How can I avoid ‘hard cuts’ in editing?

[Andrew Kimery]

I think it feels choppy because you’ve got a couple of quick cuts in there that don’t give the viewer any new information. Give this a shot; have her walk off screen, then cut to the shot of the car driving out of the parking lot, then cut to the shot of her putting the car into gear and driving away.

[Ryan Elder]

Okay thanks! What about the establishment of the new location, how do I keep that from being jarring?

[Mark Suszko]

You can do away with most of the shots in that sequence and it will be smoother and still tell the story better.

You only need:

Man leaves.

Woman, already in car, obviously watching him, follows.

New location; establishing shot, woman’s car, foreground, parked. Or to be fancy, car rolls into shot and parks first.

Medium, woman gets out of the car in the new location, walks out of shot, obviously looking for the man.

Then your peeking-thru-the-trees shot and etc.

If you look at very old films, they wasted a lot of time depicting every step of a character moving from one location to another… get into car, car drives down street, pulls up to new location, etc…. but then they took a cue from how such transitions were done in radio drama, “Well, here we are in (location)” and skipped most or all of the driving around shots, front of building, walking in, taking the elevator, etc. in order to move the story along. You only need the guy walking out of frame, and you can dissolve or wipe to his entrance at the next place, especially if the new shot has something visual that identifies it. Audiences “get it” if you create a shot that encapsulates or explains the new location.

[Ryan Elder]

Okay thanks, but that’s just it. You say that old films depict way too much, and I try to avoid that and skip ahead, and people don’t understand it.

You also say I should show the woman pull up in her car, on the secondary location, so wouldn’t that also be extra information the audience, doesn’t need? Why not just skip ahead, to when she is already out of the car and following him?

Is it possible to do this and still have the viewer understand it?

[Mike Cohen]

The cuts are a little quick when changing locations – not sure you need transition but you can use the actions to help. I was taught to edit on the motion – let the car move out of frame, for example. Have some kind of establishing shot when changing location, even for a second or two before someone enters the scene. you seem to have shot this already so you have what you have.

It is currently a bit confusing what you are trying to show – I know it is just a sample clip – but the picture should be motivated by the story.

Mike Cohen

[Ryan Elder]

Okay thanks. Here is an alternate cut of the scene, I just don’t like the establishing shot, cause there are all these parked cars around that I was trying to avoid, when it’s suppose to be a discreet area. But is this better at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VwlIj6sVrw

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[Mark Suszko]

OK this is my honest reaction to your new clip, me trying to give constructive criticism:

Shots 1 and 2 are unnecessary. Pick it up with 3 and 4 and 5; the red ‘vette leaves frame left, on the cut to her observing, add a beat to the front of that before she makes to start and follow. It works even better if she has a book, a drink or snack she has to put down first, so the audience can infer that she’s been staking him out for some unspecificed time prior, then there’s finally some action. That’s art direction helping add semiotic details.

Let her drive out of frame as a psuedo-wipe. The following shot from behind is redundant in light of the very next shot from the reverse angle, and the “tromboning” effect of the two shots cut together like that, back-to-back heading into and away from the camera without an intervening transitioning angle is jarring. You need one, not both.

So just pick it up at 17 seconds with the ‘vette approaching the parking spot. Throw a stabilizer plug-in on the shot to remove the camera shake, this should have been a locked-off shot. All of them should have. Stabilize them all.

The shot of the guy exiting the car and walking out at :32 sec is too short and too late, up-cut it and extend a beat or two.

Front windshield shot of the girl is redundant; go directly to the side shot of her reaching for the glove box and the XCU of the gun in the glove box.

Shot of her putting gun in pocket at :39 is redundant and very awkward; doesn’t move the story forward and looks clumsy and impractical as action. *Some* of that , perhaps you can sell as being in-character for her if she’s an ingenue, and not meant to be a private eye and is just a civvie winging it, but I’d dump that shot if that’s not in the script.

Skip all her walking shots and go right to her peeking thru the bushes at :53 sec.. Audience can make the jump between the tight glove box and the new establisher of the bushes, and it’s a cleaner transition in terms of line of action.

Do not make the audio of the two men audible.

She can’t hear that dialogue from that distance. And the dialogue is worthless, communicates nothing and is awkward. Much better and more realistic to keep it a mystery. You could throw in some XCU cuts to tight 2-shots so we can try to lip-read or at least see expressions as they talk. But that’s not strictly needed, just a frill.

I don’t know how or why we can hear this conversation at all… Unless you mean to shift POV suddenly to audience being omnicient, which is probably a mistake at this point. You’ve spent all this time setting up the girl tracking the guy, to see the rendezvous, trying to get us invested in her quest to find something out and make a plot connection… then you make all that irrelevant if we suddenly are invisibly omniscient and can hear them talking to each other… is she (and by proxy, us) meant to know this info at this stage or not?

