4.3: Editing and Animation

Editing is where the grammar and syntax of cinematic language come together.

They say a film is made three times. The first is by the screenwriter. The second was by the director and crew. The third is done by the editor in post-production.

I don’t know who “they” are, but I think they’re onto something.

When the screenwriter hands the script off to the director, it is no longer a literary document; it’s a blueprint for a much larger, more complex creation. A production process is essentially an act of translation, taking all of those words on the page and turning them into shots, scenes, and sequences. At the end of that process, the director hands off a mountain of film and/or data, hours of images, to the editor for them to sift through, select, arrange, and assemble into a coherent story. That, too, is essentially an act of translation.

The amount of film or data can vary. During the Golden Age of Hollywood last century, most feature films shot about 10 times more film than they needed, otherwise known as a shooting ratio of 10:1. That includes all of the re-takes, spoiled shots, multiple angles on the same scene, subtle variations in performance for each shot, and even whole scenes that will never end up in the finished film. And the editors had to look at all of it, sorting through 10 hours of footage^[1] for every hour of film in the final cut.

They didn’t know it then, but they were lucky.

With the rise of digital cinema, that ratio has exploded. Today, it is relatively common for a film to have 50 or 100 times more footage than will appear in the final cut. The filmmakers behind Deadpool (2016), for example, shot 555 hours of raw footage for a final film of just 108 minutes. That’s a shooting ratio of 308:1. It would take 40 hours a week for 14 weeks just to watch all of the raw footage, much less select and arrange it all into an edited film!^[2]

So, one of the primary roles of the editor is to simply manage this tidal wave of moving images in post-production. But they do much more than that. And their work is rarely limited to just post-production. Many editors are involved in pre-production, helping to plan the shots with the end product in mind, and many more are on set during production to ensure the director and crew are getting all of the footage they need to knit the story together visually.

But, of course, it’s in the editing room, after all the cameras have stopped rolling, that editors begin their true work. And yes, that work involves selecting what shots to use and how to use them, but more importantly, editing is where the grammar and syntax of cinematic language really come together. Just as linguistic meaning is built up from a set sequence of words, phrases, and sentences, cinematic meaning is built up from a sequence of shots and scenes. A word (or a shot) in isolation may have a certain semantic content, but it is the juxtaposition of that word (or shot) in a sentence (or scene) that gives it its full power to communicate. As such, editing is fundamental to how cinema communicates with an audience. And just as it is with any other language, much of its power comes from the fact that we rarely notice how it works; the mechanism is second nature, intuitive, and invisible.

But before we get to the nuts of bolts of how editors put together cinema, let’s look at how the art of editing has evolved over the past century. To do that, we have to go back to the beginning. And we have to go to Russia.