Editing Thinking

The idea that expert practitioners develop special kinds of thinking has lead to the terms “design thinking” (thinking like a designer in approaching problem solving)² and “studio thinking” (habits of mind taught through studio art)³ I propose that editing thinking is another such kind of thinking, and that not only is it developed by gaining expertise in the craft of editing, but it can be developed by people other than film editors who wish to enjoy its benefits and uses. Editing thinking is what editors do, but it can also be a capacity developed by other people. Further, editors who have editing thinking skills can transfer these skills to other fields of practice.

Editing thinking is the intuitive process of sensing, hypothesizing, and realizing structure and rhythm.⁴

Editing thinking begins with the editor’s mirror neurons responding to movement in unedited film material (see Chapter 1). Editing thinking is the editor using her own “embodied simulation response”⁵ to guide decisions that create the optimal embodied simulation response of viewers. This decision making is often attributed solely to directors. However as editing practice shows us clearly, the editor makes thousands of decisions about form and flow before the director makes ratifying decisions about the editor’s choices.

Editing thinking is thinking by doing. Editing thinking can be applied to any mass of material that is available for the shaping of structure and rhythm. Editing thinking, therefore, is what editors do when faced with a mass of film rushes, but it could also be a description of what, for example, curators do when pulling together exhibitions, or educators do when designing a unit of study. Conference organizers use editing thinking to create coherent structure and rhythm of events and ideas. Writers use editing thinking when converting their masses of creative ideas from sprawling notes into poems, novels, or screenplays.

Editing thinking relies on developed sensitivities and expertise. In the case of film editing, the sensitivity is to movement and the expertise is in movement of story, emotion, image, and sound. Most of this book looks at how editors can develop these sensitivities and areas of expertise. This chapter will look at a new use of the expert editor’s editing thinking: Onscreen drafting.

What is an Onscreen Draft?

It is a truism to say that the “editor writes the last draft of the script.” Anyone who has ever been to an editing class has probably heard it, and anyone who has ever edited a film has almost definitely experienced it. The editor writes the last draft of the script partly because of all of the inspirations, improvisations, contingencies, and disasters that can befall a shooting script as it makes its way from page to screen. For example, the director might have gotten new ideas on set and added them into the captured material. Or interpreted the script differently than was expected by the writer. In fact, the interpretation by many collaborators may have changed the script’s intention or design in some way. The actors may or may not have done the lines exactly as written. The money or time may have run out before all of the script could be captured and so cuts were made or moments compressed or amalgamated. For all of these material reasons the shooting script is never exactly the same as the final film. But this is only partly why the editor writes the last draft of the script.

The editor is the creative collaborator with an expert knowledge of movement of story, emotion, image, and sound. When ideas that started out as words on a page become moving images and sounds, the editor’s developed sensitivity to movement kicks in and she writes the last draft of the script in movement. Editing thinking is applied to things that seemed as though they would work when they were on the page, but which simply don’t create a coherent experience when edited as a flow of movement. There are many reasons why this could happen. Perhaps the captured material doesn’t create a solid structure—it produces an experience that has repetition or digression, extraneous bits or gaps. Perhaps performances have shaped the subtext and emphasis differently than the script may have implied, so the editor might adjust characters’ dialogue, action, or even whole journeys. Perhaps there are metaphors or sensations that can be got out of the juxtaposition of filmed images and sounds that weren’t fully exploited or designed in the script. Perhaps the script just wasn’t that great and the editor’s thinking is needed to make it better.

Here is where the principle of onscreen drafting has its genesis. When we understand how and why the editor writes the last draft of the script and add this to the fact that digital filmmaking tools could introduce new processes of filmmaking, we have to ask: why not create an onscreen draft? Why not bring editing thinking into the creative process much earlier and see how that might benefit story, emotion, image, and sound?

In his seminal article on design thinking Tim Brown writes: “Historically, design has been treated as a downstream step in the development process—the point where designers, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of innovation, come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea.”⁶

Editing has also traditionally been treated as a “downstream” step in the filmmaking process, the point where editors, who have played no earlier role in the substantive work of storytelling, come along and put a beautiful wrapper around the idea. But digital tools can change that. We can use the camera and the laptop as sketchpads and use editing thinking to improve scripts and films by making onscreen drafts.

