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Editing Today – another Philippic
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OK, Whiplash’s got an Oscar so apparently some people thinks it’s competent job. But do you feel like this too?
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Luck has nothing whatever to do with it. It is just what I have always understood my job to be. Just like in Gumball Rally. “What’s behind you don’t make no difference.”
Tim
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Yes, I do. Anyone care to challenge that?
Tim
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If they were giving editing Oscar for saving bad footage it’d be a different story. There are many very weird cuts throughout the whole film which can only be explained as fixes to cover staging/continuity mistakes. All cuts to detail feel like they were shot in different set than the scene they are inserted into, which they probably are. So it is clearly another case of “We can’t judge the editor because we have no idea how bad the footage was.” We can however make a wild guess: usually when the story is bad and too short for a feature and both antagonist and protagonist are complete jerks the chance of blocking and staging errors for some reason increases.
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[Herb Sevush] “Every decade we prove that you can get away with a little less detail, tell the story in a more fragmented way, and the audience will adjust and accept.”
Yes, in a broad sense this is true. But let’s not forget that the best TV is now very clearly staging a backlash and it is getting slower and espousing many more of the qualities of classic cinema.
My point, which has got slightly lost, was more about the overall picture rather than about counting cuts.
Multicam plus NLE technology means that a huge proportion of the movies now made are shot with a view to piecing something together in the cutting room.
This is simply poles apart from movies that are made with a clear vision of what each shot is meant to deliver.
Coverage is the great enemy in my view. It makes every film feel like TV, because instead of giving you the freedom not to cut, it imposes cutting as an imperative.
Most contemporary films, with obvious, striking and incredibly powerful exceptions, are in slave to this tyranny – and they look as they they have been vision-mixed from the gallery.
How could it be any different under the circumstances?
But this has nothing really to do with changing tastes – it has to do with market forces, lack of ambition, enslavement to technology and a host of other tiresome factors.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
So I’m guessing you didn’t like the movie?
Tim
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No, I didn’t. The music was fine though.
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Anyone who uses the phrase “complete jerks” has to be – in my considered opinion – a complete jerk. If you have a problem with this Academy Award Winner then please, attack him on the merits, which I do not see you doing.
Tim
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Wait, I have to recuse myself. You did not in any way refer to the editor as a “jerk.” But still, I think this guy did a hell of a job. And I do not see why you don’t.
Tim
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He probably did. It probably was a complete disaster. Now it is somewhat watchable. That’s the tragic part of our profession. No matter how hard you try if it wasn’t written, performed and shot well you can’t make it really good.
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