CHAPTER 40

EDITING PRINCIPLES

 

THE ROUGH CUT VIEWING

The cut following the first assembly is called the rough cut. Here the full range of material is deployed toward goals decided from seeing the assembly. No sequence is yet fine-tuned, but the editor tries to make each sequence occupy its right place and be dramatically successful.

The scrutiny you give this new cut is similar to the previous versions, and it remains important to deal with the large-scale dimensions first:

• Is there adequate, too little, or too much expository detail?
• Is exposition integrated with the action or does the film pause to inform the audience?
• What exposition, if excised, could the audience still infer?
• What exposition could be delayed (always better to make the audience wonder and wait if you can)?
• Does the film keep momentum throughout?
• Where does the momentum falter and why?
• Does the film breathe so that, like music, each movement feels balanced and inevitable, or is there a misshapen, unbalanced feel to some parts?
• What sequences feel long and what material feels redundant?
• How logical and satisfying is the development of each major character?
• Is anything misleading or alienating about the characters?
• Is there a satisfying balance between interiors and exteriors? (This often means dealing with claustrophobia the film generates. Well-constructed films alternate between intensity and release, much as a person must alternate intimacy with solitude, indoors with outdoors, family with work, day with night, and so on.)
• What is the film's present thematic impact?

After seeing the rough cut a second or third time you might ask more localized questions, such as:

• Which sequences would benefit from later in-points and/or earlier outpoints? (Most scenes are better entered or left in action rather than opened and closed).
• What needs to be done for each character to exert maximum impact, and in which sequences?
• Which sequences cry out for special attention to rhythm and pacing?
• How effective is the ending?
• Are there still false endings before (or worse, after) the true one?

Again, ask the editor to fix only the glaring faults before having another showing.

SEE THE WHOLE FILM

Even if work has been done on only two sequences, make a practice of running the whole film. A film is like a tent: Change one pole height or guy-rope length and stresses alter the entire tent's structure. Never go long without examining changes in the context of the whole work, and never undertake major changes without a fresh viewing of the whole film.

EDITING MIMICS AN OBSERVING CONSCIOUSNESS

We have said that how and why we cut between speakers in a dialogue scene is based upon whatever it is that makes us shift our attention in ordinary life. This is best seen by observing how eye contact and eyeline shifts function in real life, for these are the outward signs of shifting attention. The practiced editor builds on eyeline changes extensively, but it is important to work from human behavior rather than disembodied theory.

Counterpointing visual and aural impressions is only an extension of what was called montage early in film's history. Because film was silent, film grammar developed the juxtaposition of two shots to imply contrast, relatedness, or continuity. But it is the audience's imagination that supplies the relational links between shots or scenes. I contend that the audience's enjoyment comes not from what they see and hear, but from what they imagine or project as they pursue the narrative and its ambiguous subtexts. Few filmmakers seem consciously aware of this. If you grasp this principle and find effective ways to put it into effect, your work will immediately bear the marks of sophistication.

The use of contrapuntal sound came relatively late and was, I believe, developed by documentary editors in search of narrative compression for lengthy materials drawn directly from life. In fiction filmmaking, Robert Altman's films— beginning with M*A*S*H (1970) and continuing to Gosford Park (2002)—show great faith in the audience's readiness to interpret densely layered sound tracks. Altman's pioneer sound recordist even built a 16-track location sound recorder capable of recording from multiple radio microphones to eliminate the whole problem of miking individuals during shooting. Today you can use two little eight-track DAT machines slaved together and a lot of radio mikes if you want to do the same thing.

EYE CONTACT

Take the common situation in student projects where two diners have an intimate conversation across a restaurant table. Inexperienced actors play it by gazing soulfully into each other's eyes as they speak. But this is an idea of how people converse, not what happens in life, so it gives phony results, either in acting or used as a guiding principle for editing. Go to a restaurant and do some people watching. What really happens, as always, is far more subtle and interesting. It may be unusual for either person to make eye contact more than fleetingly. The situation varies with the individual and with the situation, but generally we reserve the intensity of eye contact for special moments. Normally we use eye contact to:

• Determine information from the other person's expression so we know how next to act on him or her
• Check what effect we have just had
• Put additional pressure on the other person as we act on him or her
• See from the person's body language or expression what is meant when he or she is acting on us

In each case we glance only momentarily at the other person's face to rapidly gather information. In subtle ways, each speaker is either pressing or being pressed. Only at crucial moments does one search the other for facial or behavioral enlightenment. Much of the time the listener's gaze rests on isolated or neutral objects while he or she mentally focuses on what the other person means or how the other person means to act. Hearing may be totally focused on the other person for the duration of the conversation. Or, it, too, may wander. Eyes and ears move their attention independently but are always working in tandem, feeding information into the overworked brain.