May as well have just started the scene there in the construction site and saved many minutes and pages and shooting.

Also, that rendezvous out in the open like that makes no practical sense, for several reasons. One, you don’t sell what the old man is doing there specifically, versus some other location. It would have helped if he’d been walking a dog. Or supervising the disposal of a body in one of the construction holes. Gives him an excuse to be hanging out there at that hour, apparently alone in a spot nobody would choose for casual outdoorsiness.., Or if it’s a property of his, the old man should be seen organizing some workmen, inspecting the job, controlling or supervising or inspecting something meaningful to our understanding of his identity, his role, the plot. Heck, even him sitting there playing with an amateur telescope would have worked. As it is, he’s only there because you wanted him there, not because the story needs him there.

And we don’t see anything meaningful about the briefcase he delivered to the old man. We don’t necessarily need to see into it and at that distance, we can’t… but the action certainly doesn’t sell that the case is important enough to deliver out there, rather than anywhere else… if it’s worth killing for, they’re not treating it like that.

From that distant POV, I’d have the old man seem to wind-up his conversation and suddenly motion to or turn towards the spot where our POV is, and motion towards our general direction, ….the younger man follows his pointing finger, nods assent, and starts to walk purposefully towards our girl, our camera POV… We don’t know if we’ve been spotted, or if the old man just asked the young man to check out the parking lot, but the result is now the same: he’s headed our way.

Smash-cut back to her at the bushes, seeing that he’s heading her way to check something out, startling, and she’s having an “oh $%#^” moment, has to bolt… but to where? Can she make it to the car? The way you set it up so far, yes, it’s right behind her. If you’d have had her move around to try to get closer, then there’s the opportunity for her to be cut-off from her car as escape and that motivates a chase or at least an evasion sequence…. and now you can intiate a chase that starts slow but builds because he didn’t really see her until she started to run, his path towards her was initially just coincidence.

She brought a gun… does she mean to use it? To confront the young man, the old one, or both? To try and grab the case? If it’s for protection, would she pull it at this point? Just to be ready?I s it even loaded, did she check that? It’s going to affect if she decides to stand or run. Would fumbling with it now and re-considering it’s use, add a meaningful beat here? Chekhov wants to know!

That’s what I’d do with these shots, more or less, not knowing the script.

Also, all this talk of lenses and rigs and do you not own a tripod? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, why is evey shot hand-held-looking with no reason? Is this the long-lens technique you were going on about? Because that’s not working for me unless you stabilize every shot. This ending shot of the two guys needed much shorter DOF in my opinion, and a telephoto *should* have given that to you, but I don’t see it here. You might be able to fix it a little in post by adding some vignette gradient blur to simulate the tighter DOF. But you have no objects at different distances in the line of sight to sell the DOF or help frame the shot or add interest. The concrete pipes are an obvious choice for that.

So the TL/DR version: you can tighten this up a lot, but you need a few shots this sequence doesn’t yet have, to make it really work, plot-wise, and the shaky shots all need stabilizing. And you need to make some choices about when and where to switch viewpoint to omniscient. I’d avoid it as much as possible here.

I hope I wasn’t too brutal, but you asked for advice and I’m making a sincere effort to help. I don’t mind at all if others jump in with alternative suggestions, and they may be more right-on in their opinions; this is how we all learn, myself included. I don’t pretend to perfection. But I have my own style, which you can derive from my comments. There are always multiple ways to interpret a scene and even completely revamp what it was meant to be, no one “rightest” way. But there are plenty more ways to get it wrong.

Always ask:

Does this shot or sequence tell the story or reveal character, and does it move that story along.

[Ryan Elder]

Okay thanks. What do you mean by pseudo wife, and tromboning?

As for adding in the shots I didn’t have, I don’t have those shots, like her eating something or something. I have already stabilized them. For some reason, the camera was on a gimbal, but it kept shaking, I was told the A7s, has a sensor that tends to vibrate sometimes, I will look into that. And yeah the audio of the men talking is not going to be in the final cut.

As for the shots you have suggested to put in, I don’t have those shots, and these are all I have. So is there anything I can do to make it work with what I have?

[Mark Suszko]

Try a cut based on my suggestions with what you DO have and get back to us.

[Ryan Elder]

Okay thanks, but when you say shots 1 and 2 are unnecessary, and to pick it up at 3, and 4, aren’t 3 and 4 the same shots, since the camera didn’t move? Just making sure what you mean by ‘shot’, since I think shots 3 and 4 are the same as 1 and 2, since the camera didn’t move.