Why Writing & Editing go Hand in Hand

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.

"I have a voice!"

Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech is one of the few movies where the actors enthrall and enlighten the viewer by presenting the emotion of the situation by their mere gestures and actions, fitting of the morals and philosophies of the film. At it’s simplest, the film deals with the overcoming and conquering of a physical defect that prevents the protagonist from realizing his full potential and his royal duties. 

The film circles the concept of the battle against the effects of physical defects, of stammering and the inability to speak as well as the external circumstances within that moment in time that affect the speaker, in this case, it is the Duke of York, future King of Britain. There is the looming threat of war with Nazi Germany and the discrimination, from society and familiar, towards those with any sort of defect or incapacity. Discrimination  as well as abuse towards those with any sort of difference or those who are not as charming is as present in the royal world as it is in the world of commoners. 

It is pain and the quiet elegance that it takes to overcome it. One of the most poignant of these moments of quiet pain happen early in the film, when the Duke and the Duchess of York arrive for the Duke’s first appointment with a controversial speech therapist. The scene is cold and dark, the colors of the receiving hall dark browns that border on black with a sense of chilliness in the air. A young boy, shy and stammering, receives the couple timidly, barely able to get his words out. The pain in the faces of the couple couldn’t be more evident, pale faces growing ashen and eyes glittering with unshed tears that aren’t allowed to fall. It is more than clear that the little boy is meant to symbolize the Duke in his childhood. 

Quiet elegance overlays the entirety of the film, the rich backdrops of London and of royal palaces doing nothing to overshadow the film, adding to it’s depth rather than detracting with any possible gaudiness. None of the colors present within the film are overpowering, rather, they are almost faded, perhaps, due to the historic nature of the film and the image of it that is ingrained within the cultural perspective.

Audio is an integral part of the film, more so than usual considering that the theme of the film is the simple notion of a voice being heard. Perhaps the greatest moment in which it is used is the moment in which that the King to be, the Duke of York, Bertie to his friends and family, is in his first visit to the Antipodean speech therapist Logue and is reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy in the “Nunnery Scene” whilst the Duke is listening to classical music. The audience hears only the first six words of the soliloquy before the music drowns him out, the entirety of the speech is only heard later, when the Duke listens to the recording for the first time, and hears himself speaking without a single stammer. 

There is another moment of musical importance in the film, the moment when Bertie, now King, is about to give his first wartime speech regarding Britain’s entrance into war with Nazi Germany. It is at this moment that the Allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony begins, at the moment that the King is hesitating before delivering his speech over the wireless to the entirety of the British nation. The music itself is melancholic and gentle with moments of greatness that are built up to gradually after having started with ominous chords that time perfectly with the King’s struggles at the beginning of the speech. There is irony in this moment as well, that the music used at this moment is that of a German when it is Britain declaring their intent of war with Germany. 

It is fitting that the score as well as the visual components of the film are comprised of quiet elegance when those two words are what one of the themes of the film can be narrowed down as, quiet elegance in the face of battle.

Vertigo

A UPI film classic, Vertigo was first released in theaters in 1958. A psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, it was based upon Boileau-Narcejac's 1954 French crime novel D'entre les morts (From Among the Dead). The film, although now considered to be one of the best works of Hitchcock's career, received mixed reviews when it was released. It had replaced Orson Welles' 1941 Citizen Kane in the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound as the best film ever made. 

This was the first film in which the dolly zoom, referred to as "the Vertigo effect" was first used. The technique is a camera effect that is used to distort the viewer's visual perception. This is achieved by zooming into a subject using a zoom lens while the camera is moved towards or away from the subject. With this, the subject is kept in the same size throughout the camera movements. The use of this technique, since the visual system of the human body is unsettled due to the change in perspective without a noticeable size change, has a strong emotional impact on the human psyche. 

Hitchcock used this technique to cement the acrophobia and vertigo of the main character, former police detective John Ferguson (played by James Steward). 

Vertigo is a film about romantic obsession and the perverse lengths a man will go through to secure the object of his affection and obsession. As with all of Hitchcock's films, it deals with the visceral side of humanity, death and murder, fear and love.