Sunday, October 01, 2017

Lazy Sunday # 490: Editing as Punctuation



I've always held that it is a storytelling power of three that makes cinema what it is. Those three story tellers are the writer, the director and the editor.

The writer creates the original story on paper. The director lifts it from the page so it can be retold in the physical world. And finally, the editor uses the captured images and sound to re-tell the story in cinematic form.

No good film story can be realized if one of the three storytellers is missing.

Without a good script, the director's skills can still achieve a level of sound and fury, but the result inevitably signifies nothing. And no matter how well the writer and director have told their tales, without the storytelling skills of an editor, the audience won't be taken on the intended journey.

Whether those story tellers are embodied in one person or many doesn't matter. The story still needs to be told three times to make a movie.

Now -- everybody thinks they can write and those with healthy egos are certain they can direct. But editing is a more mysterious craft to most, practiced in darkened rooms by people who seldom speak about what illusions they can concoct.

One of the easiest ways to understand what editors do is to look at their work through the eyes of a writer and one of the skills writers rely on -- punctuation.

The image above is the first half of one of the most famous cuts in cinema history.

Or is it just a comma...

Enjoy Your Sunday.

Editing as Punctuation in Film from Max Tohline on Vimeo.

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