shots bin. I've also got Scene 2 assembly. This is where I have just the blank sequence that we're going
to be editing. I'll go ahead and open this into a
tabbed view by dragging up, and we'll have easy access to both of those.
And then we have our shots here. You can see the descriptions appended to the shot names there.
And if you want to take a visual look of what these look
like, you can switch to Frame view and get a
pretty good idea of the composition of these shots. So, we're going to start out with this tilt up.
This is starting out
looking over Joseph's shoulder, and then up to Leavitt. And it looks like actually
they do two tries here. So, let's start with the
second try, like so. And I'm just going to play
it and mark an in and an out on the fly where I feel this shot should begin and end. And we can tweak that later if we
want to. (Mr. Leavitt: So.) All right, so as you can see, I marked my out point just
before he stopped walking.
And the reason for
that is that I think I'd like to match on action in this wider shot as he finishes walking up to
Joseph. So, I have here a shot that lasts about
almost 9 seconds. So I want to edit that in.
Let's just go ahead and make sure to load our blank
sequence here, and let's press V to Splice. I'm
just going to watch the very end of this to make sure that I like the way this
shot ends. (video
playing) Okay, so he still has momentum going
forward, I think that will help in matching to the next cut.
So let's go ahead and
go to this shot here. And I'm just going to, again, play it and mark an in and an
out on the fly where I feel it should begin and
end. (Mr. Leavitt: How's the coffee?) I'm going to go backwards a little bit. (video
playing) Okay, and let's go ahead and try editing
that in. I'll press V to Splice. I am just going to
go over this and see how I like it. Again, we can
tweak it later if we need to. (video playing) All right, and we actually have to cut away at this point
because he starts speaking.
And again, our goal
here is to really draw out the tension really, kind of take a look at these nonverbal cues on
each of the men. So next, we'll go ahead and go
back to this shot. We don't want to go to the
medium shot quite yet, because that will be our cue to actually elevate the tension a little bit later on. So, let's load the
long shot back up. I'm going to go ahead and play
through here, again marking an in and an out on the fly here. I'll go ahead and clear my in and out points to avoid
confusion, and we'll go ahead and play.
(Mr. Leavitt: So,
how's the...) All right, and then I think we've got to go back to Joseph,
and I think we'll save our close-up for when the
tension escalates. So, let's stick to a medium shot. I think both of these are really similar. Let's go ahead and
take a look here. We're just looking for some
visual indication that he has not yet looked up to his boss, so somewhere around here. I'm
going to play and mark an in and an out on the fly.
(Mr. Leavitt: So,
how's the coffee?) All right, let's go ahead and splice that in. And what I'd like to do is actually just watch this. It's probably going to need a little bit of tweaking as far as
timing and pacing is concerned. But I want to
take a look and see if I like what's on the screen in general. Okay, let's take a look. (video
playing) So yeah, we'll need to do a little bit
of tweaking regarding the timing and pacing of these
shots, but I do like how we are drawing this out.
So, as you can see,
we're using the editing process to really create this visual tension between these two characters.
Now, this is something we can do throughout the film,
finding moments within scenes that deserve this
type of treatment, and really playing to the various emotions that exist
within the script and the performances.
Making decisions about the character's nonverbal language is
important, but so is working with the character's words. Analyzing line delivery is a crucial part of the editing
process, and that's what we're going to do now in
continuing to lay down our basic assembly. So, I
have here Scene 2 assembly begin, and this is just basically where we left off.
We are nonverbally building tension, like so. Now, we're going to start in on their conversation. So let's go ahead and open up the script. And again, if you're not working with the script, then you'll
just do all of this manually, loading in one take
after another.
But I do feel it's
important to check out the delivery of each of these lines from each of the
camera angles. So, we're going to start with Mr. Leavitt's first line,
"So, how's the coffee?" And we're just going to lasso across all of these script marks. And
then we'll just press Play, and watch all of these shots taking into account
both shot composition and performance. (Mr. Leavitt: So, how's the coffee? How's the coffee? So,
how's the coffee? So, how's the coffee? So, how's the coffee?) Okay, and I'll press Spacebar again to stop. So I want to be
on Mr. Leavitt during this line.
So we actually only
have two options, the long shot and the medium shot. I think I am ready to punch in
on the medium shot to sort of give this emphasis. Let's go ahead and double-click on the script mark. So I'm going to go ahead and just rock back with J and then go
forward and mark an in and an out on the fly.
(Mr. Leavitt: How's the coffee?) So, I think I'm going to edit that in. I'll press V to splice.
I'm just going to go ahead and check this out, making
sure that it looks okay with the previous shots.
Again, we'll tweak it
later if we need to, but just generally, I want to make sure that this medium shot looks good.
(Mr. Leavitt: How's the coffee?) I think it's fine. So, let's go back to the script and get
Joseph's line here, "cold". Again,
we're going to go ahead and lasso all of the script marks, and pay attention to
shot composition and performance. I'll press Spacebar.
(Joseph: Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. It's cold. Cold.)
All right so, there are a lot of good options here.
While I really like, the close-up, here, I don't
think I'm quite ready to punch in that close yet.
So, let's take a
medium shot. I'm going to go ahead and just lasso just these two lines and
see if there's much difference between them. (Joseph:
Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold.) So, not much difference,
but I think I'll go ahead and take this first one. And again I'm going to rock back with J to go backwards, and
then mark an in and an out on the fly, including
some pause before and after. (Joseph: It's cold.)
So again, we'll tighten that up later.
But I want to include
just a little bit of extra frames on either side. I'm going to press V to
splice. And let's go ahead and go to the next
line before we look at everything in succession. So,
I'll go ahead and lasso and take a look at Mr. Leavitt's line, "did you
finish it"? (Mr. Leavitt: Did you finish it?
Did you finish it? Did you finish it? Did you finish it? Did you finish it? Did
you finish it?) All right, so again, I think I'm
going to stay in on the medium shot here.
I think it's the
strongest performance, and we want to make sure that Mr. Leavitt is on screen as he delivers
it. So again, I'm going to go ahead and
double-click the script mark. I'm going to rock
back, include a little bit of pause before and after just like we did before.
(Mr. Leavitt: Did you finish it?) Okay, and I'll press V to splice, and let's go back to our
sequence here. We're definitely going to need to
tighten this up. I know that already. But again, I'm just looking to see if I like what's on screen,
and we'll fix the timing and pacing a little bit
later.
So, I'm going to go
ahead and play through these three shots. (Mr. Leavitt: So, how's the coffee?) (Joseph:
It's cold.) (Mr. Leavitt: Did you finish it?)
So, I am pleased with that, I think medium shot to
medium shot to medium shot for this part in the
scene is good. And then, we'll get in and out on
some close-ups a little bit later when the agitation increases. But this is basically how we're going to continue. We're going to make decisions line by line laying in each
shot. Again, we're not paying too much attention
to the pacing of the scene quite yet, but don't
worry, that's coming up very soon.
For now, we just need
to make important decisions about performance, and get everything laid in appropriately to create a
good-looking basic assembly.
Once you've laid down your basic assembly, there will no
doubt be many things you need to change about it. You'll need to swap shots, add cutaways and reaction shots,
and trim the shots to give the scene the proper
pacing. We'll learn how to do each of these
techniques in the next three movies, and we'll start off here by talking about replacing shots. So in this bin
here, I have my basic assembly. And as you can
see, everything is straight cuts, we've just laid one
shot in right after another, and that's fine. But
first of all, I have a few notes. There are a
couple of shots I'd like to replace.
First of all, I'd like
to replace this shot here where we have this long shot from the side, and I'd like to replace
it with a medium shot. So I need to punch in
closer. I'm going to play this so that you can
kind of see what I mean. (Joseph: That's it, 6
p.m., huh? And if I'm a risky choice, then don't
use me. We all know what happens when risky
choices are made. The company's
in free-fall, and you want to take risk again?) So,
I think you'll agree that cutting to a medium shot here and then into a
close-up here is probably the best decision.
Let's go ahead and open up our script.
And that line is right
here, it's kind of in the middle of this line. So, here is our medium shot.
Let's go ahead and just take a look at the performance
in this general part of the script. So, I'm going
to go ahead and press Spacebar to play, and check out these two performances.
(Joseph: That's it, 6 p.m., huh? And if I'm a risky choice, then don't use me. We all know what risky decisions lead to. That's it, 6 p.m.,
huh? And if I'm such a risk, don't use me.)
I think I like the more aggressive take right here, this
one.
I'm going to go ahead
and just double-click the script mark and load it up. I'm going to clear my in and
out points. I want to show you how to do a
replace edit, which is a really nice way to swap one shot for another. So, I'm just going to play and then just pause my playhead right over the part where he starts to say "and if I'm a risky choice." (Joseph: That's it, 6 p.m., huh?) So, we're not marking in and out, I'm just putting the playhead here. I'm going to
do the same thing in my sequence, probably around this marker.
