Film Editing
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EXPOSITION 6 (selected cuts): With its comic book style, this title sequence re-establishes the sequel’s comic book roots as it recaps what happened in the first movie and primes the audience for Spidey’s latest escapade.
Spider-Man 2
FLASHBACK
Shot, sequence of shots, or scene which transport the story into the past.
FLASHBACK 1:
This movie begins as Ofelia escapes to her fantasy land, tripping the story headlong into a flashback. When the story rejoins the present near the end of the movie, we realize everything has taken place in her mind as she lies dying.
Pan’s Labyrinth
Flashbacks operate in many frequently seen ways. Commonly, they’re shown in black and white or sepia and initiated by a transition effect, ordinarily a fade or a dissolve. Flashbacks can illuminate a character’s feelings, thoughts, memories or earlier life (backstory) and are often used — and overused — as exposition. A flashback can also re-run an event to fix it in the viewers’ minds cause them to see it anew. Flashbacks often foreshadow or tease the future, clarify plot points, or thrust the story in a new direction.
Flashbacks can be quick — consisting of flash-cuts — or long and run the length of the movie. They can also contain other flashbacks and occur in non-chronological order.
No matter how a flashback operates, it is vital that while it is sending the story backwards in time, it drive the film forward.
A flashback can mire a character in the past, help them through difficult situations or strong emotions such as grief or anger, or spur them to make a decision or act.
FLASHBACK 2: Buried alive in a coffin, The Bride recalls her karate training thanks to a flashback, and starts to break free.
Kill Bill: Vol. 2
FLASHBACK 3: Bourne flashes back to his tortuous programming to be a CIA assassin and resolves to stay on the run from the agency.
The Bourne Ultimatum
FLASHBACK 4 (selected cuts): After his wife’s assassination, widower Justin Quayle grieves.
The Constant Gardener
FLASHBACK 5 (selected cuts): The hero flashes back to the intricate discipline of painting a scroll to fortify himself while he and his ally overcome a hail of arrows and impossible odds to rout their enemy (5i).
Hero
FLASHFORWARD
Shot, sequence of shots, or scene which transports the story into the future.
Flashforwards work in a variety of ways to keep the audience engrossed and the story rolling along. They can presage upcoming events or disclose parts of the story that have not yet been told but may be dramatized later in greater detail. Frequently, a flashforward bares a character’s hopes and fears for the future in the form of a dream or nightmare. Like flashbacks, flashforwards may start a movie or be inserted along the way.
FLASHFORWARD 1: After Lightening McQueen has a nightmare where he’s being chased on the racetrack by a reaper, he decides to skedaddle out of town.
Cars
FLASHFORWARD 2: This film’s first scene is a flashforward centered on a detective exploring a crime scene at night. The second scene is a flashback to the previous morning. The story then develops chronologically, returning to the initial flashforward scene near the end.
Crash
FLASHFORWARD 3: Told in chapters, this movie regularly jumps from flashforward (frames 3a and 3b) to flashback (frame 3c) as the story progresses toward Chris’s (Alexander Supertramp’s) death in the school bus.
Into the Wild
FLASHFORWARDS 4-7: A jigsaw puzzle of flashforwards and flashbacks, this biopic depicts singer Edith Piaf’s life.
La Vie en Rose
4 The film begins with a flashforward to her collapse at a concert in Manhattan in 1959.
5 1918: A lipsticked young Edith is raised in a whorehouse. Flashforward to: 1935: An adult Edith prepares to sing.
6 1918: Her surrogate mother wails when Edith is taken away from the whorehouse. Flashforward to: 1959: After a triumphant tour, Edith arrives in Paris.
7 1935: An exuberant Edith on New Year’s Eve.
Flashforward to: 1963: An arthritic Edith, battered by poor health.
MONTAGE
Derived from the French word “to mount,” a succinct, self-contained sequence of images inserted to convey or summarize facts, feelings, or thoughts.
MONTAGE 1 (selected cuts): Natural life with natural sounds and no music or narration document Baghdad in the run-up to war.
Fahrenheit 911
Usually a montage functions like a musical interlude, bridging time, place, or knowledge with its evolving collage of images. Music and narration habitually replace dialogue in montage scenes. However, some montages contain deliberate, recurring sounds or natural sounds recorded at the scene. A few are silent.
Montages have many themes — dramatic, comic, news — to list the major categories. A few montage themes have reached cliché status and become spoof material such as the “Getting over the loss of a love” montage, the “Getting fit” montage, and the “Preparing for the big event or showdown” montage.
To compose a montage, shots can be pulled from many sources: dailies, newsreel footage, YouTube, TV shows, etc. When cut together, these shots make a scene that is much bigger than the sum of its cuts.
MONTAGE 2 (selected cuts): A series of dissolves along with voiceover and music guide a trip down memory lane to the glory days of Radiator Springs’ and back to its faded present.
Cars
MONTAGE 3 (selected cuts): Postcard-like text and music transport the audience to Alaska in this expository montage near the beginning of the movie.
