Stand-Out Shorts

by Russell Evans

  Montage editing is different from continuity editing in that it doesn’t matter if we see the editing at work. In continuity editing, the aim is to hide the fact that it’s been edited at all – don’t remind people it’s just a movie. But montage doesn’t care about that. It’s too busy messing with your mind, and you are too busy trying to keep up with the pace to care.

  Montage gets you right under the skin of the movie. It speaks to a different part of your mind than regular editing, just like reading a sentence and looking at a picture seem to need different parts of your mind.

  ONE AND ONE MAKES THREE

  One of the most basic ideas in montage editing is that you put one image side by side with another image and create a third idea out of them both. How does it work? It uses the human brain to do the hard work, because when we see two unexplained things we immediately try to imagine what happened in between or what happened next. We join the dots to make an idea.

  In the following sequence of three images, the first two are on screen, but the last one is what we have figured out in our minds. If we get a picture of a house on fire, then we cut to a picture of a man walking down a railroad track, we can’t help it, we just rush in and imagine he has something to do with that fire. Nothing in the clip links them in any way; we just make the connection for ourselves.

  Figure 22.1 (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©sunara, Image# 4677386)

  Figure 22.2 (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©ilmwa555, Image# 8894785)

  Added together, what do these make you think of?

  Figure 22.3 (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©Tpopova, Image# 5986374)

  Or try a more sophisticated one:

  Figure 22.4 (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©sebastian-julian, Image# 9833396)

  +

  Figure 22.5 (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©W1zzard, Image# 4057917)

  Added together, what do these make you think of?

  Figure 22.6 (Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ©Claudiad, Image# 6569069)

  In this sequence we see a few seconds of a rollercoaster at full speed, then cut to a woman sitting on the edge of a building, looking like she’s going to jump. There’s no connection between the two but your brain joins them up and we think she feels like she is on an emotional rollercoaster, maybe life has been rough for her, or getting out of control. Cut back and forth between these two even faster and the effect is made even stronger.

  Montage works by giving us lots of these disjointed images and firing them at us too quickly for us to process. All the images fall over each other, creating new ideas all the time. Try it out – put a few clips together that seem totally random and watch them back. Add some music to really lose yourself in the process.

  STEP BY STEP: USING MONTAGE

  The way you tell it is the message. Montage is so interesting because it’s the editing style itself that is telling a lot of the meaning of the movie, as much as the actual stuff you shot. It’s what music has been doing for decades, since sampling and hip-hop kicked off. In old-school sampled hip-hop (Grandmaster Flash, et al.) it was the way you assembled sounds together, the way they collide and join up, that makes it fun. The lyrics weren’t always too important.

  And another thing that makes hip-hop so similar to montage is the way it uses these collisions. You get completely unlikely sounds and put them together – like a clip from a 1950s air raid information film, over the theme from Sesame Street, followed by a line from a Malcolm X speech. That’s sampling – playfully roaming freely across the world of culture and history, and always unexpected. With this kind of music and this style of movie editing it’s the way you say it that is important, not always what you say.

  ADDING, NOT TAKING AWAY

  A lot of people say that continuity editing is about taking shots away, while montage is about adding shots in. There’s some truth in this simple idea – we sometimes call montage additive editing, while continuity editing might be called reductive editing. When creating montage, always go for adding shots in rather than taking them out. You might need to make each shot shorter and faster, but that helps to disorientate the viewer.

  DISORIENTATE

  The aim of montage editing is the opposite of continuity. Now you need to try everything you can to throw us off balance, to disorientate us and unsettle us. We get confused and disturbed. Weirdly, this doesn’t mean we disconnect from the movie; instead we get more involved, like a puzzle you can’t figure out, like Alice following the rabbit down the hole. You keep watching and following the movie because you need to make it add up somehow. The more opposite the images that clash against each other, the more disorientated we’ll be.

  DREAMS

  In dreams we tend to see a mix of our authentic, real lives with small but crucial bits of weirdness. It gives this weirdness a context and makes it stand out. If your dreams were movies, they’d seem to have no rhythm (see Chapter 14, Continuity), and they change suddenly without warning. People change places, change shape, outfits, expressions. The weather alters like you flicked a switch; time speeds up and slows down. In fact, just about everything that we do in continuity editing is turned on its head.

  USE SYMBOLS

  Symbols are a neat way to get across ideas without having to shout them out. Lay the clips on the timeline on your editing app and scan through them to look for connections or threads, such as objects, colors or shapes, anything that can link together two shots. Look for any shot that reminds you of another shot, and start pairing them up. Try Nic Roeg’s opening montage from Don’t Look Now for an example of this – two places become linked by the connections in what happens in the countdown to a girl’s death.

