Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  Editing: Making the Cut

  MODERN TIMES (UNITED ARTISTS, 1936)

  Associational editing invites viewers to draw intellectual connections among images.

  Chaplin compares factory workers and sheep at the beginning of Modern Times. Frame enlargements.

  Case Study THE GRADUATE

  One of the most creative and imaginative sequences in

  shot, especially because his facial expression matches

  The Graduate (1967) uses associational montage to show

  in both shots. Ben then gets up, crosses the room,

  the hero, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), spending his days

  and closes a door, beyond which his parents are sit-

  floating in his parents’ backyard swimming pool and his

  ting at a dining room table ( c-2 ). They glance at him

  nights making love with the family friend Mrs. Robinson

  as he closes the door. Ben then recrosses the room

  (Ann Bancroft) in a hotel room. The montage blurs time

  and sits in a black chair before a television set ( c-3 ).

  and place. The viewer knows that a great deal of time is

  Obviously, this cannot be the hotel room; he is at

  passing, days, probably weeks, but can’t say exactly how

  home with his parents.

  much. Most remarkably of all, different places and loca-

  Shot 4 ( d-1 ) shows Ben’s face against a black back-

  tions blend into one another in a dreamlike way.

  ground, this time assumed to be the chair in front of

  In the first shot of the montage ( a ), Ben gets out of

  the television. The camera then zooms out to reveal

  the pool, puts on a white shirt, and walks into his par-

  the hotel room with Mrs. Robinson dressing ( d-2 ). She

  ents’ house, pushing open the patio door. In shot 2 ( b-

  leaves. Again the viewer has been misled. The room in

  1 ), Ben enters through a door wearing the white shirt but

  shot 4 is different than the one in shot 3. Shot 5 ( e-1 )

  has entered the hotel room where Mrs. Robinson awaits.

  is another close-up of Ben’s face against a black back-

  The match in action—Ben exiting screen left in shot 1

  ground. The viewer thinks it to be the bed on which he

  and entering screen right in shot 2—implies, falsely, that

  was lying in the previous shot, but the camera zooms

  these spaces are connected as part of a single location.

  out to reveal that he is in his bedroom at his parents’

  Ben sits with his head against the black head-

  house (e-2). He glances out his window, puts on his

  board of a bed as Mrs. Robinson unbuttons his shirt

  swim trunks, and goes down the stairs. In shot 6 (not

  ( b-2 ). Shot 3 ( c-1 ) is a close-up of Benjamin’s head

  illustrated), his mother watches him dive into the pool.

  against a black background. The viewer assumes it

  Shot 7 ( f ) is a close-up of Ben swimming underwater.

  to be the bed on which he was lying in the previous

  In shot 8 ( g ), he leaps up onto the pool’s inflatable raft,

  ( continued)

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  Editing: Making the Cut

  (a)

  (b-1)

  (b-2)

  (c-1)

  (c-2)

  (c-3)

  (d-1)

  (d-2)

  and shot 9 ( h ) is a matched cut on action that shows

  contemporary action films. The editing invites the

  Benjamin moving on top of Mrs. Robinson in bed.

  viewer to draw associations across the cuts. In this

  The filmmakers use continuity principles, such as

  case, the associations are psychological, having to do

  matching action, to create the disorienting, dream-

  with Ben’s alienated frame of mind. He is in a daze,

  like effect in which times and places are indistinct

  disconnected from all of his environments, lonely

  and melt into one another. This is a slower, more

  and unhappy, sleepwalking through his life, barely

  seductive presentation of the breakdown of time–

  conscious of his connection either to his parents or to

  space than in the violent, hard-edged montages of

  Mrs. Robinson. ■

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  Editing: Making the Cut

  (e-1)

  (e-2)

  (f)

  (g)

  (h)

  of Welles, and such other directors as Woody Allen, William Wyler ( The Best Years of Our Lives , 1946), and Miklós Jancsó ( Red Psalm , 1972), the long take is a recurrent and essential feature of style that provides an alternative to film editing.

  Here, too, however digital tools are changing the manner in which a long take can be created. Separate shots can now be joined seamlessly to create the impression of a long take. Joining shots digitally in this manner, the cinematographer of Children of Men (2004) created several lengthy moving camera sequences that looked like long takes. The edits were invisible and subliminal.

  SUMMARY

  Almost universally, filmmakers regard editing as the decisive phase of production, giving a film its distinct shape, organization, and emotional power. There is, however, no single way to cut a scene or a film.

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  Editing: Making the Cut

  Continuity editing is the predominant approach used in narrative cinema. It establishes a coherent and orderly physical world on screen, despite variations in the camera’s placement and angle. The rules that deal with screen direction and matched visual elements are an essential means of creating this coherence and order. Continuity errors occur when mismatched visual elements violate the perceptual constancies that a viewer looks for in the world represented on screen. If Julia Roberts is eating a croissant for breakfast, it should not suddenly turn into a pancake.