Here is how it works:

• An “onscreen draft” is a no-budget digital rendering of a whole story or screenplay that gets created somewhere in between the first and final drafts of the script.
• It does not replace a script draft; it is part of the script development process.
• It includes digital shooting and cutting, though the cut may also incorporate some found footage, just as it will incorporate things like temp sound and music.
• An onscreen draft is ugly. This is important. If it is going to be part of script development it cannot be polished in its production values.
• It is testing things like thematic coherence, information clarity or redundancy, dramatic questions and whether they sustain interest, plots, and whether they complicate or just repeat, as well as character’s motivations, relationships, and emotional dynamics.
• It can test shots, frames, staging, texture, and color but only if it is testing these in relation to the script, in order to reveal something about the script for a re-writing process.
• An onscreen draft must be cut together. An onscreen draft is testing the relationship of the scripted actions to real ones. The question is: Will this script make an onscreen experience of image, sound, movement, and time that tells a story with strong structure and engaging rhythm? In other words, will this script work onscreen? This question can only be answered by cutting image, sound, and movement together.

So, an onscreen draft is not the final film, it is a draft of the film that the editor writes. It uses the editor’s special skills to shape movement onscreen of story, emotion, image, and sound cheaply and in sketch form, before shooting the final version of the film. Onscreen drafting is, above all, a chance to test ideas, to fail and learn. It is writing as a digital, embodied, editing thinking process.

Why Draft?

Screen storytelling is an art. There is no other art that is made without first making a draft in the art form’s media.

For example, no one would ever write a symphony just on paper. In the pre-digital age they would have written a piano reduction. In the digital age they write music with software that can play back an approximation, a draft in sound, not in writing, of the large scale, complex idea being developed.

Similarly large scale and complex visual art works are sketched first.

I spoke to Australian painter Michelle Hiscock about why she sketches and she was very clear. She said: “you sketch to know.” Without sketching you can imagine what something might be on the canvas, but you don’t really know what your imaginings are until you begin to sketch. As they take form on paper they reveal themselves. They also reveal the delusions and illusions of the conceptual phase. Sketching corrects these through trial and error and gets the material to match the imaginings, or vice versa.

Hiscock also said, in our conversation, that “you sketch to see” and this is a very important idea for onscreen drafting. What she is “seeing” as she drafts is how the trees and the skyline actually sit in relation to each other, as opposed to fuzzy, optimistic, hopeful but ungrounded seeing—the kind of “seeing” we call envisioning when we read through a script. Doing an onscreen draft is a way of seeing the script differently. Seeing it as a set of decisions to be made and rehearsing decision making by making decisions, not by imagining options. This is a key thing for filmmakers, especially film students.

Drafting teaches you things about your work that you need to be able to do without thinking about it when you get to the oil paints or orchestras. It teaches you about form, anatomy, pattern, composition, time, space, energy, style, and so on, all in relation to the particular content you are trying to create.

So, now that the tools are available, why wouldn’t we do the same with cinema?

Rapid Prototyping

A screenplay is not an onscreen draft. Screenplays do go through multiple drafts from scribbles on the backs of napkins to fully funded shooting scripts. But a screenplay is often described as being like a blueprint, and a blueprint is not film. Cinema is an art of performance, dynamics, images, and sounds, not of words on paper. If a screenplay is analogous to an architectural blueprint, an onscreen draft would be analogous to a 3D print of the building.

3D prints are the same relationship to buildings as the onscreen drafts I propose are to films. They are relatively cheap. They test the theory that is the blueprint or script. They come at a stage in the process where there is still time to change and refine ideas and their expression. Yet they would never be mistaken for buildings themselves. They are mediated drafts, a step closer to the real thing, but still revisable.

With this 3D model or “rapid prototype” in mind, I turn now to look at some variations of onscreen drafting which are common practice in some parts of the screen industries to see how they are similar to the onscreen drafting process I propose, and how they are different.

The first of these is the “rapid prototyping” process commonly used in digital game development. A rapid prototype is defined as a visual and sometimes experiential manifestation of an intangible concept.⁸ In their feature article “How to prototype a game in under 7 days” published by the online magazine Gamasutra,⁹ Gray et al. write about some principles of rapid prototyping, which could equally well apply to onscreen drafting of film. These are:

1. “Embrace the possibility of failure, it encourages risk taking”

   In rapid prototyping, as with onscreen drafts, there is little to lose and off the wall ideas can be tried and learned from, even if they fail. This is beneficial for a team: it allows them to risk and fail. It is also empowering: shorthand is developed, ideas are demonstrated, processes are refined so that everything can be done more effectively when the big money is being spent.

