The Healthy Edit

Creative Editing Techniques for Perfecting Your Movie

John Rosenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315297552
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Dirección y producción cinematográfica

This updated and revised new edition of The Healthy Edit provides aspiring and working editors with creative editing strategies they can employ to enhance a film, while also overcoming common production problems. With decades of experience editing and film doctoring Hollywood features, author John Rosenberg reveals both the aesthetic and technical aspects of the editor's art, demonstrating tricks and techniques for nursing an ailing project back to health or enhancing a well one. Whether it's a bad performance from an actor, a hole in the story or script, a continuity or pacing issue, or a poorly-composed shot, every film or show we watch encounters challenges during production—and fixing these issues becomes the job of the editor.

Utilizing an approach comparing film editing to medicine, working editor and professor John Rosenberg offers a software-agnostic guide to best editing practices, offering solutions to everything from story and script inconsistencies to genre-specific structural issues. Accessibly written and brought fully up-to-date to embrace the predominance of file-based digital production, this second edition offers new insights into ultra-high-resolution footage, transitions, visual effects, collaboration, sound and music editing, as well as highlighting historic advances in the art form.

1

Prescriptions for Success

If, as the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan once observed, Gutenberg made everyone a reader and Xerox made everyone a publisher, does Premiere Pro make everyone an editor?¹ Today, powerful software such as Adobe’s Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer rule the filmmaking world. Anyone with a couple hundred dollars, a computer, and an idea can become an editor. Or can they?

If you put 100 monkeys in a room with an Avid, it is unlikely they would eventually edit the great American movie. Though anyone can do it, not everyone can do it well; following the rules and knowing how to operate the software are not enough. Despite the accessibility of equipment and user forums that address technical issues or describe such basic editing concepts as matching action, preserving continuity, and maintaining eyelines, many films fail. Yet often the intervention of an experienced editor with an intuitive sense of story and structure—a film doctor—can make the difference between a healthy movie and one that flatlines. Within the pages of this book are principles and insights to help the filmmaker achieve this goal.

► The Film Doctor

What is a film doctor? Simply put, the film doctor is the person who promotes the health of the film. At times he or she saves its life. Film doctoring involves many considerations. It can be as subtle as intercutting parallel stories rather than letting one play out fully before introducing the other. It can require taking the movie’s ending and splicing it to the beginning. Or it can involve completely redesigning the ending. All this demands a solid understanding of story, genre, and pacing. The riveting, suspensefully edited climax of the hit thriller Fatal Attraction (1987) replaced a previous diminuendo conclusion, tediously played out on the close-up of an audio tape that fortunately ended up on the cutting room floor.

Film doctoring can be as simple and unexpected as the projectionist neglecting to thread up the first reel of Lost Horizon (1937) during a preview screening. When the film played better before the unsuspecting audience, the studio realized that the first 10 minutes were superfluous and cut them out.

Or film doctoring can involve an editor replacing the soundtrack with a new song: “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” played throughout a dynamically edited and failing western that became the classic High Noon (1952).

The metaphor of film doctor serves as an abbreviated way to examine situations that can occur in any editing room on every film, from an indie movie produced for a few hundred dollars to a studio blockbuster weighing in at well over $300 million. Except for the level of politics, the sophistication of the technology, and the number of accountants, the two are surprisingly similar. Like twins who were separated at birth, the differences reside in the inherited traits and environmental influences—nature and nurture—afforded to each.

Strong Medicine

The difference between a cut that is not working and one that works is striking. While time and polish may burnish a film’s rough edges or improve a performance, an edit in the hands of an editor with a strong point of view and the means to fulfill it can give the appearance of a completely different film. This is particularly true in the documentary genre where the editor often shapes the movie from haphazard or unscripted footage. In the case of a fictional narrative, the recut film appears as if new footage has magically materialized in the hands of the film doctor, that a life has flourished inside the narrative, and that energy has flowed into the characters. Just as a healer’s good hands, insight, and compassion can alter the patient’s prognosis, so too the touch of an accomplished editor can change the course of a film.

This assurance extends to the audience, the most important recipient of the new vigor. The viewer relaxes and gives himself over to the images before him. Seeing a good film is like falling in love. One’s resistances break down, an innocence and vulnerability blossom, and, in this attitude of surrender, the ego’s constant chatter and self-protectiveness ease to allow something new.

For the most part, films are entertainment, something that takes us away from ourselves. But the really good ones compel us to examine our lives, our goals, and our values. The filmmaker who can look into herself and rally a unique approach, rather than the obvious or banal solutions that come from dealing with the surface, stands a chance of affecting the consciousness of the time.

Viewed as a puzzle or labyrinth, the filmmaking process can best be solved by the strategy employed in attacking any maze: retrace your steps. During the editing process, all the foibles, failings, and virtues of the script and production become clear. If one views the filmmaking experience as a three-step translation—from the writer’s idea to a script, from the script to dailies, and from dailies to final edit—it becomes clear where elements break down. Something is often lost in translation. To be a good film doctor, one must not only address the patient’s ailments but, even better, suggest modes of prevention.

There are strategies for success but no guarantees. Unlike the real world of medicine, filmmaking is not a science. Yet, like medicine, it requires intelligence, preparation, and sometimes great leaps of faith. And time is always of the essence. When viewing the dailies, mistakes in production become clear. When viewing the first cut, mistakes in the script become clear. When viewing the final cut, mistakes in the editing become clear. It is easy to be an armchair quarterback in the comfort of the editing room. One thinks of the assistant who mumbles, “The script sucks, the director’s an idiot, the movie’s a disaster; I could’ve done it better,” to paraphrase a cartoon found in some editing rooms and projection booths. But probably at the time of production, considering the budget and time constraints, the footage may be the best it could have been. Ultimately, everything ends up on the editing bench, and it is the editor’s job to make everyone else look good, even at the expense of the perfect cut. In order to achieve this, some shots may not match, some continuity may waver, some choices may appear odd, but if everyone looks good and the film works, the editor has created the perfect cut.

The Cut

Electronic nonlinear editing has introduced many new terms to the editing vernacular. Some older terms remain, occasionally altered in meaning. What is referred to as a sequence used to be a cut. Cut also means the physical or, in current use, virtual separation of one section of media from another. Geographically, the place where one shot is joined to another is at the cut. The physical act of joining the two was known as splicing.

The Editor

If the director and writer are the film’s parents, the editor is the pediatrician. In many cases the editor has been doing her job a lot longer than either of the others. Like a doctor, she has gained vast knowledge, diagnosed many ailments, and learned how to remain objective while still caring deeply for her charges. And she probably spends long hours doing it.

The best editors tend to have a depth of life experience. Their activities extend past the walls of the editing room and even beyond film culture. They have something fresh to bring to the work. They may have lived in other countries or among other cultures. They look outside themselves toward nature and the arts. They look inside themselves to find commonality with all humankind. They read books, listen to music, attend theater performances. They develop a strong sense of story and structure, both current and ancient. And, through all this, the editor must maintain a childlike sensitivity and naïveté.

Case Study

In my conversations with award-winning editor Arthur Schmidt (Forrest Gump, The Birdcage, Back to the Future, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl), I was surprised to hear him refer to himself as “naïve.” How unusual to hear a man of such knowledge and sophistication—a connoisseur of opera, music, and fine food—refer to himself as naïve. Yet that naïveté is the crux of film editing. It gives the editor the chance to discover treasures, to ask questions, and to conjure answers that will erase confusion for the audience. The editor approaches the film with the naïveté that mirrors the audience’s shared innocence that envelops them as the lights dim. Through answering the questions for himself, the editor supplies the answers for his audience, allowing them the great joy of a communal, uninterrupted dream. That is why many editors spend as little time on the set as possible. They want to avoid preconceptions. As Richard Pearson (The Bourne Supremacy, Quantum of Solace, Justice League) told me, “I don’t usually like to hang out on the set. I don’t want to know how long it took to set up that Steadicam shot. Then I’d feel obligated to use it.”²

► Principles of Filmic Medicine

To a film doctor, the basic medical disciplines apply: cardiology, genetics, anatomy, psychiatry, and, ultimately, surgery. Along the way, proficient use of the instruments and a good bedside manner help everything run smoother. In the following chapters we will explore each discipline of the editor’s craft.

Cardiology

As the heart gives the body its pulse, then the pace and rhythm achieved by good editing give a film its heart. This is accomplished through the editor’s three main choices: the selection of shots, the length of shots, and the placement of shots. The selection of shots influences the scene’s performance, focus, and point of view. The length and position of shots influences the subtext, the pacing, and the rhythm of a scene and consequently the overall film. A shot can appear on the screen for several frames or, in the case of the opening sequence of La La Land (2016), for the full length of a 35 mm film roll.

In the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rope (1948), or the more recent Russian Ark (2002), one shot runs the duration of the entire film. But those are exceptions. Usually it is necessary to cut and to cut often.

Doctor’s Note

Rope was intended as an experiment in non-editing. In actual practice, Rope incorporated hidden splices to allow transitions from one film roll to another, since 35 mm motion picture film is supplied on 1000-foot rolls that, running at 24 frames per second (fps) or 90 feet per minute, last only 11 minutes. Every 11 minutes or less, depending on thread-up waste, a changeover had to be choreographed into the on-screen action. At that point an actor would back up toward the camera, obscuring the scene so the frame went completely black. The cinematographer then changed the film roll. The new roll began with the actor stepping away from the camera. A splice joined the two black frames. Russian Ark, on the other hand, used the entire length of a specially modified high-definition videocassette.

Genetics

In life there are certain traits that are inherent in our makeup, our heredity. In medicine such conditions as diabetes, some cancers, and some heart disorders are a product of genetics. In the editing room the editor also encounters inherited conditions. These begin with the script. Issues of motivation, character arcs, story structure, genre expectation, beginnings, and endings confront the editor as she tries to create a coherent and compelling movie from a compromised script.

Anatomy

Structural anatomy is an offshoot of the inherited conditions of...