  LOSE CONTROL

  Editing in the Hollywood continuity style means being totally in control all the time. Nothing should creep in that could derail the straight path of the freight train that is the plot. Not so in montage. Montage asks that you lose control and trust your instincts; you don’t need to know why you like a certain shot and you don’t need to explain it. You like it and it feels right, so move on.

  MIX CLOSE-UPS AND DEEP SHOTS

  Montage works by keeping you guessing, by throwing you off-balance because you just don’t know what is coming next. But you don’t always need to place two totally random clips side by side. Terry Gilliam creates a similar effect in the viewer’s mind by putting shots that constantly alter depth on screen. You’ve got a dramatic close-up and then a long, wide shot, then both together as a part of the image enters the frame close by. Surrealist painters like Dali used this to confuse height and depth and produce a kind of horizontal vertigo.

  USE COLOR AND TONE

  The only problem with montage is that it can get a little out of hand, sometimes too crazy. So rein it in with a use of color (or black and white) which stays the same throughout the whole sequence. If your sequence looks too diverse, give it a color that carries through every clip. Or try increasing or decreasing color saturation by a small amount (maybe 15%), or boost contrast dramatically so every clip looks similar. Try other tips from Chapter 14, Continuity.

  USE MUSIC

  Use music to enhance the montage. If two images can collide with each other to create other ideas, then music can add to the battle even further. Music that seems out of place, or contradicts what we see, can be really effective. Even regular continuity editing benefits from this now and then.

  FINALLY, TWO OThER TYPES OF MONTAGE USEFUL FOR MOVIES WHICH USE CONTINUITY EDITING:

  Parallel montage is when you cut quickly between two separate locations, to show simultaneous events going on. They can be related or unrelated – either way we’ll make connections and get some interesting ideas out of it.

  Accelerated montage is where you use faster and faster cuts to create a turbulent stream of images that the viewer just can’t process fast enough to keep up. The result is a big disorientating overload, but if the images relate somehow it should add up to an overwhelming theme or feeling. Cuts should be shorter than two fr
ames, preferably ten frames long.

  Chapter | Twenty-Three

  Audio Editing

  OVERVIEW

  More than half of what we get from a movie is from the soundtrack. Make it work harder for you.

  If you’ve got:

  Footage with voices, sound effects, background sounds, music, or any other sounds.

  Then you need to:

  Organize these sounds into a coherent shape on the edit timeline. It’ll sound huge.

  DESIGN YOUR SOUNDTRACK

  Walter Murch is the guy who invented sound design, and he talks about sound like it’s light and color. You get hot colors and cold colors, so you get hot and cold sounds.

  Murch divided sounds up like a color spectrum, from violet to red, placing warmer sounds (like a feline purr, or wind in the trees) in the red zone, and cooler sounds (like speech or machines) in the violet. We react to these sounds just like we do with colors – we like warm ones and dislike cold.

  And it’s not just the sounds themselves that feel “warm,” but they actually hit us immediately and emotionally, like music. On the other hand, sounds that are cooler need to be understood with your head rather than your heart, like language so they don’t have such an immediate impact on us.

  Within this spectrum there are subtle shades of each, with Arnie’s Terminator talking with an ice-cold rattle against Sean Connery’s warmer tones.

  While working on films such as Apocalypse Now! and The Godfather II, Murch thought up this way of designing the soundtrack for a movie, and got the first of three Oscars for sound design. He found that if you spread out different sounds across this spectrum, the human ear could tolerate more than it could when they were piled in one corner of it, which means you create a more dense and exciting soundtrack, and yet it is still crystal clear to the ear. (Find out more at www.filmsound.org/murch.)

  How much sound can you put in one area of this spectrum? As a starting point, use two to three layers if they are grouped in just one area of the spectrum. If spread across the whole spectrum, use up to five. Murch puts the brakes on more than five as there is a limit to what we can actually understand over this amount. Using this spectrum, you can create a sound environment that uses a spread of sounds from warm to cold.

  WHAT’S YOUR SOUNDSCAPE?

  Using the ideas above by Murch, take a moment to think about the overall soundscape of the movie. Think beyond what is actually on screen – instead try to imagine the total landscape surrounding the scene. Write down the ideas you have and then start to arrange these in a 3D order. What is close by, what is further away, what sounds pass by from loud to quiet? Imagine the scene as a vast IMAX arena with a soundscape that envelopes the viewer.

  AUDIO POST-PRODUCTION: STEP BY STEP

  To get to this point you will have edited the movie but it has not been mixed yet. That means the sounds are just as you left them, attached to each video clip on the timeline.

  1. First, make sure you have “spotted” the film thoroughly, going through it up close and noting where you need effects, music, or Foley. You then work through this list, recording extra effects if you missed any. But ideally you got everything you needed while shooting.