  Realism is an elastic concept, however, and the physical and perceptual laws that continuity editing seeks to honor can be subjected to distortion and manipulation.

  Viewers accept many such manipulations, regarding them as permissible expressions of style or artistry. Montage editing enables filmmakers to create striking distortions of time and space, some of which are inconsistent with strict continuity principles. The craft of editing is infinitely powerful in its ability to reorganize time and space, and many things are permissible under the rubric of style.

  Whatever approach a given filmmaker might use, if he or she is making a feature film and telling a story, the option of completely avoiding editing does not exist. Even where a filmmaker like Woody Allen may shoot each of his scenes in a single master shot, he and his editor must still join these shots together and make decisions about the points at which to do so. Hitchcock, a director for whom editing was of great importance, once tried to do without it. In Rope (1948), he cut only when the camera physically ran out of film (approximately every 10 minutes) and tried through elaborate means to hide the cuts when they did occur. The result is an interesting experiment but a sluggish film that lacks the dramatic rhythms and intensity that only editing can create. To be a filmmaker is to select, manipulate, sequence, and cut!

  KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS

  continuity editing

  final cut

  180-degree rule

  cross-cutting

  iris

  parallel action

  cut

  jump cut

  rough cut

  dissolve

  linear system

  sequence shot

  editing

  long take

  shot-reverse-shot

  editor

  master shot

  series

  errors of con
tinuity

  matched cut

  thematic montage

  eyeline match

  montage

  voice-over

  fade

  nonlinear editing system

  wipes

  SUGGESTED READINGS

  Ken Dancyger, The Technique of Film and Video Editing (Stoneham, MA: Focal Press, 1996).

  Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949).

  Vincent LoBrutto, Selected Takes: Film Editors on Film Editing (New York: Praeger, 1991).

  Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1995).

  Gabriella Oldham, First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

  Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing , 2nd ed. (Boston: Focal Press, 1995).

  Ralph Rosenblum, When the Shooting Stops . . . the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story (New York: Da Caps, 1988).

  Michael Rubin, Nonlinear: A Guide to Digital Film and Video Editing (Gainesville, FL: Triad Pub. Co., 1995).

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  186

  Principles of Sound Design

  OBJECTIVES

  After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

  ■ describe the development of contemporary

  ■ explain five basic functions music performs in

  multichannel sound

  film

  ■ describe the three basic types of sound in

  ■ explain the nature of sound design, its

  cinema

  expressive uses, and how it builds on

  the viewer’s real-life acoustical skills and

  ■ explain the uses and functions of dialogue in

  experience

  film

  ■ distinguish between realistic and synthetic

  ■ explain the functions of ADR

  sounds

  ■ describe sound effects design and Foley

  ■ explain the fundamental differences between

  techniques

  sound and image

  ■ describe five steps for creating movie music

  From Chapter 6 of Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film, Sixth Edition. Stephen Prince.

  Copyright © 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  ■ explain five codes of sound design and their

  ■ explain why switching between on-screen

  expressive uses

  and off-screen sound helps makes camera

  positions more flexible

  ■ differentiate direct sound, reflected sound, and

  ambient sound

  ■ explain how sound establishes continuity in

  film as well as intellectual and emotional effects

  Image editing employs standard rules and techniques that (1) provide editors with methods for organizing shots, (2) establish constancies of time and space between the story world on screen and viewers’ experiences of their physical environment, and (3) are based on correspondence with the viewer’s perceptual experience and have become familiar to viewers through constant repetition over many films. Like image editing, film sound has its own rules (or codes) of structural design. One can speak of sound fades, sound cuts, sound dissolves, and sound perspective.

  This chapter examines the three categories of sound in film: dialogue, effects, and music. It explains the concept of sound design and examines its rules and techniques.

  SOUND IN CONTEMPORARY FILM

  Today, film sound is digitally recorded and edited, and it is often created digitally.

  Indeed, sound went digital long before images did. As a result, sound is much more complex and expressive than in the films of decades past. As recently as the 1980s, for example, it was common for a film’s soundtrack to be put together from 20 tracks of sound elements. Today, a soundtrack of 200 or more tracks is the norm.

  THE SOCIAL NETWORK (COLUMBIA PICTURES, 2010)

  Director David Fincher thought of this film as a docudrama and wanted the audio backgrounds to enhance a sense of place and authenticity. The story locations included Boston and Palo Alto in the San Francisco Bay Area, and environmental sounds recorded in these areas were included as ambient information in the sound mix, in order to accurately characterize place using sound. The film dramatizes the creation of Facebook, and to create an audio environment for the Facebook offices in the film, located in Palo Alto, ambient sound was recorded in numerous Silicon Valley and Bay Area offices. The ambient audio environments created in this way are subliminal, enhancing the film’s docudrama style in ways an audience feels without consciously noticing. Pictured, Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, with Justin Timberlake (right) as Sean Parker, co-creator of Napster. Frame enlargement.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  Consider what sound accomplishes in contemporary film. Many sound effects are layered; that is, they are composed of numerous sounds blended together. Doc Ock’s tentacles in Spider Man 2 (2004) were created from a blend of the sounds of a motorcycle chain, piano wire, and a pump-action shotgun. The blend was manipulated in a software program, Pro Tools, to create hundreds of variations, producing whooshes, screeches, ratchety noises, servo-motor sounds, and even vocalizations to give the tentacles personality.