APPLYING THE ANALOGY TO FILM

Film, unlike literature, is handicapped because it has difficulty in portraying interior life. But where people look and what they see always indicates (even when they try to hide it) what they feel, so we can and do show these shifts through editing. This can imply a special significance to each moment of change. Through editing choices, we do have a powerful tool to imply inner life and suggest character contours.

While observing a couple in conversation, consciously play the Concerned Observer role and be highly aware of how and why your eyeline shifts between the speakers. Notice how:

• You often followed the shifts in their eyelines, wanting to see what they were looking at, and involuntarily switching your gaze from subject to object
• How your mind hypothesized a new motivation after each eyeline change
• How there is a rhythm to your eyeline changes (controlled by the shifting contours of the conversation itself)
• How your eyes made their own judgment about who and what to look at, often on the basis of something on the periphery that demanded a closer look

Independently, your center of attention switches back and forth, often following the conversing pair's action and reaction, their changes of eyeline, and their physical action, but also making choices based on your own evolving thoughts and hypothesis, not just on outside stimulation alone.

Notice that your eyes often leave someone speaking to examine his effect on the listener even while he still speaks. Unconsciously, the Observer “edits” according to his own developing insight, looking for the most telling information. Making a hypothesis is like shining a light ahead in the dark.

To reproduce on film what you have been observing, you would need to cover each speaker from the viewpoint of the other, and add a third viewpoint to encompass them both as you, the Observer, see them. This last point of view is outside the enclosed consciousness of the two speakers, and because it shows them in a more detached, observational way, it implies a third, outside point of view. Add two complementary over-shoulder shots, and you have completed the basic movie coverage.

Flexibility of viewpoint allows the director not only to structure what the spectator sees, but to suggest whose point of view and whose state of mind the spectator shares at any particular moment. This probing, cinematic way of seeing is modeled on the way we unconsciously delve, visually and imaginatively, into any event that interests us. The film narrative process is thus never objective, but instead it reproduces the moving, selective consciousness of a particular observer.

According to choices made in editing, the audience can now either identify with one or another of the characters inside the story or with the more detached perspective of the invisible Storyteller/Observer. While character A talks, the film might allow the audience to look detachedly at either A or B, to share the perspective of either one upon the other, or to look at both of them in long shot. The Observer turns into the Storyteller when the Observer's faithful, thoughtful watching (such as you might see in a documentary) becomes a more active, identifying involvement with its own distinct attitudes and expectations of the characters and its own ideas about the underlying meaning and truth.

Though observation is often routed through an involved character in the film, it can also come powerfully from outside the characters and imply that the Storyteller is struggling to understand the characters by trying out different ways of seeing them.

INFLUENCING SUBTEXTS

ALTERING PERFORMANCE RHYTHMS

A very significant dramatic control now rests in the cutting room for any scene adequately covered. This concerns not only who or what is shown at any particular moment, but how much time each character takes to process what he sees or hears. Though this timing originates with the actors, it is finally controlled by the editor whenever there is sufficient coverage. Reaction time—which is the inner action that occurs before outward action—contributes hugely to the power and consistency of a scene's subtext.

THE POWER OF SUBTEXT

Inexperienced film actors, learning lines and repeating them in numerous takes and angles, tend to drop into a set rhythm and level the characters' inner lives into a shared average. If this shows up in the first cuts, it is deadly and must be reconfigured in editing to recover some of the changeableness and unpredictability of spontaneous action. Imagine a two-person, interior scene where a man asks a simple question of a woman who is visiting his apartment for dinner: “Do you think it's cold outside?” Depending on the context and on her nonverbal reaction, this could imply several subtexts. He could be saying:

• “Because we're about to leave, do you think I need warmer clothes?”
• “Let's not go to the party after all.”
• “Do you want to stay the night with me?”