Into the Wild
MONTAGE 4 (selected cuts): Oysters complemented by voiceover and music feed this fantasy seduction.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
PARALLEL ACTION
Editing two (or more) independent lines of action together so that the characters, settings, or subjects do not interact directly and are unaware of each other.
PARALLEL ACTION 1: The often parallel lives of black and white Los Angelenos are seen in parallel action until a carjacking causes the two worlds to collide.
Crash
Parallel action regularly kicks off films, introducing strangers going about their separate lives and making the audience wonder what they have in common or impatient to see them meet. Often, the audience is ahead of the characters in a parallel action scene: It knows the two people are going to intersect and that it’s just a question of when, why, and how.
PARALLEL ACTION 2 (selected cuts): Passengers go about their mundane business while the hijackers prepare to carry out their deadly mission.
United 93
PARALLEL ACTION 3 (selected cuts): When their target’s innocent daughter returns home unexpectedly and picks up the phone, the team of Israeli counter-terrorists frantically scurries to alert each other and diffuse a bomb (last frame) to abort an assassination.
Munich
CROSS CUTTING
Editing two (or more) dependent lines of action together so that the characters, settings, or subjects interact directly and are aware of each other.
In cross cut scenes, the characters are linked — and may be furiously interacting, e.g. the cops closing in on the robbers or the firefighters racing toward the people trapped in the burning building. Often part of a film’s climax, crosscutting brings characters and situations together, usually tightening the dramatic pace and ratcheting up the conflict.
CROSS CUTTING 1 (selected cuts): Four scenes are intercut (cross cut) as the movie climaxes:
1a) Sylvia Llewelyn Davies lies dying as her friend J. M. Barrie dashes between her death bed and
1b) the premiere of his play, Peter Pan.
1c) Her son Peter, watches the play he inspired.
1d) J. M. Barrie ends his marriage.
Finding Neverland
CROSS CUTTING 2 (selected cuts): Bourne warily strides to hook up with a nervous reporter as the CIA is ho
t on their trail, in this tense action scene created by cross cuts.
The Bourne Ultimatum
OVERLAPPING ACTION
A variation of cross cutting where a series of shots with repeating actions, often from different angles or points of view, are intercut within a scene (or scenes).
Overlapping action exaggerates the action for dramatic or comic impact and stretches time.
OVERLAPPING ACTION 1: Repeated head turns of the main character (frames 1-2) and the crowd (frames 4-7) heighten the fright of seeing the alien advance (frame 3).
War of the Worlds
OVERLAPPING ACTION 2: The archers’ repetitive bow lifting actions draw out the wait for the battle to begin.
Hero
OVERLAPPING ACTION 3: Repeated slo mo shots of the cops firing, intercut with the regular motion shots of the bar, intensify and extend this shoot out sequence.
Hot Fuzz
FINAL WRAP UP
We began by looking at basic cuts and moved on to match cuts, jump cuts, flash-cuts, smash cuts, cross cuts, and parallel action. We covered a variety of effects including fades, wipes, greenscreens and mattes and discovered some witty and extraordinary edits along the way. Across 35 movies and all film genres, these cuts took us to ancient China, modern-day Alaska, a cartoon Paris, the magical realm of Harry Potter and countless other places — into the hearts and minds of a bevy of fictional and historical characters.
I sincerely hope you have enjoyed looking at these highly illustrative film frames as much as I have. And I hope that next time the theatre lights go down and a movie’s cuts begin to tell the story, you will have a deeper view and awe of what’s projected on the screen.
If you are making your own films, my wish is that you use what you’ve absorbed here to better your creations.
Film editing mimics the way we see, think, dream, feel, and sense. The audience tenses and holds its breath with tight pacing, and breathes out and cheers when the pacing relaxes and the plot achieves a waited for climax. Movies not only affect our breathing but they get under our skin and into our hearts and psyches. Increasingly, they cross into our dreams, nightmares, and life experience; we discuss the stories we see with others and they converge, unintentionally, with our own life tales. The convergence becomes the stories told and retold ’round the campfire — the café, the bar, the family room, the car.
Each generation has its unique truths and fables. Go discover yours. Tell your tales. Make your movies. And make them well, so others will listen and fold them into their lives and retell them long after you made your last edit. We all look forward to seeing them.
SYNOPSIS OF FILMS
The Aviator
Directed by Martin Scorsese, this biopic recounts the life of billionaire Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) from boyhood until his early 40s in the 1940s. Hughes flies, designs, and manufactures new planes and founds Hughes Aircraft with the help of his right hand man, Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly). He also directs and produces movies and has liaisons with actresses: Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani), and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). Along the way he butts heads with Pan American airlines president Juan Tripp (Alec Baldwin) and Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) as well as the Hollywood establishment. He also suffers several prolonged mental breakdowns during which he isolates himself from everyone.
