Editing is often overlooked, is it just cutting out the bad bits and leaving the good bits, or is it shifting through the frames for the perfect moment?
Editing was traditionally a woman’s job, it was usually left to the wives of directors because they found it similar to sewing. It was only after the field started to become lauded that the men took over the profession and the women became overlooked, as is often the case with professions that were typically female.
It is a painstaking art, of going frame by frame to find the perfect moment to cut, of finding just the perfect order to arrange the scenes that will bring out the desired reaction from an audience. If you simply cut out the “bad bits and leave the good bits”, how is that putting together a story?
Walter Murch famously made a list of the six most important points, known as the Rule of Six, that editors should follow when making a cut. But, as with all the arts, the moment you learn the rules, if you can break them and create something striking out of it, you do it.
Murch even assigned percentages to each of the six points:
1. Emotion 51%
2. Story 23%
3. Rhythm 10%
4. Eye-trace 7%
5. Two-dimensional plane of screen 5%
6. Three-dimensional space of action 4%
Emotion and story are the most important because without emotion and story, where are you left? There should be a driving force behind every cut, not simply because one thinks that a cut would look good there. Is the cut furthering the story’s progress? Is it creating suspense or evoking some sort of emotion?
Rhythm follows third in importance, due to it tying in with the first two points. Rhythm is the pace that the story flows at, the ta-ta-ta-ta-ta or tatatata-ta-tatata-ta that follows the rise and fall of both story and emotion. It should be like music, having crests and falls rather than just one solid beat.
The first three points are the same driving points when it comes to writing, either non-fiction or fiction. What is the point of it? What are you trying to make the audience feel or realize? Vary your sentence structure.
Why do writing and editing go hand in hand? Because they’re the same thing. Each shot is a word, and each of those pieces are being sewed together into a piece of art. Alone, they’re just shots and words, nothing that really makes any sense. But when they’ve been sewn together, you have The Titanic and Slaughterhouse-Five.