What makes the audience choose the most likely subtext? How the lines are said and how the listener reacts to the speaker tell you a lot. An easy and unreflecting “No” is very different from one delivered after a momentary silence or one that is long delayed by apparent internal struggle. Not only do such timing differences and behavioral nuances direct what we imagine, but prior events (if the man visited the doctor) also condition the subtext we supply. Thus, the order of material in a film and the amount of apparent thought each character devotes to each part of their interaction will imply quite different subtexts and lead the audience to generate a whole set of open questions. This is highly desirable because it keeps up dramatic tension.

RESCUING SUBTEXT IN EDITING

When performances are not stellar, and particularly if they are uneven, sensitive editing can drive up the stakes in a scene so it acquires more intensity and a more defined point of view. By exerting fine control over the original rhythms of reply, eyeline changes, actions, and reactions, the scene can become a unified entity that nobody could quite foresee.

Of course, no editor can change a character's rate of speech or reaction times in a single, unbroken take. But much potential opens up when the scene is covered from more than one angle or image size. Look at Figure 40-1. Diagram A is a representation of the master take, a timing that the actors reproduced in all subsequent takes. The diagram shows picture and sound as separate strands, much as you see them while cutting film.

In Diagram B, the cut to close-up simply preserves the actors' original timing, though merely by using it the audience begins to expect a greater significance in her reply. Diagram C uses overlap cutting (see following section for extended

explanation) to make her reply come as quickly as possible. Diagram D, however, doubles her reaction time by adding together the pauses from both takes. Diagram E goes still further by double-cutting her thinking and his waiting reaction before cutting back to her in thought before she replies. To create this degree of delay you will need a complementary close-up reaction shot on him and a second take on her from which to steal the extra close-shot reaction.

Intelligent choices of reaction and rebalancing of performance reaction times can add massively to the credibility of the characters' inner lives, and thus to the apparent choices and reactions that compel each into action or speech. This contributes greatly to the overall impact of the film by aiding and abetting performances and creating the grounds for us to infer thought, feeling, and reaction.

VISUAL AND AURAL EDITING RHYTHMS: AN ANALOGY IN MUSIC

The interplay of editing's rhythmic elements needs further explanation if the possibilities are to be visible. Though everything in editing takes place in minutes, seconds, and frames, dramatic decisions can no more be made from script measurements or calculations with a stopwatch than music can be composed using a metronome.

RHYTHMIC INTERPLAY

Music offers a useful analogy here if we examine an edited version of a conversation between two people. We have two different but interlocked rhythms going. First there is the rhythmic pattern of their voices in a series of sentences that ebb and flow, speed up, slow down, halt, restart, and continue. Set against this, and often taking a rhythmic cue from the sound rhythms, is the visual tempo set up by the complex shifts of visual choice, outlined previously and evoked in the interplay of cutting, camera composition, and movement. The visual and aural streams proceed independently yet are rhythmically related, like the relation between music and the physical movements of two dancers.

HARMONY

When you hear a speaker and see his face as he talks, sound and vision are allied like a melody with its harmony. We could, however, break the literalness of always hearing and seeing the same thing (harmony) by making the transition from scene to scene into a temporary puzzle.

COUNTERPOINT

We are going to cut from a woman talking about her vanished husband to a shot panning across a view of tawdry seashore hotels. We start with the speaker in picture and sound and then cut to the panning shot while she is still speaking, letting her remaining words play out over the hotels. The effect is this: While our subject is talking about her now fatherless children and the bitterness she feels toward the absent husband, we glance away and in our mind's eye imagine where he might now be. The film version of this scene can suggest the mental (or even physical) imagery of someone present and listening. The speaker's words are powerfully counterpointed by the image, and the image lets loose our imagination, so we ponder what he is doing and what is going on behind the crumbling façades of the hotels.

Counterpointing one kind of sound against another kind of image has its variations. One usage is simply to illustrate. We see taking place what the woman's words begin to describe: “… and the last I heard, he was in Florida….”

Many an elegant contrapuntal sequence in a feature film is the work of an editor trained in documentary who is trying to raise the movie above a pedestrian script, as Ralph Rosenblum relates in When the Shooting Stops … the Cutting Begins (New York: Viking Press, 1979). Directing and editing documentaries has contributed importantly to the screen fluency of Robert Altman, Lindsay Anderson, Carroll Ballard, Werner Herzog, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Alain Tanner, and Haskell Wexler, to name but a few of the better-known fiction directors.