Babel
This complex movie consists of stories about characters in four different cultures: Morocco, Japan, Mexico, and United States. Two brothers in remote, mountainous Morocco become bored while tending goats. One taunts the other into shooting at a tourist bus on the distant highway. An American couple — disconnected due to the death of their baby — is on the bus. The wife (Cate Blanchett) is hit and her husband (Brad Pitt) frantically seeks help in the nearest town.
Meanwhile, at their home in San Diego, the Americans’ faithful nanny (Adriana Barraza) tends to their two children. Forbidden to secure alternative childcare and desperate to attend her son’s wedding in Mexico, she takes the kids across the border. All enjoy the wedding but the car ride back north with her ne’er-do-well nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) strands them in the desert with tragic consequences.
Across the world in Tokyo, a severely hearing-impaired teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) deals with her mother’s death and her need for love. Her father, a successful businessman enmeshed in his own sorrow, isolates himself in work and ignores her.
The four cultures and stories converge: The Moroccan boy/shooter is found, his gun is traced to the Japanese businessman, the American couple survives the shooting and takes action about their children’s disappearance.
The Bourne Ultimatum
In this third film of the thriller trilogy derived from Robert Ludlum’s books, renegade CIA agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is still deciphering his own identity while on the run from the CIA establishment, specifically Section Chief Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) and Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen). Their department oversees Blackbriar, a secret rendition program that nabs suspected terrorists and turns them over to nations that don’t balk at torture. Bourne finds out about the program and arranges to learn more from a reporter, (Paddy Considine). The CIA is hot on their trail. They gun down the reporter but Bourne eludes them.
The chase to capture or kill Bourne goes international, moving from Moscow to London to Turin to Madrid to Tangiers. It ends with Bourne apparently shot and drowned in New York City’s East River. However, he pops above water in the last frame of the movie, priming the audience for another Bourne movie.
Brokeback Mountain
Two Montana cowboys find the love of their life in each other and face the test of time, family upbringings, wives and children, starting in the 1960s. The late Heath Ledger starred as Ennis del Mar, Jake Gyllenhaal played Jack Twist, and Ang Lee won the Academy Award for best directing in this drama based on the Annie Proux short story.
Cars
Characters are cars in this animated movie. Main caracter, er, character Lightening McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a hot shot rookie race car, determines to win the big Piston Cup Championship race. On the way to doing this, he is sidetracked to Radiator Springs, a town on Route 66 that time has left behind. Forced to stay there to pay off a debt, he gets to know the town’s characters, including a 1951 Hudson (voiced by Paul Newman) and grows up a bit. The town characters then help him win the big race.
The Constant Gardener
Adapted from the novel by John le Carré, this story takes place mainly in Kenya where an introverted British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), grieves for his dead, politically active wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz). He soon realizes that her death wasn’t accidental and determines to discover why she was killed. His investigation leads to corruption between pharmaceutical corporations and government bureaucracies and ultimately, his own murder.
Corpse Bride
Tim Burton contrived this gothic animated tale set in Great Britain during the Victorian age. Victor Van Dort (voiced by Johnny Depp) fumbles his vows and his chance to wed his betrothed (voiced by Emily Watson). Wandering in the forest at night to practice his vows for a re-match, he unwittingly marries a corpse bride (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter). She’s overjoyed to live happily ever after with him in her land of the dead. He spends the rest of the movie negotiating between his betrothed and his bride and rectifying the situation.
Crash
Winner of the Academy award for best picture in 2005, this drama focuses on LA’s intersecting cultures — black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern — as they crash into each other in a series of interwoven plots.
The Da Vinci Code
Based on the bestselling book, this biblical thriller begins with the murder of a curator in the Paris’s Louvre museum. The murdered curator is the grandfather of a police cryptographer (Audrey Tatou). Interpol is certain that visiting Professor of Symbology (Tom Hanks) is the killer. Needing his expertise and knowing he’s innocent, she springs hi
m from Interpol. On the lam, the pair pursues the clues. They lead to biblical times and the bloodline of Jesus Christ as well as to a religious sect hell bent on suppressing this knowledge.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Editor of the French fashion magazine Elle, Jean-Dominic “Jean-Do” Bauby (Mathieu Amaric) is living the high life until he has a stroke at age 43 in 1995. It leaves him paralyzed, except for his left eye. The film begins as he comes to consciousness, reborn as an invalid with his mental faculties intact but unable to communicate. The audience hears his thoughts via voice over narration and spends the movie watching him cope with his misfortune.
At first, Jean-Do wants to die and feels trapped, like a diver in an old-fashioned diving bell. He escapes to memories, dreams, and fantasies to free himself, as he imagines, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. He remembers having a close conversation while shaving his 92 year old father (Max von Sydow). He flashes back to his childhood and fantasizes romances — making love on the beach and having a seductive oyster lunch. His children visit him on Father’s day. He fears their rejection but they accept him in his new condition. A speech therapist (Marie-Josée Croze), works out a method for him to use his eye to blink and spell out words. He then painstakingly dictates a book about his life to his publisher’s assistant (Anne Consigny). The Diving Bell and the Butterfly becomes a best seller after his death.