Elizabeth's+Journals


 * JOURNAL ONE**

Imagine you have a jar of jellybeans. No, a field of jellybeans. There is virtually every color and flavor of jellybean you can imagine. Your job is to pick only the jellybeans that are cherry flavored. The cherry flavored jellybeans are red. But here’s the catch: so are the strawberry flavored ones. And the fruit punch ones. And the shitty fake licorice ones that nobody likes. So now you have to taste test all the red jellybeans. One by one. In a field of a thousand jellybeans, you need only about two hundred of them. But they have to be two hundred of the right ones. They all have to be cherry flavored, or the whole thing is ruined. That’s what editing feels like. It’s fun and strangely satisfying, but after about eight hours you can’t move and you think you might throw up and you want to cry but you won’t let anyone come into your room to offer moral support or bowls of fruit, lest they see you like this.

In the early planning process, my group had a definitive idea of what we wanted to do. We knew it was going to be post-apocalyptic, that there was going to be a Dude-type protagonist named Joe, and a kid obnoxiously named Charleston. We knew it was going to be dialogue driven. The problem was that we couldn’t find a conflict. So we tried to pitch the characters against each other. That didn’t work out. Joe needed to want something, or else the plot would feel pointless. So we thought about what would really bug us at the end of the world. Then Luke had the genius idea of having the protagonist be in the middle of a TV series marathon when the power goes out. The entire thing would be centered around him trying to watch the final episode of his favorite TV show. A short film was born.

As editor for my final film, I plan to emulate the style of Edgar Wright’s films, such as the films from the Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, The World’s End), as well as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. More specifically, the different editing techniques that enable Wright to tell a convoluted story at a fast and effective pace will be my main influences in the editing process. Such techniques include fast-cutting, the hip-hop montage, and match cuts.

**JOURNAL TWO**

I picked “In the Blink of an Eye” by Walter Murch, which is a critical commentary on film editing and techniques. In the introduction of the book, Murch argues that dreaming has effectively prepared human beings for the film cuts used in editing. I thought this was really fascinating and I realized that people take film editing for granted because it feels so natural, and we only really notice it if something is wrong or otherwise deliberately jarring to our perceptive senses. Murch also likens the blinking of an eye to a cut in a film, and how, in real life, blinking often allows us to process what we have just seen. Murch writes, “There are places in a conversation where it seems we almost physically cannot blink or turn our heads (since we are still receiving important information), and there are other places where we must blink or turn away in order to make better sense of what we have received. And I would suggest that there are similar points in every scene where the cut cannot or must occur, and for the same reasons.” I found Murch’s observations on how film editing related to real life really interesting and made me look at the process of editing differently.

In one chapter, Murch talks about one fundamental aspect of editing: deciding what to keep, and what to discard. He emphasizes that editing is crucial in evoking the right emotion at the right time in the audience, and that emotion should be “preserved at all costs” when editing. In my film, because I plan to employ techniques such as fast-cutting and the hip-hop montage, I think it will be important for me to remember not to sacrifice aesthetics or pacing for emotion, while at the same time making sure that the cuts occur at a good pace. From this chapter, I think the main things I have to remember during the editing process are the importance of both emotion and precision, and how crucial it is to preserve and convey the emotion of a scene through editing.

**JOURNAL THREE**

**Tim & Eric - The NACA Challenge**

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In a fake promotional video encouraging people to make the best movie ever, Tim and Eric break every film editing convention possible. This is a list that I've compiled: =====

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To me, this video illustrates the importance of editing and how many things can go wrong as a result of an incompetent editor, or an editor trying to mess up a video as much as possible. When editing my final film, I will remember to keep Tim and Eric’s cautionary tale in mind. I promise not to use any terrible jump cuts (or any jump cuts at all) or use Comic Sans or abuse a green screen. This video exemplifies the importance of the role of the editor. This should be required viewing for anyone who wants to edit anything, ever, because it is such a good example of what not to do. Also, it’s pretty funny. =====

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Not as exciting as Tim and Eric, but this has some really useful advice. It basically reiterates what I learned in Year One about editing. For example, when dealing with moving camera shots, always cut “on movement, so that the camera is in constant motion from one cut to the next.” Another piece of advice that I found pretty useful that I hadn’t really thought of before was to save the longer version of the clip while editing, so that if you ever need to retrieve the original version of the clip, you don’t need to go back to your source file because it is already there waiting for you. This piece also reiterates what the role of the editor is, which is to “make the cuts that drive the emotion in the scene or move the story along.” Most of these tips are things that most people already know, but are still important to keep in mind. =====

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 This was a nine page long description on the role of the editor, so I just kind of skimmed what I thought were the important parts. One section that really stood out to me was about how an editor has to make do with whatever footage is given to them: =====

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"All editors live by what is in the footage, not what the scriptwriter or director hoped would be there. A film editor is looking at the picture with complete objectivity, not subjectively, and they should try very hard to pretend they're the audience so that if something is not working, they should be the first one to know and can fix it." =====

I especially liked the point that this article made about how, when editing, one has to watch the footage through the eyes of the audience and be as objective as possible. I have spent hours editing a short three-minute segment of a film and after a while, it is nearly impossible to be objective about that string of footage because you can replay it in your head and anticipate every cut right before it comes. This is why I find that it is helpful to ask for a second opinion on edited footage after I feel like all my objectivity has been exhausted.


 * JOURNAL FOUR **

[|Tips for Cutting Dialogue] This article, taken from the Final Cut 7 manual, had some good suggestions on problem solving when it comes to editing sound. Some of the suggestions, though seemingly obvious (e.g: "Use cross fades to smooth out edits"), are pretty good pieces of advice when it comes to editing sound. It also reiterates some basic rules that are really important, such as using room tone to fill audio gaps in a scene.

[| Film Editing Tips] This article was sub-titled “There’s a reason they call it cutting.” I thought this was appropriate because it is important to remember that editing is always about precision, and the goal is usually to cut things down as much as possible, so that every thing is clear and concise and the final film is not a second longer than it should be. The article acknowledges that the hardest thing for a film editor to do is to “cut his/her film down”. I have found this to be true, especially when there are some really beautiful shots that aren’t really necessary to the film that you feel like should be there, and you have to cut them out of the final project anyway. Because we are making a seven-minute film, I have to remember to keep these rules in mind.


 * JOURNAL FIVE **

With the editing knowledge that I have gained from the techniques that we learned about in Year One, I have employed editing conventions in the editing of my rough cut such as continuity editing. I have yet to employ the technical influences of Simon Pegg’s flims in my editing, given the limited time we had to do our rough cuts. On set, however, I have imitated the techniques seen in films like Boogie Nights and Living in Oblivion in my role as the boom operator. I also watched a tutorial video online in order to ensure that I held the boom mic and pole in the right way. Alas, all my preparation did not prepare me for the pain an exhaustion that came with being a boom operator. Because we did not have a windguard on the first day of shooting, some of the sound clips were rendered We will re-record the audio for these scenes.



On our first day of filming, we shot the scenes that took place at the abandoned warehouse. Unfortunately, the sun set really early and we could not finish what we had aimed to film. However, we did get a good amount of shots down, such as conversations between Joe and Charleston and the introduction of Frank’s character. On the second day of filming, we shot scenes of Joe chilling in his basement watching TV. Though we took a very long time setting up the lighting, the shots turned out pretty well. One problem we faced was that the basement windows did not have thick enough blinds and as a result, a lot of unwanted light came in through the windows. We solved this problem by blocking out sunlight with black trash bag on the windows from outside the house.