Post 6: Media Language - Editing

Editing is a huge part of film making as well as media language. It is the process of going through captured footage and putting it together to form a scene or sequence. Films are judged on their editing, even if the audience doesn’t realise it. To make sure our film is as good as it can be we have researched different editing techniques with the intention of using a few of them to show our editing skills.

Kuleshov effect:

The Kuleshov Effect is a well-documented concept in film-making, discovered by Soviet film editor Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s. Kuleshov put a film together, showing the expression of an actor, edited together with a plate of soup, a dead woman, and a woman on a recliner. Audiences praised the subtle acting, showing an almost imperceptible expression of hunger, grief, or lust in turn. The reality, of course, is that the same clip of the actor's face was re-used, and the effect is created entirely by its superimposition with other images.
 Here is our groups first attempt at the Kuleshov effect: Kuleshov

 

Montage:

Montage literally translated from French is assembly, the process by which an editor takes two pieces of film of tape and combines them to emphasise their meaning. It is a method by which through two unrelated shots we may create a third and different meaning.

Here is an example of a montage from Battleship Potemkin.

As a group we where very interested in using a montage in our film to show the progression of time and the growing relationship between the characters.

Edwin Porter:

Edwin Porter was an early film pioneer and after his death is remembered as an important figure in motion picture history. As an early film maker he took ideas from others but instead of copping them tried to improve on what they had already achieved. In his film 'The Great Train Robbery', Porter used new and previously unseen editing techniques such as jump cuts, cross cutting and panning shots.

Here is an example of transparency editing from Slavko Vorkapich’s 1934 film The Furies

French New Wave:

The New Wave was a term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s who were influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of the literary period pieces being made in France and written by novelists. They had a desire to shoot more current social issues on location, and their intention of experimenting with the film form. Some of the filming techniques within the new French Wave were natural lighting, the sharp contrast between black and white, alternative framing and the release of the camera from the tripod.