Last weekend I had the pleasure of watching EditFest Global sessions. One of them was a conversation between legendary editor Walter Murch and am outstanding director Alexander Payne.
I took some notes from the conversation that I want to share with you. Most of them are out-of-context thoughts but even in this shape, they are little nuggets of wisdom.
Great production design opens things up for what you can do with sound.
Tell them 2+2. Don’t tell them 4. My commentary: it’s great storytelling advice. Your audience is smart. But at the same time, they need to understand the equation before solving it. So assume that they will figure things out, just provide them with the required building blocks.
A famous match cut in "Lawrance of Arabia" (edited by Anne V. Coates) was supposed to be a dissolve. Because it required extra work to do dissolve in the old days, they screened it as a cut in the editing room and loved the result. All of this is to say that this famous cut would be a dissolve in a digital world. Because of a mechanical nature, you end up discovering things. An additional takeaway here is not to focus on the amazing effects you can do (or at least be careful about this stuff).
Putting images together next to each other helped with finding non-obvious connections. This is still true in the digital era but because navigating the project is much faster, we aren’t exposed to these accidental connections.
“No good” becomes like an epitaph on a tombstone - but it can use exactly what you need months later in the process. My commentary: Walter was addressing his first impressions when watching dailies and that he never just writes “no good” next to a take. He always describes why he considers it’s not good. Because later in the process it can happen that what was considered bad, is exactly what you need to solve a storytelling problem you’re facing.
Cutting on film is like playing chess (you have to imagine how it will play together, you’re calculating, and you have a plan for the next few moves (even if it changes later). Editing digitally is more like playing checkers. My commentary: It was actually a question that someone asked, not their own quotation. But even if it’s overexaggerating the fact is that when cutting on film you have to have a plan for the next few cuts. In the digital era, you can go that route but you can also do things one cut at a time and quickly adjust (which in general is good, but the point is that pre-planning is not as advanced as it was in the years gone by).
We have fantastic tools but also much more material, and less rehearsing before the shoot.
In the old days if you didn’t have discipline about shooting, and editing, you were sunk, you had to think six moves ahead.
Walter Murch is happy that we don’t edit mechanically anymore but he’s grateful that he learned editing in this way. My commentary: even though there were magical things about editing on film, Murch puts it simply - life is better on this side of the table. But I also agree that it must have been amazing to have that mechanical experience. I kind of envy editors that did cut bog movies on film, even if it was a highly demanding process.
Whenever Walter Murch works on a scripted film, he pretends it’s a documentary, meaning that everything is possible in the edit.
The background of this conversation was new film which Walter Murch wrote titled Her Name Was Moviola. It was crowdfunded through a Kickstarter and it premiered this year at Telluride Film Festival.
I watched it and it's great. They recreated the 70s editing room and worked on a scene from a film that was previously edited digitally.
Step by step you get to experience the process of editing on film with all its intricacies.
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