But let's go ahead and
make sure. (Joseph:
And if I'm a risky choice,) So, we have the playhead here, we have the playhead
here. Rather than marking in and out, we can very
quickly do a replace edit by opening up this Fast
menu here, going to Replace Edit. And basically,
it's just going to swap the shots, as you can see, I now have my medium shot.
Let's go ahead and play and make sure everything looks
good. (Joseph: And if I'm such a risk, don't use
me. We all know what risk gets us.
The company's in
free-fall, and you...) I think that we just need a little bit of space let out on
this shot. I can go ahead and enter Trim mode.
And this is going to be an A side trim, so I'm going to
roll forward. And then I'll just stop the trim
when I think the shot should end. Okay, I think
that's a little bit of space that we need. Let's
go ahead and play and just make sure that looks good. (Joseph: ...know what risk gets us. The company's
in free-fall,) So, I think that is pretty good.
Again, we'll tweak a
little bit later when we refine, but for now I think that I like this medium shot much better
than that long shot. I have another suggestion
for a change right here. Let's go ahead and see
what this is. Okay, so this one is just a little
bit different. We start in the long shot like we
have now, and then cut to the medium shot for the rest of it. So, for this one, I am going to go ahead and check it out.
Let's play it and make sure that that's exactly what we
want. (Mr. Dalton: My creativity has nothing to
do with this. I did my time.
My job now is to wear
this suit, please clients, and make sure you do your job, nothing more, nothing
less, understand?) So, for this one, instead of doing a replace edit because we
do want to keep this part here, I'm going to set
an in, and an out around the area that I would like to swap out. So, we're just kind of doing a partial shot here. Let's go ahead and get that part of the medium shot in the
script. So, it's about right here. I've done my
time.
So, it's actually
going to load it at the beginning of this line. So I have to go forward a
little bit. So, I'll just double-click here to
load it up, and let's take a look. (Mr. Dalton:
My creativity has nothing to do with this. I did...) He actually goes straight into that line. So I am going to
have to be really careful here. I'm going to go
back and forth and try to get it exactly perfect. (video playing) All right, I am marking an in, I want to see if I like that.
(Mr. Dalton: I did my time.) All right, I think that's pretty good. We don't need to mark
an out here.
I'm just going to
clear my out by pressing F. So, we're all set up for a three-point edit here. We've got our in, and we've got our in and out here. Let's go ahead and press B to overwrite. And the timing might
not be okay here. So, let's just take a look and make
sure that we like it. (Mr. Dalton: My creativity
has nothing to do with this. I did my time. My
job now is to wear this suit, please clients, and make sure you do your job,
nothing more, nothing less, understand? Six p.m.,
six p.m.) So, he actually delivered his lines a
little bit faster in the medium shot, so we just have
a little bit to cut out.
I'm going to enter
Trim mode here, and this is going to be an A side trim. I'm going to go ahead and roll
back and cut out that last part of the line. (video playing) And, I think
this is okay. Again, when we go through the
refining process, we can get this perfect. But
for right now, I just want to make sure the lines are good. (Mr. Dalton: ...nothing less, understand? Six p.m.) So, as you can see, it's really quite easy to swap shots.
Occasionally,
the timing of the performances calls for some trimming after the edit, which is
totally fine. As long as you get the right shots laid in, you'll be able to
do any necessary tweaking later in the process.
Once you're happy with the shots you've laid down for your
basic assembly, you may want to add more
visual information in the form of cutaways or reaction shots. Doing this will allow us to visually show the most compelling shots
at the right moments for our scene. Bottom
line, you should never feel limited to show just the image for the person who
is talking. Many times, the more interesting
thing to look at is the shot of the person listening rather than the person talking. Let's take a look. So, I'm going to load up the sequence here. That's what we've
got so far.
As you can see, I've
got a few more markers in this sequence, which are telling me where I'd like to add some cutaway
and reaction shots. So let's take a look at this one here. I have this note saying I want to show Mr. Leavitt turning
back around. Let's just play and get a context
for what we're looking at. (Joseph: That's it, 6
p.m., huh? And if I'm a risky choice, then don't
use me. We all know what risky decisions lead to.
The company's in free-fall,) So, Mr. Leavitt
walks away, and we really never see him turn back around.
So, this is a good
spot for that to happen. So fortunately, we can use our script to do this as well.
Let's go ahead and find that line when he is saying
don't use me right here. We want to focus on Mr.
Leavitt. So here is the long shot and here is the
medium shot. I'm going to go ahead and just lasso
these two groups of script marks and then I'm going to play them and see which one I want to use for him turning
back around. Again, if you don't have a script,
you would just load these texts manually and check it out that way. So I'll go ahead and press Play.
(Joseph: That's it, 6
p.m., huh? And
if I'm a risky choice, then don't use me. We all
know what risky decisions lead to. That's it, 6 p.m., huh? And if I'm a risky choice, don't use me. We all know what
risky decisions lead to.) And just so you know, I
switched to the other take ahead of time. I didn't
wait for the entire line to be said simply by pressing Tab. So, if you just want to go from one take to the next without
waiting for it to go all the way through the
lines, press Tab, and that's how that happens.
Okay, so I preferred
the medium shot. We got a little bit more detail on his face as he was reacting
to what Joseph was saying. So, I'm going to go
ahead and just load this medium shot into the source monitor, and get exactly
that moment. So, it's about right there, right
before the turnaround is where I want that to happen. So I'm going to mark an in and then I'm going to go to my
sequence. I'm just going to mark an in and an out
right around that area.
You can see here that
I have a medium shot of Joseph, and then I punch into a close-up rather than kind of have this
in the middle so that it goes medium shot of Joseph, medium shot of Leavitt back to the medium shot of Joseph and then to
the close-up. I think I will just put the medium
shot of Leavitt right here so that I don't have too many shots in succession. So,
let's go ahead and just mark an in and an out right here. You'll notice that I have just the video track selected.
So, this is going to be a video only edit. We don't want the audio from here coming in, and I'm simply
going to overwrite, press B.
Let's take a look and
see if we need to tweak this or if it looks good. I'll go ahead and play this
whole line. (Joseph: And if I'm a risky choice,
then don't use me. We all know what risky
decisions lead to. The company's
in free-fall, and you want to take risk again?) I
think it works pretty well. He is definitely responding to him. We definitely get some emotion off of his face here, and then
we punch into Joseph for the close-up. Again,
we'll probably tweak the timing just a little bit later. But I do like the way this plays out. All right.
I have another
suggestion for a reaction shot here.
It says Show reaction from Joseph, so we have Mr.
Leavitt on screen for a while here. Let's go
ahead and take a look and see what we're dealing with. (Mr. Leavitt: ...nothing to do with this. I did my time.
My job now is to wear this suit, please clients, and
make sure you do your job, nothing more, nothing less, understand?) We need to kind of look back to a forlorn expression from
Joseph right in the middle here.
This is long enough
that we can include it right here and then cut back to Leavitt just fine. So, let's get that part in the
script, and it's about right here, "my job is to wear this suit".
That might be a good place to see Joseph's expression.
So, we want to make sure that it's either in the medium
shot or the close-up. Let's just lasso those.
Here you go. And go ahead and press Play and see
what we've got here. (Mr. Leavitt: My creativity
has nothing to do with this. I did my time. My job now is to wear...
My creativity has
nothing to do with this. I did my time. My job now is to wear... My creativity has nothing to
do with this. I did my time. My job now is to wear...) Well, Joseph really doesn't have any type of expression on his
face in most of those shots. Rather than cut back
to him just staring at him, I'd like to find something a little bit more
interesting.
So fortunately, one of
the freedoms of including reaction shots is that you don't need to show that exact moment in time, you
can find any moment in time. I think I do want to
use the close-up. So, I'm going to go ahead and
double-click that script mark. I'm just going to
go through here, and see when might be a better spot, like him looking up like
that. He looks pretty sad there, and he is
talking, obviously, we can't use that. This is
where he has that very stoic expression that might be okay, but I don't think I
really want to use it there for the cutaway.
So, I think I'm going
to use this part right here where he is just really having a hard time looking at him, and we'll
just pretend that that's what's happening at that moment when he is saying, "my job is to wear this suit".
So I'm going to go ahead and mark my in there. I'm going
to clear my out. I'm going to press F. Let's go
ahead and mark an in and an out in the timeline. Okay,
we'll go ahead and play. (Mr. Leavitt: ...is to
wear this suit, please clients, and make sure you do your job...) So, I marked an in and an out there.
I think that's a good
place to have that right after he says "to wear
this suit". Let's go ahead and overwrite. So, I'll press B, and let's take
a look. (Mr. Leavitt: ...nothing to do with this.
I did my time. My job now is to wear this suit,
please clients, and make sure you do your job...) Let's just tweak this just a little bit. We want to maybe move it over to the left a little bit and
then show a slightly different part like when he
first looks up. So we're going to do a little bit
of slipping and sliding here.
I'm going to lasso
from right to left, and I'm entered Slip mode. This allows me to change the
shot content, but not its position or duration. So,
I'm just going to drag to the left. And if you
take a look at the second monitor, we just want to time it so that the first
few frames of this shot are when he looks up. So again, we're changing the shot content by about 42 frames.
I am going to go ahead and play and make sure I like
that portion. (Mr. Leavitt: ...now is to wear
this suit, please clients, and make sure you do your job...) All right. So I think that is stronger.
We are getting a
better part of his shot to come sooner. Now, we're going to go ahead and just slide it
over a few frames so that it comes at a better spot. I'm going to quickly switch to slide trim. Just right-click while you're in Slip or while you're in any
type of trim, I'm going to do Slide, and again I
can just slide this over just a little bit, and I'm going to press Play and see if I like that. (Mr.
Leavitt: My job now is to wear this suit, please clients, and make sure you
do...) I think that's almost perfect.
Let's go ahead and
just nudge it a few frames to the right so that it coincides with that line
just perfectly. Again, we changed it by 18 frames, but I'm going to go ahead
and just nudge this over maybe 3 frames, and I
think this will be good. (Mr. Leavitt: My job now
is to wear this suit, please clients, and make sure you do your job...) All right. I think that looks really good. So, as you can see, you don't even need the reaction shot to
be anywhere near the true script location for it
to work. If you need
someone reacting a certain way and they don't actually react that way, then
you can create the reality in which they do.
I hope this
demonstrates that the art of editing goes far beyond just assembling shots.
Every time I teach in editing class, I tell my students that
trimming is the most important part of editing. Why? Well, anyone can learn basic skills of laying the shots in
a timeline, but the true art of editing comes
with an editor breathe his life into a scene. How you do this? Well, first you need to commit to watching, really watching
their scene, figure out where it lags, where it
zips by too quickly, and where it seems to be just right. Now you're not only looking, but you're also experiencing
things on a subconscious level. Your heart rate,
your rate of blinking, your entire system physically responds to the way
you experience your scene.
Watch the scene enough
to be in tune with these physical, emotional, and psychological responses, because sometimes
you can't explain why a shot should just end sooner except that it just should.
All right, so I have our bin here that contains our
sequence of far. And it's almost 2 minutes long.
So we won't have the opportunity to refine the entire
thing, but I want to take a look at this general
area right here. Okay, so we've our introductory
tilt up here. I want to start playing about right here. (Mr. Dalton: How's the coffee?) (Joseph: It's cold.) (Mr. Dalton: Did you finish it? You
know, I'm taking a big risk putting you on this Columbia project.
Firm could be on the
line here. Six p.m. tonight, simple deadline, meet it.) All right, so let's go ahead
and zoom in here. We want to attack this one
transition at time. So we want to ask ourselves
should the shot end sooner or later? Which side
of the shot, the A side which is the left side, or the B side which the right
side, should be affected and so on and so forth? So I'm
just going to lasso this edit. And let's go ahead
and play a loop and see what we think.
(video
playing) Okay,
you know what, this looks pretty good. I think
the forward momentum from this shot works really well going into the shot.
I'm going ahead and play again, so you can see that it
really does match quite well. So I don't think
I'm going to make any change there. Let's go
ahead and go to the next edit and see what we think here. (video playing) This is where I think things are zipping by just a little bit
too quickly. We're really not getting that sense
of tension. The shots are just too fast.
So let's go ahead and
slow them down and draw it out just a little bit more. All right, so let's first take
a look at the tail of this shot, so the end of our long shot. I'm going to go ahead and click on the A side monitor. And then I'm just going to tease this out just slightly, right
before he says his line. So we'll see how many
frames we get out of this. I'm going to hold down
K and then go forward with L so that I can go in slow motion. (video playing) All right, so he says his line there. I'm going to go back with J so we get rid of that.
All right, so I got
about 8 frames out of it. So let's go ahead and play and see if that's okay. (video playing) So that's good. Let's go ahead and take a look at our B side. So again I'm going to
use J, K, L and see what sort of give we have at the head of this shot. All right, so actually not any at all, he's still walking
right there. We want him to be planted, because
he's planted here. So that wouldn't match.
I'm going to just go forward and make sure that he is
planted here.
So I think we're
probably going to have to add some frames to the tail of this shot, which is
right here. So let's go ahead to the next edit, and I'm going to see how
much I can let out here. I'm going to go forward
with a J, K, L holding down K to go in slow motion.
(video playing) Okay, so that's interesting. He's putting his hands in the
pocket. I think that really contributes to the
mood we are after. We let it out by 65 frames, so
quite a bit over 2 seconds.
I'm going to go ahead
and play the whole thing and see if it's now too long or if we like it. (video
playing) All right, so a couple of things.
So I think after he put his hands in his pockets, let's
go ahead and just add a couple more frames. I
think I cut away too quickly there. So his shoulders kind of settled there, and it's just before
he's about to start talking. And then I'm
going to go back to this edit here, and I'm actually going to take away some of the shots from the head of this.
And that's because you
know I kind of want him to get to that gesture of putting his hands in his pockets a little
bit sooner, and because he added so many frames I think this is going to work. So I'm going to go forward with J, K,
L. (video playing) All
right so that's where he starts. Let's go ahead and go back. And let's take a
look. (video playing)
Okay. You know, ideally it would be great to match on
action from when he put his hands in his pockets
in a long shot and then match it in a medium shot, but he doesn't do that in
the long shot.
He starts his line
when his hands are out of his pockets. So that's not an option, but I still like
including it here right away. All right, so we're
drawing out the tension. Let's see about the shot with Joseph. (video playing) I think it's decent, maybe just letting it out a couple of
frames. I think that, him looking down initially
is good. Let's go ahead and go to the tail of the
shot and see if we can just let it out tiny bit.
(video
playing) All
right, 8 frames or so. Let's see how that looks. (Mr.
Dalton: How's the coffee?) (Joseph: It's cold.) All
right, I like it. Let's get into the dialogue
right when he starts talking here. So rather than
include this pause, let's go ahead and have him say that just a little bit
sooner. So I'm going to click on B side and rock forward.
(video
playing) Okay,
let's take a look. (Mr. Dalton: So, how's the
coffee?) (Joseph: It's cold.) And I think that works
out really well. So don't skimp here. You want to
make sure you get through each and every edit and ask yourself should this
edit start or end earlier, or start or end later? Be
thoughtful and take your time. Make sure you're
evaluating each and every transition with your eyes, your mind, and your body.
When you get the hang
of this very special art that's when you can become a great editor.
04 EDITING A MONTAGE
We've already learned the ways that you should perform
continuity editing, which is the method of
recreating a cohesive reality from different shots within different setups and
different takes. We've have studied all the
various rules to follow in establishing this continuous reality, but now is our chance to break the rules by engaging in
complexity editing. So instead of trying to
establish continuity, we're instead going to break it for the purpose of showing the passage of time and a combination of ideas.
Let's take a look. First, there is montage.
Montage editing is the
practice of editing many small clips together, usually against music or voiceover and usually
to illustrate a change over time. And usually to display a spectrum of ideas or emotions.
That is when the shots are combined they can result in a
new meaning. Human perception literally creates a
whole from the sum of the parts. Jump cutting can
also show a passage of time and jump cutting typically breaks most basic
rules of continuity editing by cutting from one shot of
a subject to another in which the shots vary only
slightly.
This results in the
subject appearing to jump positions in a discontinuous way. So in this regard, it breaks
the rules of continuity editing by deliberately becoming discontinuous. Jump cuts draw attention to the construct of the editing
process rather than attempting to hide it. Both
montage and jump cuts can be heavily influenced by rhythmic editing, which is
based on using the length of clips to maintain
the energy of a sequence. So in that regard,
instead of focusing on story continuity, you cut clips together of various
lengths to maintain the feeling that you want to convey.
Now the sequence we're
going to be editing is the scene in which Joseph tries and vain to come up with an idea.
Here is the description of the scene in the script.
As you can see, we must not only show what's going on,
but we also must convey Joseph's growing frustration. And we'll do that by executing various forms of complexity
editing.
In order to successfully implement complexity editing
techniques, it's usually a good idea to just start
laying in your shots without too much initial emphasis on how they flow
together. Because there's no dialogue, we're
really just focusing on the visual content, and energy of the shots, and we will tweak it out later. Okay. So, as we said in the last movie, this scene is where Joseph
is trying in vain to come up with ideas for his
architectural project. Through montage, jump
cuts, and rhythmic editing, we've not only got to show the Joseph spends
a lot of time trying to come up with ideas, but we've
also going to convey the frustration, and frenzy,
of the scene.
We'll go ahead and
first lay down the shots, to show basic content, and then we'll tweak it later in order to display the
proper emotions. All right, so I have here a Bin
and in it, it's just one clip. And if I load it,
you can see that it's over 10 minutes long, but basically there's a lot going
on. The cameraman reconstitutes the frame many
times, to show various aspects of Joseph troubles. So, we can approach this one up two ways, we can go through,
and find the moments that we want to include, and
then lay them in one after another, or we could lay the entire 10 minute clip in, and then chop out what we don't want, and
then move shots around.