2. “Enforce short development cycles”

   More time does not necessarily mean more quality. At this phase of scripting, a film project could spend many, many hours chasing an idea that isn’t necessarily very good, down a hypothetical rabbit hole. Why not throw it up onscreen and, as Hiscock said in relation to sketching with charcoal, really see it.

3. “Constrain Creativity”

   Rapid prototyping sets some kinds of rules or boundaries on the project in order to nourish creative possibilities that are focused rather than sprawling. In an onscreen drafting phase of a film project, the key constraint on creativity would be money. In a no-budget draft, ingenuity for realizing ideas would be given a chance to flourish.

Embodied Decision Making

Embodied decision making means making decisions in practice, not just in theory. We have a lot of embodied metaphors that apply to the high pressure decision making that occurs on set, such as: thinking on your feet, shooting from the hip, or running with it. In an onscreen draft, these are the capacities that get some exercise. Drafting gives them a workout rather than waiting until the big day when the clock is ticking and the money is draining away to see whether you are physically up to the task.

There are lots of pressures on a film set—lots of people and not much time and lots of things that are not exactly as expected. At this point, under pressure, decisions are made that have huge downstream implications. Embodied decision making is learning about the decisions that will need to be made through making them. Onscreen drafting means getting a chance to discover the implications of your decisions in an early draft.

Animated films have long been using an embodied onscreen drafting process to develop scripts. In this process very rough drawings and sound are gradually replaced with more and more refined versions from line drawings to wireframes, to block 3D versions until the final version of the script and images are literally built on top of the first sketches. The discipline required to make this work is to not become distracted by the possibilities for beautiful images too early, but to sketch and script until the flow of story and emotional dynamics over time makes sense and feels right.

This principle of failing early, failing fast, or failing forward is one of the keys to onscreen drafting and it is also something that is perhaps misunderstood in creativity. Filmmakers need permission to fail, because this is a key to creative risk taking, and something that is most likely to produce fresh, innovative ideas. But nobody really wants to fail in the end. There is a tension between wanting to encourage risk and wanting to produce successes. Onscreen drafting can reduce this tension. Instead of asking whether to fail it asks when to fail. The answer is: fail when you have time to learn and then to succeed. Fail in a draft, not in a final film.

An onscreen draft is an exercise that builds the muscles of decision making and of resilience. It builds the collaborative vocabulary of teams and it activates the usually untapped intelligence of the editor in an early editing thinking process.

Case Study: Woman with an Editing Bench

In 2012/2015 I worked an onscreen drafting process supported by a research grant from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The title of the research was: The role of “editing thinking” in innovative models of screen development and production practice.

This research was testing the strategy of using editing thinking to prototype ideas while they are still at script draft stage. It applied editing thinking strategies to the production of a short film inspired by the life and work of Soviet Montage era editor Elizaveta Svilova (1900–1975). The film, Woman with an Editing Bench, models editing thinking as a process and is also about Svilova’s editing thinking.

Here is a quick plot summary:

Woman with an Editing Bench is about the fight for creativity in the face of repression.

Making Woman with an Editing Bench as a research project, I shot and cut together an onscreen draft; in fact I cut three versions of it, and learned something from each of them.¹⁰ Here are just some of the things I learned.

The Stakes Were Too Conceptual

In the first draft of the script, as in the final draft, Svilova is all that stands between Vertov and the bureaucracy that wants to block him. But in the first draft being blocked from making films was just a concept. When I screened the first cut of the onscreen draft for the producers, Lyn Norfor and Richard James Allen, they picked up on this right away (see Fig. 12.1 and Fig. 12.2).

Figure 12.1 In this screen grab of Beth Aubrey, Richard James Allen and Jardine Patten from the Draft Shoot we can see that Vertov (Allen) and the Bureaucrat (Patten) are arguing, but we don’t know what they are arguing about. Also, Svilova (Aubrey), who is supposed to be the hero, the one who stands between Vertov and his nemesis, is sidelined. [Photo credit: Screen shot from Draft Shoot, cinematographer: Michi Marosszeky for The Physical TV Company]

Figure 12.2 In this screen shot of Richard James Allen (Vertov), Leanna Walsman (Svilova) and Marcus Graham (the Bureaucrat) from Woman with an Editing Bench we can see what they are fighting for: the camera. We can also see that Svilova is the one doing the fighting. Vertov is distracted by his own ideas. Svilova is literally between Vertov and the Bureaucrat. [Photo credit: screen shot from Woman with an Editing Bench, cinematographer Kieran Fowler for The Physical TV Company]

Tone Was Too Light

In the first draft of the script the tone of the relationships between Vertov and Svilova was playful, and Vertov’s ebullient physicality was often described in terms of dance. Once onscreen it became clear that the tone of the relationship did not match the circumstances. Vertov needed to be seen struggling and Svilova needed to be seen working things out, making decisions and taking actions. This had an impact on the way I re-wrote the characters and the way I directed them, which also extended to Svilova’s relationships with the Bureaucrat and his henchmen, the guards (see Fig. 12.3 and Fig. 12.4).

