Introduction to the Second Edition

A revolution has occurred since the first publication of The Healthy Edit: Creative Editing Techniques for Perfecting Your Movie. Coincidentally, it arrived at the same time that the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world. But the calendar was misinterpreted—it wasn’t about the end of the world, it was about the end of film! And while students have wept in class at the announcement that they will not be shooting or editing on the perforated celluloid medium that launched the world’s most advanced and arguably most influential art form, the arrival of ultra high-definition file-based digital video heralds a new future for filmmaking and postproduction. Like any revolution worthy of its name, the digital revolution has revamped the film industry with new nomenclature, new aesthetics, and new technology.

Feature films and network and cable television continue to dominate the media world, but short form projects have made substantial inroads. In decades past, the short film had almost no outlet save for film school and art house screens. Today it floods cellphone, tablet, and computer screens, offering entertainment and instruction on venues such as YouTube. Some of the work is highly refined while others are clumsy, homemade snippets that still manage to resonate with something true, heartfelt, or amusingly silly. The other day, a student in passing announced, “I watch videos of dogs, kids, and old people when I’m sad.” How poignant, and even healing, are some of the simplest expressions of this medium.

Though the focus of this book remains primarily with longer forms, the guidelines herein will be instrumental to shorter tales as well. Stories, however they are told, remain primary to the psychological survival of humanity, as they have for eons.

The latest edition of The Healthy Edit addresses this dynamic file-based world while still retaining valuable information about celluloid-based filmmaking, practiced most recently by such notables as Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino.

As with the original edition, I’ve developed these new chapters based on my ongoing work in the film industry, as well as my experience as a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

► The Art

Editing is not a simple art form. It can take years to master and great technical skill to perform. It changes due to technological developments and cultural upheavals. Where a writer can survive on a pen and paper or a painter with a brush and canvas, an editor requires the support of expensive, highly complex equipment, as well as the efforts of often hundreds of people. These crews work together to deliver to the editor the raw materials—the dailies—with which to perform his art. He depends on them, and they depend on him.

Postproduction and editing encompass everything it takes to bring a film to completion. This includes storytelling, dialogue, pacing, color, sound, visual effects, music, titles, and more. It is an art form that consists of part aesthetics and part high-technology. Today the discipline of film editing has gone from a quiet, nearly invisible profession to a driving force. In that regard, this book not only speaks to the advances in modern film editing but also to the filmmaking process in general.

The technology can be daunting with respect to the intricacies of running the editing machine and understanding the film and video medium in general. Unlike paint and pencil, the medium with which the film artist sketches is highly sophisticated. It consists of colored gel layers imbedded with silver salts on celluloid strips or, in the case of video, binary codes imbedded on magnetic and plastic surfaces. The same person who will arouse an audience with a well-orchestrated kiss, send them into fits of laughter with a well-placed punch line, or scare them with a sudden cut and a loud sound, must also understand timecode, frame rate, codecs, LUTs, greenscreen, compression, 3D, aspect ratio, DI, DCPs, 7.1, anamorphic, and a plethora of other technical concepts.

Digital nonlinear editing (NLE) has revolutionized the art form. The affordability and accessibility of systems like Avid Media Composer or Premiere Pro, coupled with the opportunity to create and archive multiple versions, to experiment without the consequences of physically altering the original, and by instantly rendering visual effects, have eclipsed the analog film medium. Included in this is the increase in new and innovative ways to put a film together.

Even if the movie is accentuated with digitally generated light and motion effects, color distortions, flash frames, jump cuts, and other potentially jarring images or sounds, the effect for the audience must feel seamless. It must create a consistent universe, “a vivid and continuous dream,” as the novelist John Gardner called the storytelling process.¹

While not as obvious as a cinematographer’s or director’s work, the editor’s impact is so pervasive as to make or break a film. Among the early Russian filmmakers, the great film theorist and director Sergei Eisenstein believed that editing held the highest position in the art of cinema. Since his time, Hollywood producers, acknowledging editing’s influence, have generally reserved the right of the final cut for themselves, not the director. While the auteur theory, as espoused by the French New Wave, held that the director was the author of a film, the New Wave’s greatest contributions, such as the use of jump cuts, came from innovations of the editing bench. Today, postproduction exerts an influence that exceeds any of the past.

George Lucas has declared that postproduction is the most important aspect of the filmmaking process and that it should be afforded as much time as possible. Granted, his films are postproduction miracles, but he was not speaking merely of manufacturing images through motion capture and computer modeling. He was referring to the assembly process in general. This is the stage where a film truly realizes its identity and where some of the greatest discoveries are made.

► Today’s Editor

Despite the unprecedented access to editing equipment, today’s aspiring editors often lack the crucial experience and mentoring that have informed and launched previous generations of filmmakers. From a small handful in the 1970s, film schools now abound. There are well over 1000 film programs worldwide, signifying the prominence that film has taken as an art form within the culture.

Film school editing professors vary from those who work actively in the film industry to those who began as assistants but switched to academia before acquiring the position of editor, to those who studied the process but have never worked in a professional film environment. This book fills the ever widening gap that has opened with the introduction and proliferation of digital editing systems and the commensurate decline in mentorship due to digital technology’s lessening need for assistants. In the foreseeable future, all postproduction jobs may eventually meld into one as editors become their own apprentices, assistants, sound designers, mixers, color graders, finishers, and even distributors. They will also have to serve as their own mentors through the time-consuming process of trial and error, mitigated perhaps by film school instructors and a guide such as this.

Throughout this book the reader will encounter medical terms analogous to the editing and film doctoring process. These will help him or her to remember the basic concepts and put those into an overall context. With this in mind, he or she may venture forth confidently into the uncharted territory that every film presents to the editor, whether novice or veteran.

Doctor’s Note

The Roman god Mercury, known as Hermes in Greek mythology, was the winged messenger who carried a staff encircled by two serpents that Apollo had presented to him. He was said to move between the highest and lowest, from gods to humans, from alpha to omega. In the filmmaking process, the editor is that mercurial messenger. At times he becomes the audience, naïvely viewing the film from the point of view of the uninitiated. Other times the editor gains omniscient powers, seeing the film through the director’s eyes and carrying that vision to the world. Ultimately, as an editor he or she is attached to no one—not the script, the set, the dailies, the actors, anyone. Yet the editor services them all. His or her ultimate goal is to discover the best way to tell the film’s story.

Like the chemical element that bears his name, Mercury flowed unencumbered, working his way around any obstacle, determined to deliver his message. The wings of Mercury and his staff are reiterated to this day in the image of the medical caduceus, a symbol adopted here with two coiling strips of film (Figure 0.1).

Figure 0.1 The film doctor’s caduceus

But wait a moment. Mercury’s caduceus, which is generally associated with medicine, is the wrong caduceus. Appropriately, the medical caduceus actually belongs to Asclepius, the god of healing. His rod bears no wings and only one serpent coiled around it. The rod of Mercury, bearing his wings and two serpents, was mistakenly adopted by the Army Medical Corps, who were probably thinking of Asclepius’s design. As happens, this image took hold and has propagated to this day. Since Mercury was a trickster, thief (see Stealing a Shot, p. 28), athlete, and messenger, his symbol is probably most appropriate for a book on filmmaking.

► Notes