For this movie, I'm
going to show you the first way, and we are going to be as organized as possible about sub clipping
the shots we want, into manageable bites, before editing them. Okay, so, I am going to go through, and just basically put an
in and an out around any complete action. So I
could actually start right here, marking in and an out, and I'll just call this
ruler1.
And then I'll go
forward, as like we've got a close up of Joseph's face here, okay JosephCU1, and so on and so forth, we
have got another ruler shot here, like so. So, as
you can see, it's just going to take a little while to go through this entire
clip, and Subclip everything. Let's actually just jump ahead to this Bin here, where I have
already done the work for us. And mind you, all
of these are pretty large chunks, if I right-click here, at the top, and Choose Columns, and show Duration you can see that these
manageable bite size pieces, actually some of
them are quite long.
But we are not going
to worry about that yet, we are just going to lay in the shots and then we're going to chop
everything up. All right, so the way we are going
to do this is going into Frame view, and I'm going to just make big canvas for myself, and then I'm just going to
start arranging shots in the basic order that I
think I'm going to use them. So I'm going to
starts somewhat chronologically, we are going to see shots of Joseph and hand
of writing, and ruler, and then later on we're going to
get shots of the waste can, and paper throwing
away and then just everything is going to fall on top of each other at the end.
So, I am just going to
storyboard this out, I want to go ahead and start with Ruler, Writing, another Ruler shot, and
another Writing shot, and then we'll get into Joseph, and then maybe our first Paper throw, actually maybe Crumple paper first, and
then throw it, and then back to the Ruler. So,
its pretty organic at this point, again we're going to move stuff around, so
don't worry, if you don't know exactly what the shot
content is.
But here we're at
least getting a sense of the visual energy of the scene. So I am going to lasso all of
these clips, from left or right, and let's go ahead and drag it into the Sequence. As
you can see, we had a sequence created right here, we want to name that right
away. So, I am just going to can call this
Montage assembly, and if we look at it you can see that it's 6 1/2 minutes of all of these shots, but I am just
kind of go through, and see if the visual energy
is what I want.
So now that we have
laid in the basic visuals in the basic order that we are going to use for this Montage sequence, we
are then going to able to tweak it further. We're
going to delete a lot of things, we're going to move things around, we're going to trim this by
about 95%. But here we leave the foundation for
being able to tweak it further, to show exactly the
content, and extract the mood that we're looking for.
When editing a Montage it's often a good idea to lay a good foundation
and then carve from there. That's what
we've done in this sequence, here, Montage scene long.
We've taken all the subclips
that we've made from our giant 10 & 1/2 minute master clip, and laid everything in without any emphasis on any sort of flow.
But we'll go ahead and take care of that now. Now the first thing that we want to do is map the commands Top
and Tail to our keyboard. If I
go to Settings and then Keyboard and then open up my Command palette, which is
Command+3, or Ctrl+3 on a PC.
Top and Tail are found
in the Edit tab, right here, and I always map Top and Tail to E and R, because that's Mark In and
Mark Out. But Mark In and Mark Out are also I and
O, you don't need two of those. So, that's where I tend to put it, Top on E, and Tail on R.
Now what are Top and Tail? Top, basically extracts material from the position indicator
to the beginning of the clip. So if I were
to perform a Top edit right now, I'll press E,
you notice that, that first part of that clip was extracted.
Let me just undo Command+Z, or Ctrl+Z on a PC. And
a Tail extracts the end, so from the
position indicator to the end of the segment. So I'll perform a Tail Edit now by pressing R, and you can see
that the end of that shot was extracted. So Top
and Tail are wonderful tools for helping to carve the material in a Montage.
So I am going to basically, zoom in a little bit, so
I've some better control, and then I'm going to
just move my position indicator, to a specific moment, like him drawing that
on the ruler right there.
So we just want it
very, very, very, short clips. So, I think right before he starts to make that drawing right
there, I am going to go ahead and press E, to
make a Top Edit, and then when he finishes that action maybe about right their, I'll press R. And
now I'll just mark clip by pressing T, you can see that, that's two seconds and
21 frames. So a lot better, I am just going to
keep doing that. So, lets go ahead and find a
moment here how about right there. So I'll just
do E to do Top, and R to do Tail, and so on, and so forth.
It's very easy, and we
are well on our way. Now, I already have a scene that's been chopped up, and you
can see that it is about 24 seconds. I am going
to go a head and play it. So you can see kind of
where we're at right now, after we've performed those Top and Tail Edits, and obviously going from 6 & 1/2 minutes to under
30 seconds is a dramatic improvement, but let's
just see kind of what the content from visual energy is like right now. (video playing) So, it still needs some work, and you can also tell that I did
some moving around of clips, if you need to move
clips around its really easy, it's just the extracts by segment mode.
I'll make sure that
you have your Link Toggle Selection on, so everything will move at once. And then just hold down
Command on a Mac or Ctrl on a PC, to snap to the transition. So, I have done a little bit of that in sort of redefining how
these shots are coming together. But I will just
undo that, because kind of like how I had it. You
can see that you know we are well our way to getting this frenzy, this
frustration, it's going to get even better, when
we start doing some jump cuts, and doing some more rhythmic editing.
But as you see,
because a Montage is primarily a visual practice we're essentially just using our eyes and our instincts to
include the best material. Again, once we're
happy with very fine base we can begin further tweaking to build a motion
within the scene.
Jump Cuts are a great way to portray disjointed slices of
life in quick succession, which can help in
adding to the frantic chaos of our scene. So,
when we've got the shots in the order that we want, at the relative duration we
want, then we can begin playing with jump cuts. All
right. So, I have our sequences here, Pre-jump
cuts, and really we've already got a lot of jump cuts
by designing in our sequence. Remember, a jump
cut occurs when you have two very similarly composed shots, one right after
another, and the subject appears to jump across the
frame.
So as I go through
this, I think you will be able to see a lot of examples of this. But for our purpose, I think
we'll add a few more, engaging in rhythmic editing, where we perhaps start out with relatively few jump cuts, and then
it increases as the scene builds. This will add
to the building frenzy of our scene. So, making
jump cuts is as easy as marking an in and out, and then extracting the included
material. So, again if we don't really have too
many extra jump cuts, you know in the beginning, but
maybe like right here, his hands might jump from over here on the left side of
the frame, to the right. And so, I am just going
to Mark In and an Out.
And actually let's
play it first to see what it looks like, and then I will go ahead and make the
extraction. (video playing) Okay, so let's go ahead and I'll press X to extract, and we'll
see what adding that did to it. (video playing) Okay. And you
know, I'm actually going to just do a little bit trimming,
you sometimes have to do this, when you create
jump cuts just so that the shots actually look okay. I want that sound of the crumple to be in both of the shots.
So I'm just going to
let this out just slightly, I am going to pull down K and go forward with L. (video playing) And then,
we'll do the same thing here. (video
playing) And maybe let out a few frames there as well. (video playing) All right. Let's take
a look. (video playing)
Okay, so I think I like that. We have that sound in both
of them, we're definitely jumping the subject
across the frame, I think that's fine.
And let's take a look
down here, maybe we'll try it again right here. So, I am going to go ahead and
just initially take that out, extract it, let's take a look, and we'll probably have to trim it. (video playing) Not too much, I am going to go ahead and just add a couple of
frames on this shot right here. (video playing) And a couple of
frames here just because it went by just a tiny bit too fast, little bit
less, and let's take a look at that.
(video
playing) All right. I think that works out pretty well. So, we'll keep doing this,
again it'll take just while. So, let's take a
look at our Post-jump cuts sequence. And, as you can see, we have longer
shots in the beginning, and they get really quick at the
end. So again, this is rhythmic editing, where
the length of the shot determines our emotional experience. I am going to go a head and play, it'll still needs some
refining, but at least you can tell where I added
some more jump cuts. (video
playing) So we took it from 24 seconds down to
14, but, as you can see, adding these jump cuts has
more even emotional and psychological effect on viewing experience, and helps
us be able to convey Joseph frustrated state of
mind in this closing expanse of time.
Once you have employed all the techniques to build a
compelling montage scene with proper emotional
energy, it's time to refine it through the trimming process. Now this isn't too much different than trimming a dialogue
scene, because honestly it's still all about
watching, watching, watching, and reacting, and making changes based on your
observations. Let's take a look. Let's go ahead and open the _Refine Bin, and we've got our number
one sequence, which is where we have left off.
Let's go ahead and play it, and see what we think.
(video playing) So, in general I think it's a pretty good base, we're starting
with longer shots in more chronological order
here in the beginning, and then the shots get shorter, and the content is kind of all over the place, as that mood gets more
frenzied.
