You have journeyed through production and shot your movie by now, and if you were thoughtful and did your homework, you kept the editing process in mind as you captured your elements. In fact, it is commonplace for the editor to start working on what is called the assembly edit or first assembly while filming is still going on, working on parallel tracks with production. Of course, on a student film, your timeline and resources may not make that feasible, but if you can, it is a great idea to get into your editing environment after your shooting day is done, watch dailies, and start the editing process as soon as possible.
START EARLY
Among the reasons for starting the editing process as early as possible during production is that it will allow you to determine if you missed any crucial elements while shooting. From a practical point of view, doing so may afford you the opportunity to go back and capture that missing footage the next day to complete the edit.
Once you have shot all your elements, organized your editing infrastructure and sorted your dailies, logged your footage, and set up your bins as explained in Chapter 11, you will start with the assembly edit. Often initially handled by an assistant editor on professional projects, in an assembly edit you roughly organize footage on a scene-by-scene basis—putting preferred material for each scene into a general linear order and then into folders to make it easier to find later. You will likely not even have temp music or effects yet. Rather, at this point, your main goal is to consider all the material available for each scene, pick the pieces you like the most, and begin arranging each scene according to how you want it to look. Keep in mind that many of these “rough draft” decisions will evolve or change as you move further into the editing process. Still, as with the rawest of elements, it’s a good idea to save your assembly-edit material for reference even as you push forward.
Once you are confident you have an assembly edit in good shape, you essentially have a template to begin the more sophisticated editing of scenes and the linking of scenes and sequences together to create a seamless story. These stages of editing take place in the following order:
EXPERIMENT WITH YOUR ROUGH CUT
Whether you are the director or are working with the director, you will be replacing shots and other elements based on the director’s notes, your own notes, and suggestions from collaborators you respect—among others. This process entails reviewing scenes for timing and continuity issues, and deciding along the way to add, subtract, or otherwise tweak particular shots. Maybe your initial shot of a flag waving in the wind had too many lens flares in it, for instance. Your rough cut will eventually lead you to remove that first take of the waving flag and replace it with another. Or perhaps you will decide to take it out altogether. Or, if absolutely necessary, you will reshoot it. Often, totally new ideas or experiments are tried out and then either incorporated or discarded.
You will also be addressing various technical issues, such as the syncing of picture and sound, and the periodic arrival of new or finished visual effects or sound elements. In visual effects–oriented movies or animated films, in fact, you may also find yourself creating temporary shots, or inserting other types of placeholding elements into the cut to allow you to figure out the timing of the shot and other intricacies of the final sequence while you wait for the finished shot to arrive later in the process. It is common for such elements to come in without always being properly synced, or to fall out of sync, and so you also will be trying to find and fix such hurdles during the rough cut. Finally, it is often a good idea to let your editing points between scenes look rough or raw if you are collaborating with others on the rough cut, so that it is clear there is an edit point at a particular place and thus an opportunity to consider other options if the edit is not something you have finalized.
The fine cut is named as such because you are looking to make fine changes. You are not necessarily evaluating the entire film globally; rather, you are examining each scene and each cut in each scene to find out which you are unhappy with and to make tweaks where you think it’s required. At this point, more notes will be addressed and more final music and final or close-to-final visual effects shots, if any, will be completed. Once you incorporate them, you may well formulate new ideas or see either opportunities or problems that were not previously visible. During the fine cut, you will address these issues. Likewise, during this period, it is typical to screen the film for friends, colleagues or fellow students, or even strangers. You may or may not have the resources to hold formal screenings, or recruited screenings (surveying or prequalifying attendees to make sure they fit your target audience), on a big screen or in a theater, but even if you don’t, show the fine cut on the best monitor you can, find out what people who typify your audience think, and address their comments during further honing of the movie.
Of course, depending on your film’s format—film or digital—and exhibition plans, you may still have more work to do to get your imagery into its final, high-resolution master form with final color correction, final visual effects or music, and other technical “sweetening” where needed, as discussed in Chapter 11; this is part of the finishing, or mastering, process. But as long as you have a final cut you are happy with, and have followed the steps outlined in Chapter 11 to generate an edit decision list and other elements for your mastering work, you will be able to breathe a sigh of relief that, at last, you have a completed movie to share with the world. If you worked hard enough on the process, there is every reason to believe you have a story that corresponds to the emotional beats you intended so long ago when you developed your script and dreamed of making a movie.
However, as you go through each of these phases, you will need to be savvy about how to tell your story if you ever hope to reach a final cut you can be proud of (see Producer Smarts: Watch Yourself, below). Let’s next examine how to find a pace, a style, and shot-cutting methods that will allow you to get there as you journey through the aforementioned phases of editing.
For Prince Avalanche (2013), David Gordon Green and his crew shot lots of B-roll footage to give them lots of imagery of the physical location they were shooting, thus providing additional elements for the editor to experiment with later.
SECOND-GUESS THE FILMMAKERS
Rent a DVD of a major motion picture that includes deleted scenes among the bonus material. Many classic films on DVD and Blu-ray include deleted sequences, including the famed “Mouth of Sauron” scene from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003) and an extended dream sequence from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Watch the movie, and then check out the deleted scenes. Choose a particular scene that catches your attention, and write an essay explaining the scene and giving your opinion about why it was cut, whether you agree with the choice, what it would have added to—or taken from—the movie, and what your conclusion is about the studio’s or filmmaker’s choice to take it out. Most important, consider the emotional impact or lack of impact of the choice, and whether the scene would have helped or hurt the film’s pace or coherence, or advanced the story. Would certain characters’ motivations have been clearer or more muddled if it had been left in? Would your overall reaction to the movie have been altered one way or the other by its inclusion?
Certain editing methodologies will bear the best results if you take your time, cull through your material in great detail, and experiment with numerous cuts and versions along the way, but as a producer with many other jobs to do, you know you can’t spend all your time editing once filming is complete. If you do, you will miss deadlines, classes, other projects, and who knows what else. So, what’s the middle ground between being creatively committed and thorough, and the practical issue of editing your movie on time and within your means? Here are a few ideas about walking this particularly fine line successfully: