7

A Brief History of the Practice

► Sharp Objects

It all began with a pair of scissors (Figure 7.1). Throughout the majority of filmmaking history motion pictures were handcrafted on workbenches using physical filmstrips, a medium such as glue or tape to stitch the individual clips together, and scissors. Eventually the scissors gave way to splicers, with names like Guillotine and Rivas.

Before the invention of plastic film stock, nitrate was used. Anyone who has seen the projection room scene in Inglourious Basterds (2009) or Cinema Paradiso (1988) will remember the graphic example of nitrate’s dangerous potential. Nitrate is, after all, the main ingredient of gunpowder.

Yet film editors handled this stuff every day. Film editing possessed other dangers as well from sharp blades, pins and hooks, fast-moving machinery, and toxic substances like film cleaner. In the early 1950s a new material, cellulose acetate film, made its debut. Eastman Kodak, the manufacturer, dubbed it safety film, since it did not pose the same fire risks as nitrate. Clips could be spliced together with clear tape.

Around the same time another medium appeared—videotape. Its primary role would encompass the new world of broadcast television. From Ampex’s early 2-inch Quad black and white tape, video editing advanced through the decades toward digital color videotape. This was edited on computer-based systems such as Editflex, CMX, and Montage, and more recently on Avid Media Composer, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro. Meanwhile, celluloid film remained the primary medium for editing theatrical motion pictures.

With the advent of digital nonlinear editing, film images could be digitized into computers, edited virtually, then matched back to film. This was the case until the late 1990s when both film and videotape began their decline with the arrival of high-definition digital video. Yet through all this technological change, the constant that remains is the human heart. Ultimately, it is not the machine but the person who constructs the film through editing.

The aesthetic approach to editing has continued to evolve. The films of the 1950s feel very different than those of the 1960s, and so on up until today. One of the earliest milestones in the art of film editing appeared in 1903 with The Great Train Robbery, Edwin S. Porter’s highly popular one-reel movie (Figure 7.2). Up until that moment, films in America followed a linear and simplistic storyline. Prior to the editing of Porter’s silent black and white film, a western’s tale would proceed something like this: A group of outlaws enter a train station, draw their guns, tie up the station master, steal the loot, ride out of town, try to avoid pursuit by the sheriff, and are finally brought to justice. With The Great Train Robbery all of that changed. In one simple cut.

After the bad guys hijack the train, rob the passengers, rejoin their horses in the woods, and ride away, the scene cuts back to a parallel moment in time at the train station where the station master’s daughter enters, finds her father tied up, and frees him. This single cut back to the train station changed everything. It allowed filmmakers to transport their audiences through time and space. With parallel editing multiple storylines could unfold to reveal simultaneous occurrences in various locations, giving the viewer an omniscient view of the world. Immediately stories grew in complexity, weaving back and forth in time and space, giving glimpses into the separate but related actions of protagonist and antagonist.

These early advances in editing art were not confined to America. Much of the understanding of how editing works and how it enhances a film’s impact appeared around the same time in Russia. The filmmakers Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Vertov, and Pudovkin were teachers and theorists, as well as filmmakers.

Eisenstein’s films, including Battleship Potemkin (1925) with its classic Odessa Steps sequence, employed the theories that he and others, notably Kuleshov and Pudovkin, expounded. If one looks closely, it becomes apparent that the Odessa Steps scene is made up of a long series of neutral shots: a woman’s face, boots marching down steps, a gun, another face, and so on (Figure 7.3). Constructed together these images that, on their own, have very little impact create a devastating exposé on the ruthless violence against the Russian people by the Cossacks. This is a lesson for all filmmakers to keep in mind—it is not the grand, highly choreographed shot that will ultimately tell the story. Instead, a string of seemingly neutral images will convey the greatest meaning and emotion.

That is not to dismiss the aesthetic joy derived from a beautifully choreographed shot that conveys multiple bits of information and lasts for many seconds, even minutes. But ultimately the power of a simple, single shot cannot be denied. Yet, throughout the history of cinema, this basic concept is often forgotten. Even La La Land (2016), with its extravagant single-take dance sequences, gathers its greatest emotional impact from basic intercutting of the main characters’ dialogue and reactions.

In earlier decades, movies often depended on long master shots where characters moved through the scene or sat and talked. The wide shot depicting the robbery of the train’s passengers in The Great Train Robbery goes on for well over a minute while the robbers confront each passenger in turn. Unfortunately, much of the emotion that can be found in the characters’ eyes and expressions, as well as the feelings derived from the physical juxtaposition of images, was lost. These early films were directly influenced by a similar but undeniably separate discipline—theater.

The concept of the proscenium arch, allowing a wide image framed by a limited perspective, infiltrated much of early cinema. Even Hitchcock, in order to perform his non-editing experiment in Rope (1948), relied on a Broadway play to help his experiment succeed. Even though Hitchcock’s camera dollies back and forth in order to vary the angles, it remains within a confined proscenium. Barbarella, the cult sci-fi hit from the 1960s, suffers from long and tedious moments without the advantage of more active cutting. As the power of editing became more and more apparent, directors introduced more varied coverage commensurate with the vast and vivid opportunities that active editing brings.

Two of Eisenstein’s main theories remain as significant and powerful today as when he first expressed them. These are film time and montage.

Tincture of Time

Many ailments, from the common cold to lost love, are cured by what doctors refer to as the “tincture of time”. Time alters everything. But editing alters time.

In a sense, time is all that human beings have. How we spend it determines the value of our days. Perhaps part of a motion picture’s attraction resides in the fact that it allows us to control something which we have little control over—time. While we build clocks, schedule appointments, and occupy our thoughts with past and future events, we have no way of controlling the flow of time. Except through editing. Eisenstein’s concept of film time illustrates cinema’s ability to disrupt the flow of time. Granted a film takes place in the circumscribed space of about two hours, but within that confine an audience can visit the distant past or future, slow seconds into minutes, or accelerate the stubborn movement of events.

Eisenstein’s revelation that real time does not matter as much as perceived or psychological time informs editors’ decisions to this day. The fleeting time one experiences over moments of great joy as compared to the seemingly endless time that weighs upon us when we’re forced to endure an activity we despise or to suffer pain or sorrow reflects this notion.

In film, the increase or diminishment of tension and emotion relates directly to this sense of time. This is affected by the length of shots that in turn relates to the technical use of the trim function. The plasticity of film time exists due to the ability to extend or contract a shot or to add or lift multiple shots in a scene.

Tarantino and Time

Quentin Tarantino and his editor, Sally Menke, are modern masters of manipulating film time. The opening scenes of films like Pulp Fiction (1994) or Inglourious Basterds succeed in part due to the ability to extend prosaic dialogue and seemingly neutral moments leading up to impending doom, thus creating excruciating suspense. In Inglourious Basterds the deceptively leisurely pace of the opening scene where the kindly dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet) is visited by the seemingly mild-mannered Nazi SS officer Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz) goes on and on, far beyond the endurance of most scenes. Yet we cannot turn away from the frightening prospect that the Jewish family the farmer has sequestered beneath the floorboards will be viciously exterminated as soon as Colonel Landa finishes the second glass of milk he has so blithely requested from his host.

Later, the tables are turned as The Bear Jew (Eli Roth), a baseball bat–wielding executioner, is summoned to kill a captured Nazi officer who refuses to divulge the whereabouts of soldiers waiting to ambush the crew of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Employing Kuleshov’s juxtaposition of neutral images, Tarantino creates tension by cutting between the officer’s paralyzed expression and vacant shots of a dark passageway where only the increasingly loud sound of a bat tapping against the brick walls captures our attention. What makes these scenes work is the juxtaposition of uninflected images and sounds combined with critical choices in terms of shot length. Too short and the effect is lost. Too long and the tension dissipates as the audience becomes comfortable with the image. The precise timing of each shot torques the tension to unbearable levels.

Perhaps the most revealing display of film time occurs in Tarantino’s classic film, Pulp Fiction. Hit man Vincent Vega (John Travolta) races to the home of his drug dealer, Lance (Eric Stoltz), desperate to revive an unconscious Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), the wife of his boss. Mia has overdosed on heroin, having mistaken it for cocaine. Lance determines that the way to save Mia’s life is an adrenaline shot straight to her heart. But first they have to find Lance’s little black medical book that describes how to perform the procedure. The ensuing search by Lance and his wife Jody (Rosanna Arquette) takes place in real time and demonstrates a vivid contrast between clock time and film time. The entire search is covered in a single handheld shot without any cutting. This is real time.

Once the medical book is located the scene switches into film time. The syringe is loaded and the needle aimed toward a red ink mark they placed on Mia’s chest. Vincent asks for a three second countdown. The three seconds, however, take nearly 20 seconds by film time. As Lance counts, “One … two … three …” the editor slows actual time, building suspense, by cutting from a wide shot of the group (Figure 7.4) to Mia’s face, the needle, Lance, Vincent, the mark on Mia’s chest, Jody, and finally Vincent as he plunges the needle into Mia’s chest. The adrenaline has an immediate effect and she lurches upward, alive.

Montage

Another important theory is Eisenstein’s five types of montage. He expressed these as rhythmic, metric, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual. While Eisenstein’s writings expound a rather complex analysis of these terms, it is possible to condense them into some basic concepts that we use today. Two primary points are metric and rhythmic montage. In metric montage, mathematical measurement plays a role. As with music, the cuts are composed of precise, measured beats. The clip length is calculated for effect. Shorter clips often yield excitement while longer ones feel more laconic, irrespective of the action within the frame. Editors usually determine clip length based on feel—is the image long enough to convey its informative and emotional content but not so long that its impact dissipates? In some cases, however, a purely mathematical approach can be effective. Establishing shots, if of a similar shot size and complexity, can be calculated based simply on frame length. Selecting three shots—remember the Rule of Three—and cutting them to the exact same length produces a staccato-like effect.

Another important type of montage is rhythmic. This refers primarily to the movement within the frame. The editor studies the action and uses the movement to determine the beginning and end of the cut. This approach follows the rhythm of the actors’ and camera’s movements, allowing those to dictate the entrance into and the exit from the selected shot. In its most basic form, editing involves a conjunction of metric and rhythmic montage. The pace, feel, and energy of each clip is determined by the physical length of the shot combined with the movement within the frame.

In a conversational scene, however, dialogue generally dictates the cut length. As described in Chapter 12, the best approach is to initially cut in on the beginning of the dialogue and cut out at the end of the line, then adjust—using the trim tool—based on feel. (It should be noted that at the time when Eisenstein developed his theories, film sound had not yet been invented, so there is no discussion of dialogue editing in his initial theories. The only sound the audience heard came from the musical accompaniment of a live orchestra.)

Another, more particular, form of montage is intellectual montage. This acknowledges the associative quality that images and scenes can have in relation to each other. Just as our brains associate similar experiences or reference one image with another, as in dreams, intellectual montage capitalizes on relational ideas. Unlike most editing that depends primarily on feeling, this form of montage finds its root in intellectual conceptualization. It equates or compares one idea with another. Take for example the baptism sequence in The Godfather (1972). Here Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the prodigal son recently returned from serving his country, having resisted the pull of his family’s murderous business, discovers that the fate of his clan rests on his shoulders. To prevail in a gang war he must strike first. To accomplish this he orders hits on the five other mafia families with the goal of wiping out the heads of those families. From pacifist he rises to the most brutal butcher of all. Director Francis Ford Coppola and his editors William Reynolds and Peter Zinner designed a montage sequence equating Michael’s baptism into the world of violence with the baptism of his niece (played by newborn Sophia Coppola) in a church (Figures 7.5a and 7.5b). This intellectual montage, employing the affinity of the baptisms while contrasting the peaceful church with the orgy of violence, became one of the most effective scenes in cinema.

Another important construction form is tonal montage. Tonal montage presents a mood, emotion, atmosphere, impression. It can be stylistic and abstract. Eisenstein suggested that it could involve images of weather or calm pastoral scenes to evoke an emotional response. The title sequence in Up in the Air (2009) reflects Eisenstein’s original conception of tonal montage, since it incorporates meteorological images along with vast landscapes of farmers’ fields and cities seen from the air. This is all set to the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land.” The images transition with a variety of customized wipes that move the viewer from one scene to another creating an uplifting, adventurous, and omniscient feel. The irony of this becomes clear when the film’s disillusioned protagonist realizes the limits of his peripatetic life.

Lastly, Eisenstein presented the idea of overtonal montage. This combines elements of the other forms to create an array of emotions, and accounts for some of cinema’s stunning montage sequences. One vivid example is found in the film Adaptation (2002). Though the script—written by Charlie and Donald Kaufman, adapted from the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean—originally contained the concept for a short montage, the design, placement, scope, and utility evolved greatly in the editing room. The script begins with a prehistoric terrain where “Volcanoes erupt. Meteors bombard. Lighting strikes, concussing murky pools of water. Silence.” Then it cuts to a modern day living room and the subtitle: “Hollywood, CA., Four Billion and Forty Years Later.” This begins the darkly comic, quasi-autobiographical tale of a neurotic Hollywood screenplay writer.

The final theatrical version begins very differently, however, with a home movie–like portrayal of director John Malkovich’s set. The hero of Adaptation appears as the spurned and ignored writer wandering the set. The film then devolves back in time to a more complex representation of the montage that was envisioned in the script. A subtitle appears, but instead of announcing a later Hollywood, it presents a primordial one: “Hollywood, Four Billion Years Earlier,” a more amusing concept. Then through montage, the scene evolves forward through the dramatic history of life on earth up until the birth of the story’s narrator in modern day America. The montage is a mixture of captivating images, slow motion, time-lapse, stock footage, animation—some quite abstract—accompanied by music and sound effects. A modern-day display of Eisenstein’s overtonal montage theory, it engenders feelings of awe, horror, disgust, desire, fear, delight, and elation.

The Jump Cut

To challenge the existing order is the mandate of youth, and the young filmmakers of the 1950s French New Wave, influenced by the popularity of French existentialism and American film noir, disrupted the traditional conceptions of cinema and, in so doing, altered the future of film editing.

Though the early Russian film school of Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov, and others set down the basic principles of montage at the turn of the last century, it was not until the late 1950s that a cadre of film critics writing for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma decided to pick up portable Éclair cameras and mount an assault on the traditional concept of narrative cinema—a classical cinema that had settled into a complacent methodology. In so doing they liberated filmmakers from the assumed constraints of style and narrative with such films as Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (Breathless; 1960) and Weekend (1967), and Francois Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player; 1960), Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows; 1959), and Jules et Jim (1962). Godard’s pronouncement that “a film should have a beginning, middle and end—but not necessarily in that order” still rings true today as more and more films adopt a nonlinear story structure.

Godard’s experiments are particularly noteworthy. He fluctuated between the extended take, such as the long tracking shot in Weekend, to the quick jump cuts in Breathless.

As sometimes happens, technical necessity resulted in artistic innovation. When the final cut of Breathless was deemed too long for a theatrical release, the director and editors began lopping out the boring parts. A conversation between Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Patricia (Jean Seberg), filmed from behind Patricia as Michel drives his stolen car through Paris, constantly leaps forward in time, causing the locales to shift in the background due to the excised dialogue. Where normally an editor would cut away to the other character—in this case Michel—in order to hide the gaps, Godard chose to remain on Patricia so the viewer experiences the leaps in action. Later, in Patricia’s apartment (Figure 7.6), the actors dart from bed to window to the other side of the room in a series of jump cuts. These abrupt moves catch the audience off guard and direct their attention to the filmmaker’s presence. Like Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater where the performers consistently remind the audience that they are watching a play, the New Wave often broke the fourth wall, pulling the viewer from the uninterrupted dream state that Hollywood strived to maintain and reminding him that he was watching a movie. The Brechtian idea of allowing the actor to leave his role and address the audience was also manifested in film by the New Wave. Like many innovations, it has become a trope in recent movies and TV shows, such as The Office (2005–2013) and endless student films.

As French filmmakers experimented with the malleability of time and space as they exist in the edit, American cinema began to adopt these practices. In editing rooms such as Dede Allen’s, the once ubiquitous dissolve gave way to the straight cut as a way of transitioning from scene to scene. The typical progression from wide shot to medium to close-up fell out of order, and the shock cut overcame the traditional narrative flow. In the climactic shootout in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Allen showered the screen with cuts as quick as bullets, totaling up to 50 in less than a minute. Today, Godard’s jump cut has permeated every genre from horror to romantic comedy and from documentary to music video. Ironically, the jump cut has become so pervasive and skillfully used in today’s cinema that it is often imperceptible and serves simply to move the story along.

The 1960s and 1970s counterculture greatly influenced cinema, which had begun to stagnate under a studio system mired in traditional, irrelevant, and uninspired filmmaking. With the popularity of portable European equipment, such as the Éclair and Arriflex cameras and the Nagra sound recorder, American filmmakers no longer depended on studios to give them permission to make their films. This led to startling and original new narratives edited in dynamic and, at times, disturbing ways.

While the studios were following an old-school trend of historical dramas, specifically Cleopatra (1963)—one of the most expensive films of the time—by the end of the 1960s independent filmmakers were creating unique and groundbreaking movies, such as Easy Rider (1969), for incredibly low budgets. Imagine the shock of studios like 20th Century Fox when their multimillion-dollar Cleopatra, with its major box office stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, failed to win over audiences while a film independently produced for several hundred thousand dollars with unknown stars Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper triumphed as an enormous hit!

Anyone who lives in or has visited Los Angeles has probably passed through the business metropolis known as Century City. This conglomeration of glass, steel, and cement is the direct outgrowth of the studio’s failure to catch up with the times. Century City is built on the land that once belonged to 20th Century Fox’s back lot, valuable real estate auctioned off to save the studio from financial ruin.

Also, at that time, in 1968, the highly restrictive Production Code met its demise. A product of the archaic and ultraconservative Hayes Office, the code forbade everything from the names of poisons to allowing two unmarried people in the same bed. With the thrust toward more daring and explicit cinema and the threat of government censorship, The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) created a rating system that allowed more radical depictions of sex and violence while sheltering age groups whose level of maturity was not commensurate with the material presented. In a sense, under the new rating system, the primary goal of editing a love scene no longer meant striving to conceal explicit details but how to achieve the maximum effect in terms of the story, whether romantic, titillating, or seductive. Violence, as well, was no longer concealed, as its harm and horror was depicted in fast aggressive editing, excruciatingly slow motion, or vivid detail shots.

“Look Out, Haskell, It’s Real”

Disillusioned by a war that many young Americans failed to support, determined to find relevance in their daily lives, and influenced by political movements such as women’s liberation and civil rights, filmmakers strove to instill their movies with greater reality. This paralleled, in some regards, the cinema verité movement of the French. At its extreme it denounced the editing process as manipulative and reality altering, and, in other aspects, relied on editing to discover the truth and reality among thousands of feet random footage. As filmmaking rejected the studio prototypes, more and more movies found their locations away from the sound stages in other cities and countries. Films like Bullitt (1968) opted for real locations in San Francisco, incorporated actual hospitals rather than sets, and cast actual doctors rather than actors. Bullitt’s classic chase scene, edited by Frank P. Keller, who won the Academy Award in 1969, feels startlingly real in its locations and editing style that allows shots to play out in believable ways. The French Connection (1971) car chase also benefited from this new realism, to the point that the filmmakers took risks—such as driving through unmonitored streets—that would be nearly inconceivable today.

The ill-fated Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 became the backdrop for Medium Cool (1969)—one of the first serious films to receive an X rating under the new MPAA rating system. Directed by longtime cinematographer Haskell Wexler, Medium Cool used clever editing techniques to weave a fictionalized story with footage of the actual convention and the riots that surrounded it. Eileen Horton (Verna Bloom), dressed in an easily recognizable yellow dress, roams among actual crowds and riot police, searching for her lost child. In one particularly revelatory moment the police release tear gas upon the protesting crowd and the assistant director’s voice can be heard off-camera shouting to the cinematographer, “Look out, Haskell, it’s real.”

In the past the editor might have removed those lines, as one does with director’s comments and unwelcome noises, but here he chose to break the fourth wall, in a sort of verité move. Here he revealed the precariousness and danger of a city and country at war with itself. Those words could be the battle cry for that generation of filmmakers. Hollywood was no longer safe to weave fanciful tales of idealized times or to supply fluffy escapist entertainment. It had been tasked with the need to confront the current reality, to supply relevancy.

Around the same time, and into the 1980s, a new wave of science fiction shifted the focus from mere fantasies with special effects to a greater emphasis on spiritual, social, political, and mythic values in films like those of the Star Wars series. The Star Wars mythology of technology and human family dynamics elevated it to more than just film but a cultural phenomenon. Incorporating complex visual effects, advanced sound techniques, and innovative editing, Star Wars heralded an era where science fiction filled the gap left by another hero mythology—the western—insuch films as The Searchers (1956), a clear influence on Star Wars. With Star Wars, the pace and rhythm of films achieved a new urgency, delivering more and faster images as evidenced by the speeder scene in Return of the Jedi (1983), where audiences were treated to a chase unlike anything before it (Figure 7.7).

These new filmmakers, like Lucas, Coppola, and Scorsese did not ascend from the mailrooms of major studios but from the classrooms and sound stages of film schools like USC, UCLA, and NYU.

MTV

Then on August 1, 1981, a whole new phenomenon burst onto the scene: MTV, a cable channel devoted to showing music videos. Productions such as Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” with its captivating beat, fast-paced editing and startling images to tell the story of a black man falsely accused, gave way to the world of creative pop, country, and rap videos, eventually crossing the seas to Europe and Asia. The frenetic editing style associated with MTV music videos evolved over the years into supercharged cutting in films like Crank (2006), title sequences like Enter the Void (2009), and more recent music videos like Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” a dance sequence reflecting the privileged gloss of South Korea’s Gangnam district.

In “Gangnam Style,” cuts ricochet with and against the beats, firing off a vast variety of images with a fast-paced and ironic melody. Unlike their early predecessors that became famous through the new television channel, these videos gathered millions and millions of views on internet-based venues like YouTube. Music videos serve as an excellent reflection of editing rhythm, how music and the pattern of cuts work together to create stunning audiovisual displays that resonate viscerally with the viewer. While the editing of good music videos takes great editorial skill, the focus is limited to image manipulation, structure, and pace, generally without other editing challenges such as story, character, dialogue, subtext, and other elements of narrative filmmaking.

Not unlike the concerns of the 1970s, today’s filmmakers continue to deal with issues of racial in equality, sexism, civil rights, government corruption, war, the environment, and gender discrimination. Today, with the emergence of inexpensive but extremely high-quality digital cameras and editing equipment, a new revolution is overtaking Hollywood and beyond. The borders have been breached as the internet allows the instant dissemination of media productions ranging from webisodes, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube videos to full-length features virtually anywhere in the world. Where the 1970s saw the proliferation of innovations such as Dolby sound, IMAX theaters, Panavision cameras, and KEM flatbed editing machines, the current era blossoms with new camera names such as GoPro, RED, and Blackmagic alongside traditional manufacturers like Arriflex and Sony, virtual reality films, motion capture stages, and highly sophisticated editing programs.

The world of ultra high-definition video allows for aesthetic editing choices that did not exist in the past. Technology helps fuel creativity. One of the most significant and common is the use of extractions. By employing 4K, 6K, 8K, and above resolutions, editors now select portions of the frame while leaving out other areas.

In the editing room, one of the greatest breakthroughs of high-resolution production resides in the ability to alter an image without degradation. In the day of celluloid film and lower resolution video, any alteration to the frame, such as enlargement of the image, became noticeable. Grain increased and sharpness decreased. With ultra high-resolution formats, such as 4K and above, shots can be blown up, allowing for extraction of a select portion of the frame, without sacrificing image quality. This is particularly the case when the final movie will be released in a resolution lower than the original camera resolution. For instance, deriving a 2K projection master from a 6K raw file yields a sharp image regardless of whether many of the shots were scaled up significantly. This allows for extreme blow-ups to reinforce an emotion or story point, or to create coverage that had been neglected during production (such as close-ups or inserts shots). In documentary, for example, editors can turn a loosely composed interview into a close-up for dramatic effect.

Image alteration through other visual effects benefits significantly as well, since working in an ultra high-resolution realm allows effects artists and editors to introduce images that blend well with the existing material. With the increase in handheld photography, editors can now achieve high-quality image stabilization based on the ability to expand and track portions of the frame. Editing systems like Avid and Premiere now include image stabilization features that were once costly outsourced procedures.

Again, technology and social change are fueling the rise of powerful and innovative filmmaking.

► Notes