So let's go ahead and
start the beginning, and I am going to go ahead and enter Trim mode, I'll press
U. And
let's see we what to add, or subtract frames here, and then once we decided,
we'll move on down the line. (video
playing) I think I am just going to add a couple
of frames here. So I am going to hold down K and
rock back with J, to just get a little bit more of this action. (video playing) I'm going to stop
here. As you can see, the focus is shifting,
which is pretty interesting.
So I am going to go
back a little bit further and see if we can get this entire focus shift in
there. (video playing) Okay. Let's see how that looks. (video playing) And I am going to go ahead and play through the entire shot,
and let's see if we like it or if we need to trim
some from the tail. (video playing) I think I am going to leave it for now.
We kind of have a
lingering first shot, let's go into the next edit here and see what we think. (video
playing) I am going to go ahead and just remove a
couple of frames from the B side here, so his pen will almost be right on the paper as we start this shot.
(video playing) And so I am
going to check this one out. (video
playing) All right, very good.
Now I am thinking for
the third shot I would like to actually see Joseph. So we don't actually see him
until here. Let's just move this shot down, press Command or Ctrl on a PC so we can snap, and let's
see what this look like. We might have to lengthen it.
(video playing) Yeah, I want to make it linger just a little bit more, so I am
going to go ahead and trim this out, and let's
take a look. (video playing) All right, so, I do like these first three shots, I think it's
looking pretty good.
Okay, so I am going to
go to the number 2 here, and we've already refined it. And what I want to do now is
introduce some audio elements to help increase this frenzy towards the end.
So, as you can see, we definitely have the sound of
writing, the rulers, the crumpling paper, all of
that's going on. But let's go ahead and begin
layering the audio, and as the scene gets more intense, we can increase the volume, and prevalence of all the writing,
and paper, and crumpling sounds, and I think it
will really help it build.
Okay, so, I've a Subclips Bin here, and it's just a couple of those shots,
and a good examples of writing sounds, in crumpled paper sounds, I'll just play
one, so you can see. (video
playing) And you leave them like this, or what
you can do is turn off the video, and we can go ahead
and see which channel our audio is on so that we can just get what we need.
All right, so it's not on A1, let's check out A2.
(video
playing) All right, so it's on A2.
So we can just turn off V1 and A1, and you can mark an In and an Out, and then you can make a Subclip here. You can see that this is an audio only clip so that when I
load this, it's just one audio channel, and it
happens to be the sound that I'm after. (video playing) So, I am going
to go ahead and delete that, because I have already got it, right here in this Bin called Audio Elements. So we've our ruler and our paper and our writing sounds, let's
go ahead and just start adding some audio tracks.
We'll go ahead and
press Command+U quite a few times here, and I am
going to just start to layer this in.
And I am just going to load this, and let's go ahead and
deselect all of my audio tracks in my Timeline. Go
ahead and just Shift+Drag through all of those and
also my video. And where do we want this to
start, probably kind of as our cut start to increase right here. I am going to play this and see if this looks good to me.
(video
playing) So,
I think about right here, we'll start the layered audio. Let's start with the ruler, and I'll go ahead and patch A2 to
A3, and let's go ahead and just overwrite B. And
I am just going to maybe layer it down here as well, and maybe right here as
well. Now let's get the crumple, let's get the
writing in there too, and you can see what I am doing here.
I am layering these
sounds, like so. And let's get our first crumpled paper here, and let's just
take our first listen. Again, this going to
require refining as well, we're just kind of laying it in. We're going to have to move it around, trim it up, and make it
work for the visuals. But let's go ahead and play
through once and see how it's going.
(video
playing) I
am going to go to number 3, where I have already done this work, and I have
gone through and very carefully figured out
exactly where I wanted this audio to go. I've trimmed some stuff, I have moved it around. You
can see that I have ended in silence, which I think is a nice contrast from
this serious building of audio here. And I am going to ahead and just play it, and we'll see where
we're at, and we can continue refining if necessary.
(video
playing) So,
when you have gone through this scene enough times for it to really feel right,
both visually and orally, you
can feel good that you've constructed a scene that effectively compresses time,
heightens emotions, and enhances the viewer's
experience.
05 EDITING A FLASHBACK
So far in this course we've learned how to edit with
continuity when constructing a dialogue scene,
and how to creatively edit with complexity when editing a montage scene.
In this chapter, we are going to use both of these
methods in order to build a compelling flashback
scene, which employs both traditional methods of continuity, and more stylistic
methods of complexity. Let's take a look at the
flashback scene that we are going edit. It's a
scene between Joseph as a young boy and his father. Joseph and his Dad bond over the creation of a sandcastle, and
it's at this point in his life that Joseph's love
for creating structures originates.
It's clearly a very
happy, nostalgic scene from long ago, and it's in this film to help inspire the frustrated adult
Joseph. So, while this is clearly a dialogue
scene, we're going to have some artistic leeway in designing it. It's also shot as a POV, which means that we're seeing the
world through the eyes of one of the characters,
that is the camera is acting as the eyes of the father. One thing about this scene is that it wasn't shot using the
coverage model, so there really isn't much
variety and shot composition as pretty much everything is shot as a POV of
the boy in the medium shot. So, we'll have to work
around that creatively.
But because the
flashback scene is also a slice of memory, we can probably play a little bit with the part where Joseph
is building the sandcastle. We can use some
organic montage techniques as well as some jump cuts. We also need to figure out how to best come into, and out of
the flashback from the scene in Joseph's office. The
object that sparks the memory is a framed photograph in his office, so we might
be able to do something creative with that.
After we're done editing, we'll also have the
opportunity to add some color grading and effects
to emphasize the antiquated nature of this dream. Okay.
So, we've a very basic
plan on how we're going to attack this scene. I think we'll have some fun
combining editing styles to build the sandcastle sequence.
When editing our flashback scene, it might be useful to
break it down into a couple of different sections. Let's first tackle the primary dialogue, and then let's go for
the sandcastle building scene. We'll also set ourselves up to effectively cut into and out of
the flashback from the scene in Joseph's office.
All right. So I have here a scene for assembly,
and I've got three versions of it. The first one
start is just a blank sequence, so we'll start with that, and then I want
to open up the script and talk about it for a little
bit. All right.
So we have three takes
of young Joseph on the beach delivering his lines, so I can go ahead and just lasso these three
script marks, and I'll go ahead and show you what we have here. (Joseph: How's it stick together, dad? How's it stick
together, dad? How's it stick together, dad?) As
you can see, very, very similarly composed shots, but the interesting thing is
that if I just play a little bit further for you,
you can see that the dad is really not saying his
lines here, it's just the cameraman sort of feeding young Joseph his lines so
that he will say what he needs to say.
So I'm going to play a
little bit longer so you can see what I am talking about. (Joseph: How's it stick
together, dad?) (Cameraman: The sand? Well, that's boring stuff, that's chemistry stuff. I want to show you, or teach you about the
lines.) (Joseph: The lines?) So, you can see he
really didn't even stick to the script, but young Joseph delivers his lines
okay. So how do we get the dad's audio? Well, he recorded it separately in a sound booth not at the
beach. So let's take a look at this. (Joseph's father: The sand? Well,
the water and sand mix, chemistry stuff. But that's not the exciting part.
The exciting part is
the lines.) Okay, so we have on location video mixed with off location
audio. The first thing we're going to do is just
lay in young Joseph's lines one after another. Again,
we'll probably have a lot of jump cuts, but we'll deal with that creatively a
little bit later. All right, so I'll go ahead and
lasso these three script marks, and we'll see which one we like. (Joseph: How's it stick together, dad? How's it stick
together, dad? How's it stick together, dad?) All
right, they are all very, very similar.
I'm going to go ahead
and just choose this middle one here, and I'll go ahead and backup just a little bit to include a
little bit of the action beforehand. We'll
definitely have to tweak it, but I want to make sure that I have enough frames
before and after for it to be easy for me.
(Cameraman: The sand? Well, that's boring stuff, that's
chemistry stuff. I want to show you, or teach you about the lines.) And then you'll notice that I also included enough space of
the cameraman actually talking so that I could
fit the dad's audio over it later.
All right, I'll go
ahead and splice this in by pressing V and then I can go ahead and just take a look at this
performance and then lay that in. Now I do have a
sequence where I've already done this, number 2, and you'll see I'll just
kind of show you visually that I have laid in all of
these shots, all of the lines are in, and I'll go
ahead and play this so you can see what this part looks like. (Cameraman: Little bit of an angle. See that? All right.)
(Joseph: Can I try?) So this is everything with
the dialogue.
We now need to build
in the sandcastle building scene, and I'm not going to
use the script for that, because we don't really have any dialogue here.
So I'm going to open up the scene for clips, and we have
three clips here. If I load them all into the
Source monitor, one after another, and then I come up here you can see that I can basically go back and forth pretty
easily and pull these various moments. I'm just
basically going to be looking visually for various moments of the sandcastle building scene, and then this is complexity
editing, so it's going to be a moment here a moment there.
