Ever fancied having a bash at making a movie? In a new series, acclaimed filmmaker Paul Duane tells you everything you need to know…
The Editing Process
A cut in a film should, in theory, come as a shock to the viewer. We don’t have edits in life, so why do we accept them in movies? But we do. That’s because the language of cinema has developed around the cut. You cut to what the audience wants, or needs, to see next. If you do it right, it should match the jump in their minds’ eye. Visual logic follows story logic. You cut when there’s a motive to move in space, or in time, to the next thing you have decided your audience needs to see
Your framing and editing should together work to direct the audience’s attention to where you want it to be, and to make some elements more significant than others. Maybe that’s why they call it film directing – I don’t know!
Coverage is the term for the number of different angles and shot sizes you have on each individual scene, to get enough material so that you can cut the scene together, or enough that you have different options in the edit.
Working quickly on a low budget, we didn’t shoot a lot of coverage for my film All You Need Is Death. Most of the material was shot knowing it would be cut in a certain way, without alternatives. Only experience will teach you how to do that, and in some jobs where producers like to have input on the edit, this way of working will make the director unpopular, because they expect to be able to recut the scene in various ways.
Do you want to shoot a lot of coverage? Or do you want to make a decision on the floor, and stick to it? These are different approaches, but they are both equally valid. Your decision on what coverage to use is very much part of your understanding of what each scene is about, what’s important and what’s unimportant.
What we call the master shot is the ‘wide’ shot that covers all the action. Some directors like to use the master shot without coverage – this is pretty risky, as it’s much more difficult to change anything in post-production if it’s a one-shot wonder. See the recent French horror movie MadS for an example of what you can do all in one long master shot – it’s worth experimenting with to see how it works for you.
Close-ups/over-shoulder shots move in to closer to emphasise the actors and performances. You need to vary your shot size in order to cut between shots of the same subject. If you cut between two same-sized shots, it will be a jump cut, destroying the illusion of seamlessness.
A cutaway shot is one that might not have an actor’s face in it but is important to the plot, possibly a shot of a prop or location relevant to the story.
In horror movies you often get a ‘jump scare’, which are technically very interesting as they work best when the director has planned the scene to be edited in one specific way, usually to lure the audience’s attention away from where the ‘jump’ is planned to happen, or to put them into a false sense of relaxation by deploying a fake scare, then the real one.
Notice scenes where the protagonist is doing ‘nothing important’ – going to the bathroom, walking alone – and notice how you are waiting for a ‘jump’ to happen. This is because we have been conditioned to expect it from decades of horror movies. Finding a new way to do it is the fun part.
In horror movies, offscreen space can be as important as what is seen onscreen – John Carpenter’s Halloween does a superb job of setting the audience up to expect the killer to pop up anywhere, at any time. It is a triumph of framing and editing. It was also shot in fifteen days, the same duration I had on All You Need Is Death – a real challenge, but if you start planning with the script, stick to your guns in production and have enough material in the edit, you can pull it off!
And that’s a wrap! Read the rest of the articles in this series here.
