Acceptable practice in editing interviews?

[Nicholas Bierzonski]

Editing is much like the pirates code from Pirates of the Carribean. They’re not necessarily rules…they’re more like guidelines.

So to answer your question…it depends.
I prefer an invisible edit because it doesn’t jar me out of the story however as an editor I do love a well executed match edit.

For example, In Lawrence of Arabia…
From Wikipedia:
“Perhaps the second most famous match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a lit candle with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg as inspiration for his own work.”

It all depends on your source material, and intention.

-Nicholas Bierzonski
Senior Editor/DVD Author/Java Boy
http://www.finalfocusvideo.com

[Grinner Hester]

I don’t mind fade to blacks for pacing, suspense or rythm but if someone was dipping to black during an interview, I think I’d have to turn the channel.

[Bob Cole]

Are these dips to black covering an edit which would otherwise be a jump cut? (that is, the image size is the same in both shots.)

If the cuts will flow as cuts, use straight edits. If they’re jump cuts, don’t worry so much about it. It seems that it is okay nowadays to throw in jump cuts. I’ll sometimes use jumps, dips to almost-white, quick dissolves, and push wipes, all in the same piece.

But I’m with Grinner about dips to black. Not sure why this is, but perhaps they somehow read as being full of meaning, and if they really are not, the viewer feels abused.

Bob C

[Rocco Rocco]

Man On Wire won the Best Edited Documentary Eddie this year so whatever he was doing was working ;o)

Dips to Black are used in trailers all the time of course and I’ve dropped them into an interview sometimes before an image. I prefer to use the old white flash – or distant relative of – in interviews or make it a really quick dip to black if I have to. If you’re gonna use the same transition over and over again though, make sure they’re quick. There’s nothing worse than having to sit through the fifth, sixth slooow transition in a row. Ugh.

[Del Holford]

I’ve seen this device used occasionally in emotional interviews(eg: cancer survivors, etc.). It helped carry the story and give the viewer a moment to react to the emotion. It has to be very sensitively done or it will get boring in a hurry.

Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS3
Charlotte Public Television
del underscore edits at wtvi dot org

[Tim Kolb]

These days, written or not, there are very few ‘laws’ it seems to me…

I’ve used a fade to black to change topics…it adds a bit of separation…’clears the palette’ if you will.

Often, I’ll use some text in the black and bring up the music bed to keep the continuity. (you obviously need to do this more than once to get a “I meant to do this” feel…) Many times I’ll pick up some sort of key topic quote from the upcoming section. It’s up to you as to whether it needs to be an overt format device, or just a way to cover a cut with no cover.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Ken Harper]

There is only one rule I try to follow, does it feel right. This is art and the rules are fluid. They change with each new artist that changes conventional approaches. Errol Morris https://www.errolmorris.com/
Pioneered cuts to black. I used this myself and the piece won a number of awards. https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4440166859378139487

[Del Holford]

Nicely done. As Tim said, you used music to carry the piece and the music’s emotion lets the audience know the seriousness of the topic. You don’t just cut to black but use a variety of transtitions to tell the story.

I once did an hour documentary where there were only 3 dissolves in the show and they were in the open. I didn’t realize that until the show was completed but a cut is all you need if it moves the story forward. Sometimes other transitions get in the way.

Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS3
Charlotte Public Television
del underscore edits at wtvi dot org

[Mark Suszko]

Dissolves, and by extension, fades, “traditionally” imply a change in time and sometimes place. it’s a convention established over the history of film and audiences understand it subconsciously. In my college TV class, as an experiment, we shot our own Twilight Zone dramtic episode using nothing but dissolves for every transition, I mean every one. The audience certainly got creeped out, but not due to the story:-P

That’s why I’m always uncomfortable substituting them for cuts just to hide a jump cut. As a one-time band-aid, sure, sometimes. But to cut a long sequence of the same framed medium shot full of dissolves can IMO sometimes make thing overly pretentious, if the underlying material doesn’t support that kind of aesthetic. When I cut interviews, it is almost always in such a way that the speaker tells the whole story without any of the questions left in, as if it was a natural narrative. This is easy if you ask the right essay type questions in the right way.

Unless you’re shooting depositions for lawyers, why would you ever just roll a locked-down shot on interviews with no changes in angles and no cut-aways available? Seems like lazy shooting to me. It is no big deal to snap-zoom in or out, in between the questions, so you have some more angles to work from, even single-camera. Takes less than a second on manual zoom, maybe 90 frames with a power zoom on. I guess if you only ever shoot with primes, it can be a hassle to dolly in and out, but you know, most interview questions take five to ten seconds to ask, and you usually cut the questions out of the final mix anyway… so a shooter should be able to swing the jib in or out or dolly in or out the foot or two needed during that interval. Somebody tell me why they don’t ’cause it makes no sense to me.

If they insist on the lock-down during the interview, see fi they will shoot two minutes of wide at the end where the guy is just listening to the interviewer. With that, you can L-cut the front or tail of a reply as voiceover with the wide as your cut-away.

[Dan Brockett]

Thomas:

In traditional visual terms, a fade to black is meant to emulate the curtain dropping on a stage performance. It symbolizes the beginning or end of a scene. Of course, as the others have alluded to in this thread, few people these days pay attention to classic visual cues from cinema history and all of the rules have changed.

There are some good tricks suggested here. Just to add to them, I have been editing a terrible corporate video that I did not shoot. Really badly shot footage, and it was shot exactly how most of us would not shoot it, in a single camera lock off most of the time. Two suggestions:

1. I have been using quick soft-edged angle wipes, they work okay and at least make it look like, “take one, take two, etc.”

2. If the shot has decent resolution, you can always zoom in on the shot to give you a fake medium or MCU to cut to. This works best in fast cut, more edgy types of project better than conservative “traditional” cuts.

There is ideal solution to the issue of chopping up single angle, single framed interviews but we all have to do it from time to time. Both of these tricks have saved me numerous times.

Dan

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