I'm going to lay them
next to one another and then we'll tweak a little bit later. So I'll just kind of go
through and see if I like any-- I'll wait 'til Joseph starts building the
sandcastle. I guess he really doesn't do it too
much in this take, lets go to number two. Okay,
I'll go ahead and include that moment. All right,
I'll press V to Splice and hopefully there is a lot of stuff in three.
I think I'm going to
include that, I think I'm going to include that movement. All right, splice that in, and
so on and so forth. Okay? Okay, so again I also have
this completed number three, and I also laid in the first shot of Joseph looking at the picture in the office and then
we're going to match that up as well as we can,
and again here's the dialogue where he is talking to his dad--or rather talking to the cameraman--and then I've got some sandcastle
building sort of complexity edits there and then
back to him in the office.
So, use the script for
the dialogue if you like, of course you can just go through and manually load this clips to if you want
to do that, but just lay in a very, very rough basic assembly here. I'll go ahead and just play a little bit of it and jump around
so you can kind of see that the audio is not
matching up at all, but we're basically just focused on the visuals here.
I'll go ahead and press Play. (Cameraman: I'm call action, all right? There you go. All
right, nice and slow.) And I'll pop over here so
you can see this.
(Cameraman: Give it a
shot. Yeah, that's good.) So, lot's of audio we don't want, but
at least Joseph's lines are in there, like so. (Joseph:
The lines?) But don't worry,
we'll continue tweaking the scene so that eventually it becomes an artistic
and interesting flashback sequence.
Now that we lay the basic foundation of our scene, we'll now
focus on adding all of the off-camera
audio for the father character. Again, because we
never see the father the production team didn't actually shoot with the actor there. Rather, the cameraman just fed the little boy
his lines. So we'll just need to insert some
voiceover audio here. All right. So I have my
scene for Assembly bin, and there are four sequences each at a different point
in time. We're going to start with one which is
where we have left off, and I have put a marker at
each one of young Joseph's lines. So we want to cut out everything else.
So I just want to make
sure I enable my audio but not my video tracks, and I'll just mark an in and an out around
everything else, and I'm just going ahead and play make sure I get his whole line in here. (Joseph:
How's it stick together, dad?) Okay, so I'll just
press Z to lift and then go on the other side here. (Joseph: How's it stick together, dad?) Okay and just cut everything out up to his next line. (Joseph: The lines? The lines?) Up
to here and press Z again, and we should be in good shape.
So I would just keep
doing that for each one of these places where Joseph is not speaking. In addition, I'm going to need
to obviously have some background audio here, and I have some ambient audio from the ocean, which I'll load up. So if I just press Command+U, or Ctrl+U on a PC, to add a audio track just patch A1 to
A3, and we can start laying this in, like so. Take a
couple of times there. And if I go back to my
scene for Assembly Bin, and I load up number 2, you can see that I've done all of that work.
We've got Joseph's
lines, everything else cut out, and we have all of the ocean sound to sort of help blend
everything together. Probably also need to just
put some dissolves in between these, which you can do, I'll just go ahead and put some nice eight frame dissolve centered on
the cut, apply to all between in and out. All
right, and it should sound okay. (Joseph: How's
it stick together, dad?) Each one of these markers
now is where his father has a line.
So we want to make
sure to load up our script and here's where the
voiceover audio is for the father, and probably they are fairly similar performances,
but let's check them both out. I'll go ahead and
lasso my script marks and press Play. (Joseph's
father: The sand? Well, the water and sand mix, chemistry stuff. But that's not
the exciting part. The exciting part is the
lines. The sand? Well, the water and sand mix, chemistry stuff. But that's not
the exciting part. The exciting part is the
lines.) Well, they both are very similar, but I
think I will take the second take, and let's go ahead
and get to the end of his line here.
(Joseph's father: The
exciting part is the lines.) All right, so I've marked an in and an out, and we'll come
back here and mark an in here. Notice that we
have a mono track instead of stereo, so I'm just going to edit it on to A1, and I'll overwrite, and let's go ahead and see how it
sounds with Joseph's line. (Joseph: How's it
stick together, dad?) (Joseph's father: The sand? Well, the water and sand mix, chemistry stuff. But that's not
the exciting part.
The exciting part is
the lines.) (Joseph: The lines? ) All right, so just keep doing
that, and if I go to number three, you can see that I've laid in all of the dad's audio here. It's good
I think everything is looking and sounding good, but there is just one problem.
At the end of the film it supposed to actually be a big
surprise that adult Joseph's boss and young
Joseph's father are the same person. However, the
actor who plays the father has a really distinctive voice, so it's not a
very well-kept secret.
So let's just imagine
that 30 years ago when Joseph was a little boy here in this scene, the father's voice wasn't
quite so deep. So let's go ahead and raise the pitch and hopefully that will help keep the
secret. So I'm just going to open up the AudioSuite tool here, and I'm going to go to Pitch Shift,
and we won't have an opportunity to go through all of
these parameters, but I'm just going to
manipulate the Ratio and Crossfade sliders and just try to raise the pitch of
his voice just slightly, so I'm just going to
bring this up a little bit and Preview.
(Joseph's father: The
sand? Well, the water and sand mix, chemistry stuff.) Okay and just a little bit
more here. (Joseph's father: The sand? Well, the
water and sand mix, chemistry stuff. But that's not the exciting part.) Okay, so I think that's far enough away from the actual voice
that we might actually maintain the secret. If
you want to render that, you would just press Render and then OK, we can now
play it in our timeline. (Joseph's father: But
that's not the exciting part. The exciting part is the lines.) And then if you wanted to apply this to the rest of the clips
of the father, we could just come into the AudioSuite window and either just apply it to each one of
these clips, or you can also drag it into a bin
and save it for later.
I also have this, I'm
going to go ahead and just remove those effects, because I already have this finished in this
fourth sequence, and I'm just going to go ahead and play the dialogue between Joseph and his dad all the way through, so we
can see the work that we've done. (Joseph: How's
it stick together, dad?) (Joseph's father: The sand? Well, the water and sand mix, chemistry stuff. But that's not
the exciting part. The exciting part is the
lines.) (Joseph: The lines?) (Joseph's father:
Yeah, the lines. Here, let me show you.
You want strong lines,
unique lines, fun lines.) (Joseph: Can I try?) (Joseph's father: All right,
kiddo. Get in there. Let's see it.) Okay, and
then off on the sandcastle sequence. All right. So
we've taken care of the off-camera audio by editing in the correct dialogue,
and we've manipulated its pitch just slightly so
the secret ending can be kept.
Our foundation is one
step closer to completion.
As always, it's important to take plenty of close passes
through the scene to tweak and refine it. Again,
this is pretty similar to refining the other types of scenes, but we're going
to be looking closely at how all the various parts are
working together. In my Bin here I have two
sequences at different stages, and I'll load up number 1, and this is everything we've done so far. And I would like to go ahead and play at least the first part
of this, and I want you to see what's working,
what's lagging, what's going by too quick, what's just right, and I'll just press Play so we can check it out.
(video
playing) (Joseph:
How's it stick together, dad?) (Joseph's father: The sand? Well, the water and sand mix, chemistry stuff. But that's not
the exciting part. The exciting part is the
lines.) (Joseph: The lines?) (Joseph's father:
Yeah, the lines. Here, let me show you.
You want strong
lines--) Okay,
I'll stop it right there, and let's just get started on refining the first part
of this sequence. All right, so I'm just going to
go to this very first edit, and before I do anything, what I want to do is put my Sync Locks on, and this will allow me to keep
all of this material together as I'm performing
these trims. But I'm just going
to going to go into Trim mode here, and we want to compose these as
closely together as possible.
So I'm going to click
on the B side there, and we'll go back and forth until I can try to match that up as best as I
can. (video playing)
That might be as good as we get. All right. I'm going to go ahead and play and see how it works with the
shot before it. (video
playing) And I actually really like how we have
this motion going from right to left in this shot and then going from left to right in that shot. I like how
that works.
So I'm going to leave
that cut alone, and then I'm going to go forward, and this really felt long to me, this shot
here. So I think I'm going to just cut this up
into a couple of jump cuts. Again that's fine,
this is complexity editing, we're in a dream sequence, so it's totally fine if we do that. So I think
maybe here I'll go ahead and cut out from there to maybe there as he's lifting
up the pail, and I'm just going to make sure that I have
everything selected and press X to extract, and
I'm just going to play all three of those shots in succession once again.
(video
playing) All
right, and I'm actually going to take a little bit more out of there I think,
like so. Okay, very good.
And then we get into the dialogue. There is really not
too much that I can cut when they are talking,
but when he is making the lines, I think I'm going to make a couple of more
cuts there as well. So I'm going to come out of
that and just take a look.
(Joseph's father:
Strong lines--) All right, as soon as he finishes that first line I think I'm
going to cut out and go straight to this shot
here when he does unique lines. And extract, and let's just take a look at
that. (Mr. Dalton: Strong lines, unique lines, fun lines.) And same thing
here, so instead of having him go over it again, let's go ahead and cut that part out as well, like so.
Okay, so I really feel
that it could benefit by some overall trimming, and I've got this second scene right here.
So I've made all the changes. I've also added a little
bit of music at the end. I've got the music here
in this bin, so you can add some of that if you like. Let me go ahead and play this through, and let's see how it's
working. (video playing)
(Joseph: How's it stick together, dad?) (Joseph's
father: The sand? Well, the water and sand mix,
chemistry stuff. But that's not the exciting part.
The exciting part is
the lines.) (Joseph: The lines?) (Joseph's father: Yeah, the lines. Here, let me show you.
You want strong lines, unique lines, fun
lines.) (Joseph: Can I try?) (Joseph's father:
All right, kiddo. Get in there. Let's see it.) (music playing) All right, so
it's working pretty well for the most part.
We can continue to
tweak it 'til we get it just right.
Just remember to take your time and rely on your
instincts, and the trimming process will be well worth it.
So we've got a pretty solid base laid down, but there are
still a few issues with it, even after
refining it a bit. Let's take a look. So my Scene
4 rough cut bin contains couple of sequences. We're at
stage 1, which is everything we've done so far. And
I'm thinking it would be great to make these jump cuts really work for us.
You know right now there are a little bit too overt, and
again, we have no choice but to include them
because everything was filmed using the exact same composition of shot. So again, because this is a dream sequence we'll have some
liberties, but we should really try to figure out
the best look for the scene.
So my first thought is
that we could make the scene sort of like it's constructed from old film stock. That will make the jump cuts
make the most sense since looking at old reels of film always has plenty of cuts like that. And
it will also add to the antiquated nature of this memory. Now we have a couple of options here. We could use some of Avid's own
effects to complete this look, but honestly, we can do better if we use a third-party plug-in effect, like something
from the Boris or Sapphire visual effects package. For our purpose, I'll be using an effect from the Boris
Complete Continuum package.
So if I go to my
Effect palette, you can see that I have the entire Boris Complete Continuum package installed, it's here
at the top. And if you would like to try this
with me, you can download a 14-day free trial from Boris at www.borisfx.com/downloads. Let's go ahead and find a
shot to add it to. Bring up this first one here.
And I want to go into BCC Film Style and then BCC Film
Damage, and go ahead and just apply it, like so.
And let's open up the
Effect editor, and you can see that you know it already has quite a lot of default film damage
applied, and that's fine if you want to keep it like that. But there are several parameters in here that you can change,
and adjust it exactly how you'd like this to
look. So we won't go through them all, but you
can see that color on adds a little bit of tint, and
you can control that tint, if that's not open for you just go ahead and open it
like so, brighter, add a little bit more
contrast, and maybe my tint color, there's a little oranger.
You can always just
toggle that on and off to see what you like better, and then I'm going to go ahead and close that.
And you can put on Flicker and then you can control the
amount of Flicker and the speed of Flicker, so
let's just dial it down a little bit, and let's check it out. Okay, so definitely a lot going on there. If I come down there're some more parameters. There is Grain
and a lot of parameters related to Grain. So I'm
not going to go fully into that, but if I want to turn the Grain on, we can see
that that really adds a lot to it, go ahead leave that
on, and same thing with the Dirt.
I think I'll turn the
Dirt off and then I'm just going to look at Scratches. We'll turn them on, but we'll
go ahead and take a look at some of these parameters. Lots and lots of parameters related to the Scratches. Let me go ahead and just turn down the Speed here, and the
Density. Let's go ahead and take a look and see
what that looks like. So let's say that that is
the look that we want. I can go ahead and save that out. I'll go to Bins, and I've already got an Effect Template bin
for us.
If I go ahead and open
that, and then we go to the top here, just drag that into your bin, and now you can apply that to
all of the clips in this sequence. I've already
done that for us. Let's go ahead and close everything out here. And number 2 already has everything applied. You can see that I manipulated the parameters,
I've got it looking good. I'll go ahead and just
play through, you know, a little bit of this so that we can see how it's looking with the dialogue.
(Mr. Dalton: You want
strong lines, unique lines, fun lines.) Okay, so it's looking good. I
do have one other idea, and that is to flash into
the flashback, you know, with white, sort of flooding the frame there, and then
also do the same thing coming back out. I mean like a solar flare there, so I think that will look
nice. So that's really easy. It's something that we can do just with the simple Dip to
Color, that's in the Blend category and Dip to Color.
We'll go ahead and
just apply that to that transition right there. Let's zoom in a little bit,
and right now it's going to Dip to Black, so I'll play that through. Okay, and let's go ahead and just change that to white, and
let's change the duration here. So I wanted to
sort of flood the frame, so I don't want it to be just 1 second. Let's have it be slightly longer, maybe 45 frames, and let's
see if we like that.
Okay, so it's actually
really nice. It sort of goes to white and then we have the white of his shirt, sort of taking
over the frame after that. So let's go ahead and
save that out. Again, Effect Template and here,
and you can rename that if you like. And we did
want to apply that one other location down here, like so. And let's take a look.
(video
playing) All
right, so you can keep going. I think it's looking pretty good right now.
We've definitely manipulated the look and feeling of the
scene to take on this look of old film stock. If
it's not quite how you envision it, feel free to keep experimenting with other
effects either ones from Avid or from third-party
plug-in package.
So, we've edited our flashback scene and have applied some
nice stylistic elements to it with some
third-party effects. Now, this might very well be
good enough, but we do have the option of taking it a step further to see what a little color grading might do to make it
just a little bit more authentic. So, in our
Rough Cut Bin, I have Sequence 1 here. And again,
this is everything we've done so far. Looks good. And what I'm going to do is actually add a video track. Command+Y, or Ctrl+Y on a PC.
Let's go into the
Effect palette, under Image, and we're going to go ahead and add a color effect like so, and I want to
move our monitor up so we can actually see what we're doing. Actually, let's deselect all tracks, Command+Shift+A
or Ctrl+Shift+A on a PC and just select V2. We don't want the effect over the first shot. So I'll just
lift that out. And we don't want the effect over
the last two shots, so lift that out.
Okay, so we're
isolating it to just the flashback.
So we already have kind of a tint to it which was
included within that plug-in. Let's go ahead and
get a good representative frame here. But let's
see what other options we have. You can really do anything at this point.
So, if you wanted to come in, and just totally
de-saturate it so that we were looking at old
black and white film stock. That's certainly an
option, or because the parameters are processed from top to bottom, you could first de-saturate it, and then add some color back
in, maybe make a sepia tone.
All we need to do to
that is just a bump up the Red, and then bump up the Yellow
which is the same as removing blue. You can get that looking how you
want. You can add contrast or decrease it.
So really, you can manipulate any of these parameters in
any way you want. And because it's applied to the
top track, it is applied to the entire sequence, like so. Now again, if you like it, great.
If you want to go ahead and look at what it used to look
like, and just go ahead and move the monitor down,
and maybe we like the color film stock more than we do a sepia tone.
It's totally fine, it's just an option. But regardless, I think the
scene is looking nice. It's definitely got that old-time
feeling, and we've used a variety of really exciting editing techniques.
06 LOOKING BEYOND SCENE
CREATION
This course is focused largely on the art of various types
of narrative scene construction. However, you should
know that constructing individual scenes isn't everything. You need to know how this creative process fits within the
larger process of editing together the entire
narrative. I'm talking primarily about an
awareness of scene flow and the construction of a viable story arc. Additionally, it's important to remember everything we've
talked about regarding how editing affects the
emotional and psychological experience of the viewer. Always be acutely aware of how you're cutting with each scene
receiving the proper energy for its purpose.
Now, the skills in
going beyond scene creation are of course quite complex, and we won't have the opportunity to delve
into the process of putting together an entire film. However, there are some things I want to briefly convey so
that you get a sense of how scene creation fits
into the greater context of story formation. So,
how do you make sure that your scenes serve the story well? Let's talk about scene flow. It's
true that most editors edit the story scene by scene, getting each as tight and
polished as possible, and then string all of the scenes
together in order.
However, that's not
the end of it. You've got to wear a new hat when analyzing scene flow and
scene importance. This is so important. Your goal as an editor should be to understand and appreciate
the role of each scene. You need to know what
each scene contributes, and you need to make sure it's on screen the right amount of time to accomplish the desired goals. A common mistake of rookie editors is keeping scenes too long,
which leads to story lag. A good tip for scene
pacing is this.
If it doesn't advance
the action of the narrative and help the audience understand the story, then
cut it. This
goes for everything from entire scenes down to individual frames. Experienced editors know this, and they become obsessed about
trimming scenes and trimming shots to perfection. There is actually a saying among editors of both writing and
film, which is pretty awful on its surface, but
so true in its meaning. Killing your babies means shortening or cutting a scene. It's named as such because of all the care, effort, and time
in putting it together, only having it to go to
waste.