  2. Next, start working on scenes, but don’t necessarily start at the opening credits. Sometimes it is better to identify the most central scene in terms of importance to the film, so work on this one first and let the results determine how every scene before and after it is created. Think of it like laying out the furniture in a room; you start by placing in the set-piece items and work outwards from these.

  3. Once you have earmarked a scene, start to block in the layers of sound on the edit timeline according to two factors: how clear the sound needs to be for the necessary information in the scene – such as actors talking or critical sound effects – and how important the sound is in terms of creating atmosphere. It’s useful to figure out the difference between a layer and a one-off effect. A layer is usually a linked series of sounds, similar in tone and volume, which run more or less continuously. A background street sound, of traffic and crowds, is a layer, but an individual police siren would be a sound effect. You could keep one audio track on the timeline just for one-off effects.

  4. But look out for logjam, where the sheer number of layers you are having to juggle threatens to overwhelm you. Keep in mind the order in which sounds need to appear on the timeline.

  FIGURE 23.1 Most editing programs enable sound mixing using intuitive on-screen mixers, as in this one from inexpensive software Magix’s Movie Edit Pro.

  LAY OUT YOUR TIMELINE LIKE THIS

  1. Create six additional audio tracks in addition to the main tracks – sometimes called the A/B tracks.

  2. Leave the linked audio from the main visuals in the A/B tracks.

  3. If you have recorded dialogue separately, place it on the next track down.

  4. Next, include lower-level background sounds. Use this one for individual, one-off sounds like gunshots or doors closing. Most of this track on the timeline will look pretty empty, but that’s a good sign – it shows that you are prioritizing your soundtrack and laying these further back in the soundscape.

  5. Further down, add music, if used. This could be a continuous track which runs throughout a scene or it could be a sudden moment used for dramatic effect. If it’s the latter, you usually keep other sounds quiet, with little or no dialogue.

  6. Finally, use the last track for other ambient sound, or “presence.” This is the continuous track of sound which you would have recorded in each location after each scene. It consists of an uninterrupted clip of sound containing a more or less constant level of background sound, more like a kind of hum or murmur which is pretty much impossible to recreate but easy to get as long as you take it from real life. Simply ask your actors to take five after a scene while you record an ambient track.

  To mix: Next you’ll want to make some tracks louder and some quieter. To get it right without getting distortion, simply leave the volume (or gain) of the top layer untouched and decrease the ones below. Never actually raise any gain above the level it started with.

  A tool that helps you create three-dimensionality in the mix is to use multichannel audio, usually at 5.1 surround sound. You can spread your separate sound layers across these speakers to reflect to the image on screen.

  Straightforward stereo has its drawbacks, as it tends to work only if the viewer is placed exactly between the two speakers. Any further to one side or another and the brain hears the sounds closest to it as only coming from one speaker, distorting the sonic space – a problem known as the Haas Effect. The way to avoid this is to use foreground sounds such as speech across both left and right tracks, even though this will flatten the sonic space slightly. But if you have a center speaker then bleed both tracks into the center as a mono feed.

  FREE SOFTWARE FOR AUDIO MIXING

  Audacity, available from http://audacity. sourceforge.net, is a broad program that encompasses capture, editing, export and clean-up. It doesn’t replace that highend audio suite but it is quick to master and frequent updates keep you in touch with its rolling development.

  Download from http://audacity. sourceforge.net.

  It works on Mac, Linux and PC, and since it’s open source other developers can add plug-ins and push its scope further. For now, though, it gets any discerning filmmaker off the starting blocks with mic capture of up to 16 simultaneous tracks, as well as line-in capture.

  ESSENTIAL KIT OR RESOURCES

  1. You need an edit software program which lets you use multiple sound layers.

  2. Or you can use a dedicated sound mixing program such as audacity.

  3. It really helps if you have some quality loudspeakers hitched up to your computer. try connecting the computer directly into your amp on your music system. sit between the two speakers.

  4. Alternatively, get hold of good-quality headphones – a better option if you need to keep your work noise to a minimum.

&n
bsp; Health and safety tip: You may be used to louder sounds at a live concert but headphone sounds can seriously affect your hearing if you work for years in making movies. as a guide, 110 decibels (dB) is about how loud a nightclub is, and yet in filmmaking a worker is allowed to endure only 30 minutes of that level. a full working day should have a level of only 90 dB, roughly the volume of a food blender close by.

  SECONDOPINION

  Why so complicated? Who needs all this hassle and technical sleight-of-hand? As soon as you start messing with the audio tracks you get an artificial movie, totally different from real life. When is real life like listening through a pair of Bose earphones? No, skip this and check those at Dogme again. For them sound is served up plain and simple, without garnish or fries to go.