The Art of Editing – by Jerry Hofmann

We go to the movies to have two hours of escape. When we can’t physically or emotionally relate to what’s being shown and heard, we don’t like the film because our escape is truncated by foolish editors whose edit decisions got in the way, or they weren’t given footage which relates to what a given moment was actually about. The french term is Mise-en-scène. I don’t think hand held-shaky cam shots work with interviews for example. I don’t watch people talk shaking myself as if I was in an earthquake, do you? I don’t think fast cutting works for much of anything but fast action scenes, when I too would be changing my point of view fast as if I needed to be ready to duck. When most people leave the theater after seeing films using inappropriate technique, they don’t even know WHY they didn’t like it, but they do know they didn’t care for it as much as they had hoped.

How many movies have you seen where the script was good, the acting was good, the direction was good and it contained very well shot and pleasing cinematography, art direction using mise-en-scène as it’s guide, but the movie didn’t satisfy? Lots I’ll bet, and whose left here to blame? The editor of course.

But suffice to say, if our personal problems get lost in the story, because we get emotionally involved with it, which only happens when we can relate to what we are presented with, we love it. It’s a fabulous pain-killer. We cannot get as emotionally attached to the characters if we cannot emotionally or physically relate to what we are presented with.

Oddly in this theory I hold unmovingly to, audio quality that’s low will emotionally separate us faster from the story than picture quality will. Don’t you notice a hit or pop in the audio track sooner than a mismatched edit? Sure you do, because it’s inescapable, and it suddenly reminds us that what we are watching isn’t real, and our emotional attachment to what’s happening is diminished. (Emotional attachment is what entertainment is actually – a diversion which allows us to worry about something other than our own problems for a while).

When an unmotivated picture edit is made, the audience is actually frustrated, and less “entertained”. We can’t relate to it because it’s not what, when or actually how or where we would look with our own eyes and brains if we were actually standing beside those characters in reality. This is the reason that zooms are avoided more often than not. Humans cannot zoom. We can dolly by walking, but we can’t sit still and zoom in on our field of view. They work rarely, but when they do work, they usually simulate what our brains do when we suddenly see an important object that causes an emotional reaction. I think a fast dolly or a series of closer shots of the same moment punching in closer and closer works better because it simulates how our brains process visual information. We concentrate on that small object across the room that has grabbed our attention for some emotional or intellectual reason, and we simply ignore what’s actually in our total field of vision. Note we only have about 3 degrees of sharp focus, even though we may have 160-80 degress of actual light hitting our retinas. It is this fact that allows cuts to work for us. We don’t intellectually process the “blur” of vision that happens when we actually do change our point of view. It’s as if a look from this person to the other is a cut from one piece of processed information to the other. So cuts work. Dissolves actually don’t. Fades work better because it simulates what we percieve when we close and open our eyes. Fade to black and back…

The goal of any project is to grab our attention and keep it. Show us an unmotivated edit, or an edit out of sync with the rhythm of the scene or moment within the scene, and we get less emotionally involved with the story and characters every single time. The audience is frustrated by a beat that’s not there when, in reality, it would have been there because it takes time to process what’s happened at that moment mentally. The audience is frustrated by showing the wrong thing at the wrong time. If an editor cuts to an angle not where we would look if it was actually happening to us in reality, we don’t relate, and figure it’s time to go to the popcorn stand instead. We tend not recommend the movie, product, or instructional to others, and so the success of the project is doubtful at best.

You can produce the most technically perfect show in the world and it will FAIL miserably if the message, or it’s original goal, which includes “entertainment”, isn’t reached because it contained unmotivated and/or rhythmically inferior edits and thus, less relatable edit decisions. (There’s rhythm in everything.) Conversely, it can be of less quality technically, but if the story or goal is reached because it is edited well – it’s entertaining, enlightening, or motivating, containing edits and durations that we can relate to, it is successful every time.

All else being equal, the poorly edited project will fail every time, and the well edited piece will always perform better than one that just looks good. When you have both of course, it’s certainly better, but storytelling techniques trumps picture quality every single time.

It’s not as if technical considerations aren’t important. They are. They just aren’t as important as we apparently think they are. We should be spending a lot more of our time and effort making better edit decisions. After all, how many ways can you edit a feature? Usually more than you can even conceive of, and much of editorial is trial and error, so the more time we spend refining an edit, trying to cut it this way or that way, the better the edit ends up. This is also why I promote using keyboard commands. They allow us more time to try the what if’s within the alotted time we’re typically bound by.