DISSONANCE

Another editing approach exploits discrepancies. For instance, while we hear a salesman telling his new assistant his theory of dynamic customer persuasion, we see the same man listing the virtues of a hideaway bed in a monotone so dreary that his customer is bored into a trance. This discrepancy, if we pursue the musical allusion, is a dissonance. It spurs the viewer to create a resolution. Comparing the man's beliefs (heard) with his practice (seen), the viewer is driven to conclude, “Here is someone who does not know himself.” This technique of ambiguous revelation is equally viable in documentary film, where it may have originated. Documentary has a big problem getting the audience to look critically at reality. People think documentary is just a record when, in fact, it, too, is a construct like fiction and must use all the devices at its disposal to alert the audience to critical subtexts and hidden dimensions.

THE PROBLEM OF ACHIEVING A FLOW

After you run your evolving cut a few times, it will strike you more and more as a series of clunky blocks of material, with a distressing lack of flow. Dialogue scenes in particular seem to bog down, being centered as they probably are upon showing each speaker. First there is a block of this speaker, then a block of that speaker, then a block of both, and so on. Even sequences seem to change from one to the next in a blocky way, like watching train boxcars pass, each discrete and hitched to its fellows with a plain link device. I think of this kind of editing as boxcar cutting.

How to achieve the effortless flow seen in the cinema? To move in this direction we must recall our Concerned Observer principle and reflect on how human perception functions.

COUNTERPOINT IN PRACTICE: UNIFYING MATERIAL INTO A FLOW

Once you have improved on the script's order for the material, you will want to combine sound and action in a form that takes advantage of counterpoint techniques.

In practice this means bringing together the sound from one shot with the image from another, as we have said. To return to my example of a salesman

with a great self-image who proved to have a poor performance, you could show this on the screen by merging two sets of materials, one of him talking to his assistant over a coffee break (sequence A) and the other of him in the salesroom making a pitch to clients (sequence B).

We can edit the materials into juxtaposition. The conservative, first-assembly method would alternate segments as in Figure 40-2A, a block of explanation, then a block of sales talk, then another block of explanation and another of sales, and so on until the point had been made. This is a common, though clumsy, way to accomplish the objective, and after a few cuts, both the technique and the message become as predictable as a boxer slugging a punching bag.

Instead of crudely alternating the sequences, let's integrate the two sets of materials as in Figure 40-2B. Start Harold explaining his sales philosophy (sequence A) during the salesmen's coffee break. While he's showing off to the younger men, we begin fading up the sound from the salesroom (sequence B) in which we hear Harold's aggressive greetings. As he reaches full volume we cut to the salesroom picture (sequence B) to see he has trapped a reluctant customer and is launching into his sales pitch. After this is established we fade up the coffee break conversation again (sequence A). We hear the salesman say how he first fascinates the customer. We cut to sequence A's picture and see Harold has moved uncomfortably close to his juniors. He tells them how you must now make the customers admit they like the merchandise. While the voices continue we cut back to the salesroom (sequence B) picture only to see the customer backing away angrily. We bring up sequence B's sound as the customer says she only came to buy a pillow.

Notice that in the overlap areas (x, y, and z) of Figure 40-2B, picture from one sequence is being counterpointed against sound from another. Instead of having description and practice separated as discrete blocks of material, description is now laid against practice, and ideas against reality in a much harder-hitting counterpoint.

The benefits are multiple. The total of the two sequences is shorter and more sprightly. Conversation is kept to an interesting minimum while the behavioral material—the salesroom evidence against which we measure his ideas—is now in the majority. The counterpointing of essentials allows the combination of materials to be pared down to essentials, giving what is presented a muscular, spare quality usually lacking when film writing is theatrically conceived. There is a much closer and more telling juxtaposition between vocalized theory and actual performance, and the audience is challenged to reconcile the gap between the man's ideas and what he is actually doing.

Counterpoint editing cannot really be worked out in scripting, because entry and exit points depend on the nuances of playing or camerawork. But if both scenes are shot in their entirety, one becomes a parallel action to the other. The resulting sequence can be worked out from the materials themselves, and will reliably and effectively compress the two.

There is a shooting/editing project to practice these skills in Chapter 6: Shooting Projects. Look for Project 6-2C, Vocal Counterpoint and Point of View. This adds a vocal counterpoint to action, but you might want to try improvising the salesman scene used as an example earlier, using one scene as parallel action to the other and fusing the two in counterpoint.

THE AUDIENCE

DRAMA TAKES PLACE IN THE AUDIENCE'S IMAGINATION

By creating a texture of sound and picture that requires an interpretation, a film can juxtapose the antithetical with great economy and kindle the audience's involvement in developing ideas to resolve the story's dialectical tensions. Now the audience is no longer passively identifying and submitting to the controlling will of the movie, but rather it is stimulated to live an imaginative, critical inner life in response to the film. Critical awareness like this is what Berthold Brecht, striving to arrest the audience habit of identifying, set out to accomplish in the theater.

THE AUDIENCE AS ACTIVE RATHER THAN PASSIVE PARTICIPANTS

This more demanding texture of word and image thrusts the spectator into a critical relationship with the action presented and encourages active rather than passive participation in watching. The Storyteller has developed a contract with the audience that promises not just diversion but a challenge to interpret, a chance to weigh what is seen against what is heard and to balance an idea against its contrary. The film will now sometimes confirm and other times contradict what had seemed true. As in life, the viewer must use critical judgment when, as in our example, a man's self-image turns out to be unreliable.

More interesting ways to use juxtaposition and counterpoint emerge when the basic coupling of sound and picture is broken. For instance, you might show an interior with a bored teenage girl looking out a store window at people in the street. A radio somewhere offscreen is broadcasting the report of a dog show as she watches a boy and his mother having a violent argument outside. The girl is too abstracted to notice the counterpoint. Though we see the mother and child, we hear the commentator detailing the breeds and their traits. There is an ironic contrast between all the different planes of consciousness: an argument is raised to the level of a public spectacle, yet our main character is too naive or too inward-looking to notice. Very succinctly and with not a little humor, both her unconsciousness and a satirical view of mother and child relationships have been compressed into a 30-second shot. Now that's economy!

THE OVERLAP CUT

DIALOGUE SEQUENCES

The overlap cut is another contrapuntal editing device useful for blurring the unnatural seams between shots. It works by bringing a speaker's voice in before his picture, or vice versa, and this removes the level cuts that produce boxcar cutting.

Figure 40-3 is a straight-cut, boxcar version of a conversation between A and B. Whoever speaks is shown on the screen, and before long this becomes predictable and boring. You could alleviate this by slugging in some reaction shots (not shown).

Now look at the same conversation using overlap cuts (also called lap cuts or L cuts). Person A starts speaking, but then we hear B's voice (during overlap x). We wait a sentence before cutting to him. B is interrupted by A (during overlap y), and this time we hold on B's frustrated expression before cutting to A driving his point home. Before A has finished, because we are now interested in B's rising anger, we cut back to him shaking his head (during overlap z). When A has finished, B, whom we have seen waiting, caps the discussion, and this ends the sequence.

How do you decide when you should make overlap cuts? Let's return to our trusty guide to editing: human consciousness at work. Imagine you are witnessing a conversation between two people; you have to turn your head from one to the other. Seldom will you turn at the right moment to catch the next speaker beginning; only a suspiciously omniscient intelligence could be so accurate. Such omniscience in a movie destroys the illusion of watching something spontaneous. Inexperienced or downright bad editors often make neat, level cuts between speakers, and the results give a prepackaged, premeditated effect.

Because in real life you can seldom predict who will speak next, it is hearing a new voice that tells you where to look. If a film or video editor is to convince us that a dialogue sequence comes spontaneously from real life, he or she must replicate the disjunctive shifts we unconsciously make as our eyes follow our hearing or when our hearing (that is, concentration) catches up late with something we have just seen.

The guideline to effective cutting is always to be found from building the unfolding consciousness of the story's point of view. This is modeled on the motives and intelligence of what I have called the concerned and observant Storyteller. This spectator and guide is engaged not just in hearing and seeing each speaker as he speaks (which would be boring) but also in interpreting what is going on inside each protagonist through clues embedded in moments of action, reaction, or hypothesis developed by the observer. Through what the Concerned Observer notices from the evidence shown on the screen, the Storyteller's consciousness of the events is subtly established in addition to that of point-of-view characters—and sometimes in contradiction to theirs.

For filmmaking, the message is clear. For a film to be true to life and to implant in the audience the developing subjectivity of the critical observer, the editor must make sound and picture changeover points as staggered cuts much more often than level ones.

SEQUENCE TRANSITIONS

In the worst and most uncinematic scene transition, a character exits the frame leaving an empty set, and the film cuts to another empty set in anticipation of his arrival. This is really proscenium arch theater, a kind of clumsy scene shifting that puts a huge hiccup in a film's momentum. Inexperienced directors often engineer scenes to start and stop this way, but a good editor quickly looks for ways to axe the dead footage.

Just as there are dialogue overlap cuts, so are there live transitions from one sequence to another by using the lap cut. Imagine a scene with a boy and girl talking about going out together. The boy says he thinks her mother will try and stop them. The girl says, “Oh don't worry about her; I can talk her round.” Cut to the next scene where the girl asks the question of her mother, who closes the refrigerator with a bang and says firmly, “Absolutely not!”

First, it is redundant to restate the girl's situation in this way. A level cut would take us instantly from the boy/girl sequence to the mother/girl scene where the mother answers, “Absolutely not!” A more interesting way of leaving the boy/girl scene would be to cut to the mother at the refrigerator while the girl is still saying “… I can talk her round.” As she finishes, the mother slams the fridge door and says “Absolutely not!” as the camera pans to show the girl already in the scene.

Another way to create an elision instead of a creaky scene change would be to hold on the boy and girl and have the mother's angry voice say “Absolutely not!” over the tail end of their shot. You would use the surprise of the new voice to motivate lap cutting to the mother in picture as the new scene continues.

Either of these devices (sound trailing or sound leading picture) serves to make less noticeable the coupling of one sequence and the next. Though you sometimes want to bring a scene to a slow closure, perhaps with a fade out, more often you want to keep up momentum. Though filmmakers choose dissolves because a level cut jerks the viewer too rudely into a new place and time, the dissolve also inserts a rest period between scenes and may dissipate your valuable forward momentum.

SOUND EFFECTS AS SCENE ELISION

You have seen this overlap technique done with sound effects. It might look like this: The schoolteacher rolls reluctantly out of her bed, and as she ties up her hair we hear the increasingly loud sound of a playground until we cut to her on duty at the school door. Because our curiosity demands an answer to the riddle of children's voices in a woman's bedroom, we do not find the location switch arbitrary or theatrical. Anticipatory sound dragged our attention forward to the next sequence.

Another type of overlap cut makes sound work another way; we cut from the teacher leading kids chanting their multiplication tables to her getting food out of her refrigerator at home. The dreary class sound subsides slowly while she exhaustedly eats some leftovers.

In the first example, anticipatory sound draws her forward out of her bedroom, while in the second, holdover sound persists even after she gets home. Because the Storyteller shows how the din exists in her mind, the implication in both cases is that she finds her workplace unpleasant. So overlap cutting does more than soften transitions between scenes; it here implies what dominates our schoolteacher's inner consciousness. We could suggest something quite different by playing it another way and letting the silence of her home trail out into the workplace. In this scenario she is seen at work with her bedroom radio still playing softly before its sound is swamped by the rising uproar of feet echoing in a corridor. At the end of the day, her TV sitcom could displace her voice giving out the dictation, and we cut to her relaxing at home.

By using sound and picture transitions creatively, we can transport the viewer forward without cumbersome (and in film, expensive) optical effects like dissolves, fades, or (God help us) wipes. We are also able to scatter important clues about the characters' subjective lives and inner imaginings, something film cannot otherwise easily do.

SUMMARY

In the previous examples, we have established that our consciousness can probe our surroundings, either:

• Monodirectionally (eyes and ears on the same information source)
• Bidirectionally (eyes and ears on different sources)
• Ears pull eyes forward to seeing a new setting
• Eyes pull ears forward to hearing a new setting

Film suggests these aspects of consciousness by making the audience share the sensations of a character's shifting planes of consciousness and association. A welcome and money-saving result from creative overlap cutting is that you can completely dispense with the fade or dissolve.

HELP, I CAN'T UNDERSTAND!

These cutting techniques are hard to grasp from a book, even though, as I have said, they mimic the way human awareness shifts. If this is getting beyond you, do not worry. The best way to understand editing is to take a complex and interesting sequence in a feature film and, by running a shot or two at a time on a VCR, make a precise log of the relationship between the track elements and the visuals. Chapter 5: Seeing with a Moviemaker's Eye, Project 5–2: Editing Analysis is an editing self-education program with a list of editing techniques for you to find and analyze. Try shooting and editing your own sequences from the directions in Chapter 6: Shooting Projects, Projects 6–5 through 6–10. After some hands-on experience, return to this section and it should be much clearer.