Figure 12.3 In the Draft Shoot, I invented a backstory for Svilova (Beth Aubrey) in which she had known the guards (played by Kim Anderberg and Ivan Germano) since they were kids, so she didn’t take them seriously as a threat. [Photo credit: screen shot from Draft Shoot, cinematographer: Michi Marosszeky for The Physical TV Company]

Figure 12.4 In the final version of Woman with an Editing Bench, the guards are a real threat, and Svilova (Leanna Walsman) hides under the rewind bench when they invade the edit suite to shut it down. [Photo credit: Jonathan Grace for The Physical TV Company]

Perspective Was Unclear

As soon as I had put together the first version of an edit of the onscreen draft it was possible to see that perspective was a problem. Whose story is it? What is the filmmaker saying about the story? The perspective I had in my head was not on the screen, except in one moment: the last one. Once I saw the last shot in context of the story leading up to it, I knew I had to work backwards from there to re-design all of the action to lead to it.

After shooting and cutting the onscreen draft, every event in the script was ultimately re-written either partially or completely. Stakes were clarified. Tone was modified. Things that were too general were made specific. The problems and actions were redesigned to build to the resolution.

Figure 12.5 In the onscreen draft version, Vertov (Richard James Allen) jumps out of a window on what seems like a whim. [Screen shot from Draft Shoot, cinematographer: Michi Marosszeky for The Physical TV Company]

It is possible that all of these things could have been done on paper, but I think it unlikely. The conversations I had with the producers when looking at cuts were conversations I have had with producers in edit suites many times before, on many projects. But on this project, for the first time, I was having them at draft stage. Usually when we have those conversations the editor is trying to fix the problems of the script and the production with editing. This time we were able to go back and re-write the script using the insight we’d gotten from editing thinking and the onscreen draft.

Figure 12.6 In the final version of Woman with an Editing Bench, Vertov’s (Richard James Allen’s) jump is a logical but surprising development of his earlier actions and it leads inevitably to Svilova’s actions at the end of the film. [Photo credit: Jonathan Grace for The Physical TV Company]

Endnotes

1. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” is an influential 1948 essay by Alexandre Astruc in which coins the phrase “camera stylo” meaning camera as pen. It has been reprinted in The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks edited by Ginette Vincendeau and Peter Graham.

2. Brown, T., “Design thinking.”

3. Hetland, L., Winner, E., Veenema, S., and Sheridan, K.M., Studio Thinking—The Real Benefits Of Visual Arts Education.

4. I am undertaking further research through Macquarie University in Sydney into the areas of cognitive science and creative practice to continue to develop this hypothesis. For the purposes of this chapter, the definition relies on research into editing partnerships such as that of Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova, my own experience as an editor, and my students’ experiences in making “onscreen drafts” of films and using these drafts to strengthen the structure and flow of scripts and productions. My thanks, particularly to the enthusiastic and willing students of Macquarie University who did onscreen drafts and production assignments, and to Genevieve Clay-Smith who embraced onscreen drafting as part of her process at AFTRS.

5. Gallese, V., and Guerra, M., “Embodying movies: Embodied simulation and film studies.”

6. Brown, T., “Design thinking.”

7. I recently heard from a Hollywood feature film editor that it took him six weeks of working alone with the director to solve structural problems in a film that weren’t evident in the script. Many of the scenes that were shot were dropped in that process and there was a lot of ADR recorded to make it work. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to shoot and cut an onscreen draft and find out before spending all of the money on huge stars, huge crews and huge schedules?

8. Coughlan, P., and Canales, K., “Prototypes as (design) tools for behavioral and organizational change a design-based approach to help organizations change work behaviors.”

9. Gray, K. et al., “How to prototype a game in under 7 days.”

10. The cast and crews on both versions were fantastic—I couldn’t have asked for better. I am indebted to all of them for being such great collaborators, especially Michi Marosszeky and Beth Aubrey, two fearless women who dove into the drafting process without judgment and brought extraordinary energy, talent, conviction and skill. Thank you!