  There were so many tentacle variations that they occupied 100 tracks, separated by right tentacle, left tentacle, and upper and lower tentacles. This variety, and the fact that the tentacles are always moving on screen, was perfect for surround sound.

  A viewer watching the film experiences the tentacle sounds whooshing across all the speakers, front and back. The film’s sound designer said that the character was ideal for surround sound because the tentacles were moving in all directions, which multichannel sound could capture perfectly. Bass or low-frequency sounds are a key part of the contemporary soundtrack, adding power and presence to voices or effects.

  TOY STORY 3 (PIXAR, 2010)

  This was the first film released

  theatrically in Dolby Surround 7.1,

  an eight-channel sound system that

  spreads four channels across the rear

  to create enhanced directionality

  within a 360-degree sound field. When

  Barbie and Ken first meet in the film,

  Gary Wright’s song “Dreamweaver,”

  about the appeal of dreams and

  fantasy, starts out as a mono (single-

  channel) recording and then it swells

  and spreads in audio space, filling all

  eight channels. The audio change play-

  fully points to the flush of love seizing

  Barbie and Ken. Frame enlargement.

  SPIDER MAN 2 (COLUMBIA, 2004)

  Multitrack sound mixing in contemporary film produces richly layered sound effects composed of numerous sound sources blended together. Doc Ock’s tentacles take on a personality of their own owing to the many different sounds that they make and the distribution of this sound information in multiple-channel playback. Frame enlargement.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (NEWMARKET, 2004)

  Sound is a subliminal element of cinema. Often, a viewer feels its contribution without being explicitly conscious of it. The sound mix of The Passion did not use the bass channel very often, reserving it for scenes where Christ carried the cross. When the cross thuds against the ground, the bass channel anchored that sound effect and gave it considerable force. Viewers experienced the force of the effect without being aware it was there. Frame enlargement.

  The sound design of The Passion of the Christ (2004) reserved the subwoofer for the thudding of the cross on the ground, giving this action added power and emotional presence as a metaphor for the sins of the world.

 
In earlier decades, scenes that had a lot of repetitive sounds—guns firing, for example—often sounded a bit flat because the sound was not varied. The same

  gunshot, or ricochet effect, might be used throughout the scene or even from film to film. Today, these effects, like Doc Ock’s tentacles, are given tremendous variation.

  Sounds were individually recorded for each of the iron balls and sheep bones of the flagrum used to whip Jesus in The Passion of the Christ , and these were then mixed in expressive combinations.

  A huge variety of punching sounds was created for the boxing film Cinderella Man (2005) to give each of the film’s fights a different tone and personality. Two professional boxers sparred with one another over several days, punching in a variety of styles while the sound crew recorded them. These were the sounds heard in the film.

  Sound also can be used to change an actor’s performance. In one scene of Cinderella Man , Mae (Renee Zellweger) argues with her husband (Russell Crowe) about his going back in the boxing ring. Afraid he will be killed, she becomes nearly hysterical. During postproduction, the sound crew lowered the pitch of her voice to make it sound less shrill, fearing that otherwise the audience would lose sympathy with her.

  Sound also can be subliminal and subjective. At the beginning of Collateral (2004), when a hired killer played by Tom Cruise appears in an airport, the sound is nonspecific and diffused, unfocused, until he bumps into his contact man, at which point the sounds of the airport become very clear and defined.

  Later in the film, when a cab driver (Jamie Foxx) realizes that Cruise is a hit man, the soundtrack expresses Fox’s alarm. The background city noises all convey anxiety—

  one hears people yelling, the siren of an alarm, car speakers booming rap music. The sound mix weaves a tapestry of urban noises that convey and symbolize the current of emotions that run through the film.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  EVOLUTION OF FILM SOUND

  Of all the components of film structure, sound has shown the greatest improvements in recent decades. Contemporary film uses multiple channels of sound information to envelop viewers in a dynamic, three-dimensional sound field (the acoustical area covered by speaker placement in a surround setup and activated by multichannel sound coming from the speakers). In the 1930s and 1940s, in contrast, film sound was essentially a monaural, single-channel experience, with each speaker in a theater auditorium receiving the same signal. Sound was encoded as an optical track on the strip of film, and directors and sound mixers were invariably disappointed at the loss of volume, limited frequency range, and distortion in the upper register that occurred when they encoded their sound onto the optical track. Low-volume sound effects vanished into the hiss of the track.