It's sometimes a
brutally painful process, but so often it's necessary for the betterment of the film at large. So bottom line, you shouldn't be afraid to cut entire lines,
partial scenes, or even entire scenes if it
doesn't add to the story. Two, you should be vigilant about the refining
process, cutting frames from individual shots until the
edit feels just right, and all unnecessary fat
has gone from the scene. That said, if a scene
needs the space to breathe, don't just trim for the
sake of trimming, you need to be in tune with
this process.
For this reason, it's important
to spend a lot of time refining, going through watching all the scenes as they feed
into one another perfectly.
Once you've done all the work in polishing each of your
scenes and then have combined them together
with a sharp eye on how each and every scene, shot, and even frame contribute
to the narrative at large, it's time to start getting
some much needed feedback on your rough cut. Why
is feedback so important? Well, keep in mind that
when you've been editing the film, you've been working in somewhat of a vacuum.
It's important to get some fresh eyes and ears to tell
you what's working and what isn't. You'll
certainly find that screening your work will teach you a lot about yourself,
and your ability to work criticism into further
refinement of the film.
Try your absolute best
to get as much out of the feedback as possible, so your project can continue to improve.
There are a few things about this very important phase.
You should screen the film for people who are both
invested in the film like the director, producer,
clients, and so on, as well as for those who have no investment in the film,
so in other words, the general public. You want to make sure you please who you need to please, but
you also need to make sure that the film is
working for the majority of people who will actually see the film. Screen your film live, and if possible, also screen it online.
When you hold live
screenings, make sure that your screening room is set up perfectly, which includes having tested your
monitor, or projector, and your speakers. Make
sure the temperature, lighting, and seating is perfect. For online screenings, which you can protect with a password
if you wish, make sure that you enable comments,
so people can tell you what they think. If
possible, start screening for small audiences, and try to read their
expressions. In intimate screening environments,
you can usually watch your audience fairly closely and see how they're experiencing the film each and every
scene.
After the screening,
start by asking broad questions, then get more
specific. Try
to get a strong sense for the audience's understanding, interest, and emotion.
When you receive negative feedback, take it well.
Although it maybe difficult, don't be
defensive. You need to go through that
experience to figure out what is and isn't working in your film. So, if it's a one off piece of criticism, you don't have to
change a thing. But if you consistently get
similar criticism, there might be something to it. So bottom line, screen it for as many audiences as possible.
Once you've gained
valuable feedback, it's time to go back to the film and make some changes. This may or may not be
difficult considering how much time you've already put into editing it, but it's essential. You'll
probably need to go back and forth a couple of more times in order to ensure
that you've got everything exactly as it should be.
But it's a process that's well worth it in the end.
Once you've reached the end of the editing process,
you've reached picture lock, which means that no
further edits can be made and the film is ready to send for titling, audio mix,
and color correction.
Once you've reached picture lock, it's time to complete the finishing
stages of the editing process. Again, this
course is almost entirely rooted in the art of scene creation. So I won't be taking you through a step by
step process of the complex finishing steps. I did, however, want to briefly mention what is involved so
you're aware of what must happen to your film
when you're finished editing it. First, let's
just get a sense of the post-production process. During
the offline edit is where you spend time creating and perfecting your scenes,
and then putting them all together to form a viable
story arc, then comes lots of refining before
eventually reaching picture lock.
After the offline edit
is the online edit which is where the finishing phases
occur. While
there can be any number of things involved in finishing, there are usually at
least three that should complete any
post-production workflow, titling, color-correction, and a professional audio
mix. And depending on your workflow, you also may
need to complete an online edit which may mean either re-linking to high-res files or recapturing your
footage at a higher resolution before completing
finishing. Finally, you'll need to properly
deliver the film according to delivery requirements which
may include exporting a file or printing to tape or
possibly delivering for the web.
Again, this course is
focused on one single part of this process, scene creation. But I did want to give you
context of everything else that comes after. Let's
briefly touch on the finishing phases. First,
it's possible that during the main editing face, the offline edit, that you
edit it at a lower resolution for reasons related
to performance or storage. So first of all, you
would need to re-link or recapture the footage at a higher online resolution.
Most often, you would simply deliver your edit to the
online editor who would perform this.
This stage should be
done prior to any other visual finishing phases such as color correction. Now, titling can be done in
Media Composer, probably using Avid's built-in
titling and graphics program Avid Marquee.
But more often it seems titling is done outside of Avid,
in programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After
Effects, or other more professional packages. Depending
on the workflow, when titles are finished, you might have to re-assemble them
within your sequence. Another large crucial phase
of the finishing process is color-correction.
The color-correction
workflow is complex, and if you want to explore the entire process, you can check out my lynda.com
course titled Color Correction: Creating a Polished Look in Avid Media Composer. That will take you through every
stage. Again, here I'll just give you a
high-level overview of the process. Color-correction
starts by analyzing and correcting shots on an individual level. You first set accurate black and white levels. You then work
to remove any existing color cast. Finally, you improve the general color, the hue and saturation
of your image, paying particular attention to the
flesh tones.
Once shots are
corrected, your next job is to establish shot to shot correction. You want to make sure, as best
as possible, that all shots from one scene look like they belong together, and that each scene fits together visually as
well. Finally, once all individual shots are
corrected, and you've made sure the shots fit together well,
you can apply a broadcast-safe filter so that everything falls within legal
broadcast levels. You can also apply a global
look or style to one or more sections of the film if you like. You can color-correct your film in Media Composer, or you can
send the sequence to professional colorist that
will complete the online color correction in Avid Symphony or another
third-party program.
Visual manipulation
isn't all. You'll
also need to complete a professional audio mix for your film. This goes beyond just the general level and pan adjustments
that you've made within Media Composer. Most
often, the more complex audio adjustments are done outside of Media Composer,
most often in a program called Pro Tools. Whether the audio mix is completed in Media Composer or
exported to Pro Tools, there are several issues
that should be addressed in a general workflow by the audio mixer. The level and pan must be adjusted to balance the mix.
Then the dialogue must
be emphasized, and all other supplementary audio must be mixed appropriately. Room tone or ambience must be
used to repair sections of audio that need to be replaced or re-edited. EQ, or equalization, should be adjusted to eliminate unwanted
frequencies and enhance desired ones. EQ
adjustments should be made to match audio quality between various dialogues.
And all attempts to eliminate or reduce unwanted
background noise must be made. And finally,
damaged or distorted audio should try to be re-created.
There are of course
countless other adjustments that the mixer will make, but this is at least a high-level understanding of
the process. If you're interested in learning how
to mix audio, there are several Pro Tools audio mixing and mastering courses on lynda.com. When all finishing stages of the post-production process are
complete, you're going to need to re-assemble
your finished elements in a new master sequence. Then
you've got to deliver the sequence to the specifications needed. And really, these delivery requirements are an exceptionally
important part of the post-production process.
So most good editors
find this information early on as it can certainly influence your workflow. Delivery requirements run the
gamut depending on who you're delivering the product
for. You might have to deliver high-resolution
file. If this is the case, you'll need to figure
out the format and codec that the file needs to
be, or you might have to deliver a master tape. Again,
you'll need to research format and codec information as well as tape stock
requirements and leader requisites like bars,
tones, slate, and countdown. So hopefully, this
was a helpful, yet very brief overview of the post-production process following the art of scene creation.
Fortunately, if you
need to take a project from concept to creation, there are enough courses available on lynda.com
to get the job done. However, take stock in
knowing that we spent a good deal of time in this course, exploring several various types of scene creation techniques
through in-depth project-based learning.
Now that you've finished this course, you should have a new
or renewed understanding into the art of narrative scene
construction in Avid Media Composer. Because
there is so much to know about editing a narrative film, this course really
only focused on several various types of editing
techniques within the art of planning, designing, and refining different types of scenes. If you would like further instruction and exciting narrative
editing techniques, I'd love to recommend a book
I co-authored called Avid Editing: A Guide for Beginning and Intermediate
Users.
While it contains
techniques for both narrative and documentary, most of the book focuses on both technical and conceptual
narrative construction techniques for a very exciting three-person dialogue scene about a bank heist. So, you'll have more footage to practice with as the book
comes with a DVD of media. And although there are
countless other resources out there for editors, the one I always recommend
is Walter Murch's In the Blink
of an Eye. This book expertly dissects the art
and aesthetics of editing, offering incredible insight into many of the concepts that we touched on in this course.
Like editing and continuity
and discontinuity, evaluating the criteria for a good cut, and delving into the emotional and
psychological impact of the cut. You can get
either of these books in a bookstore or on Amazon. And again, because this lynda.com course is about one specific
workflow, I frequently refer to other lynda.com
courses for more exhaustive techniques in Avid Editing. So, if you need further instruction in general editing, color
correction, effects, or documentary editing,
please feel free to check out my other courses.
Good luck as you
embark on the exciting world of narrative scene construction.
DONE