Post-film editing process-rough cutting is the pulse of the film

Everyone who does editing knows that what kind of editing ideas and techniques are used to shoot the scene depends on the director's theme, conception and shooting style. Before you enter the editing stage, you must comprehensively consider these aspects to ensure the correct editing ideas. This is the so-called "planning before moving". I call this process "the pulse of the movie".

The establishment of the plot trend structure diagram is the context of the script, and its ways and methods have been discussed in detail in the second chapter, so I won't repeat them. What I want to focus on here is how to consider, choose and choose the editing scheme according to the trend structure diagram after it is established, that is, to carry on the thinking and make the director's pulse.

Take Don't Look Back and Slumdog Millionaire for example.

Don't Look Back is not so much telling a story as emphasizing the establishment of an anti-traditional poetic film label with oliver stone's personal temperament. This is exactly what the film editor firmly grasped before he began to edit the film, so he showed anti-traditional "slit editing" everywhere to break the smooth narrative, and established his own expressive poetic narrative language structure while constructing nonlinear double space-time.

How did this "pulsation" of realizing the anti-traditional style of movies with anti-traditional editing scheme come out?

One is the script, the other is the director, and the third is the content and image style of the material.

Let's talk about the script first

Don't Look Back tells the story that Bobby is trapped in a small town because of the explosion of the radiator pipe of his car, but he is stuck in a series of events, depicting a dog-eat-dog society and a desperate life that seems fatalistic. In order to highlight the idea, the whole story is full of slightly crazy plot setting and black humor temperament, and its narrative trend and characters' emotions are despair that has pushed life to the bottom. This conception and plot setting of the film contains a lot of elements that do visual effects and subvert tradition.

Look at the director again

The films directed by oliver stone are notoriously unconventional, and each film should be firmly branded with personal characteristics. It is not surprising that his films are dazzling, but following the rules is a special case.

Finally, watch the movie material

Shoulder-mounted photography has a strong symbolic image (vulture, snake, cat, scorpion, etc. ), irregular composition, rapid shaking and throwing shots, and images everywhere all show the director's strong unconventional personal style and the purpose of conveying meaning through images.

After the editor accurately grasped all this, he established the idea of creating an anti-traditional poetic film with "slit editing".

In Don't Turn Around, flashbacks are used to rearrange the relationship between time and space. The antecedents of Bobby's appearance in the town, Grace's growing experience and Jack's description of his ex-wife are disassembled into countless fragments, which are inserted into the present time and space as memories, forming a dual-time nonlinear structure of "paragraphs plus fragments" composed of continuous flashbacks.

In the choice of materials

When shooting, the editor specially selected the scene where the director violated the classic composition, and combined with the narrative style of shaking the mirror to highlight the restlessness of the film: he also used a lot of anti-traditional techniques such as jumping, free switching of time and space, shaking the mirror, upgrading, symbolizing and cutting. It strengthens the rhythm of the film and the dynamic trend of the picture, shows the turbulent inner world of the characters, and proves the thoughts of plunder, greed and cruelty in human society, showing a strange and changeable film style.

For example, at the beginning of the movie, Bobby is shown swelling alone on a hot and barren road. As a result, the scene of killing an animal, the former editor is eclectic and profound:

Among the seven short shots, except for three related shots, the other shots are not describing the event itself, nor are they conventional traditional narrative methods. This passage only gives the audience an impression of crushing animals, and does not intentionally present the whole clear process. Editors pay attention to the symbolic meaning and dazzling stylization of the lens through assembly. This makes the film have a strong sense of modernity and fashion, and it is also full of implications.

In order to establish this image style more clearly, the editor added a series of symbolic shots such as vultures, snakes, scavengers and lions on the way to Bobby's garage to symbolize the social reality of the law of the jungle and Bobby's coming doom. In the later narrative, the editor also selected the scene of Bobby standing in front of the scorpion's water pipe under the billboard painted with snakes and other beasts in the town many times, and accumulated through these constantly appearing scenes, rendering the joy and values of life that the creator wanted to express.

It should be said that it is the editor who found the correct way to express the shot with intention that makes the empty shot, which was originally used as a transition in most films, become a stylized element with strong intention in this film and an important embodiment of poetic audio-visual language. In the transition between time and space and events, Don't Turn Around doesn't care about fluency at all, but pays more attention to the expression of the characters' emotions and inner thoughts at a certain moment, which has almost become the main form of transition. Correspondingly, some important plot points (scenes) are bold and dazzling editing techniques.

There was a scene where a car dealer blackmailed Bo, and he didn't laugh. The editor first used a set of quick shots to assemble and connect, showing the growing impatience of the garage owner and Bobby. When Bobby picked up the wrench and rushed over, the owner of the car shop waved a pickaxe, but he was picked up by one person. There were several repeated jumps and slashes in the action, which gave Bobby a dynamic sense of strength and oppression.

The editor's focus is not on explaining the conflict between the two, but on Bobby's anxiety, helplessness and depression at this moment, as well as the turbulent visual feelings formed by their quarrel.

The slave state of the editor's anger at the mechanic is presented through a series of jumps, which shows Bobby's extreme helplessness. Finally, the mechanic's stroke on the hood, coupled with the neighing sound effect of a horse (the logo of the car happens to be a horse), makes the whole scene show a little ironic black humor in the tension and turmoil. This treatment not only conveys the psychological rhythm and emotions of the characters, but also highlights the unique personality style of the film. Bobby was robbed in the supermarket. In the early stage, the editor first selected a large number of fast-shaking lenses and ptz. Through the correct connection, an urgent sense of rhythm is formed. Lu Xianbo's nervousness when he was robbed of a huge sum of money to save his life also created a tense atmosphere at the scene of the robbery.

After the gangster was shot, the editor used an upgraded treatment. In the euphemistic background music, the banknotes flying all over the sky slowly fall like scattered snowflakes. Bobby was crawling on the ground, watching in despair that the life-saving money disappeared. At this moment, the editor used the upgraded variation to set off Bobby's despair and helplessness. Deliberately blurring time and space, from the dynamic lens group to the sudden stop in the fast rhythm, this editing method shows the festive feeling and emotion in the play, and shows the effect of Si Tong's film style with strong visual effects. This style, combined with breaking the linear narrative structure, realizes the editing idea set by the editor after "grasping the pulse" and marks the film with a unique anti-traditional poetic film brand.

Let's watch Slumdog Millionaire. The director shoots the film in a mixed way of shoulder-to-shoulder and fixed, and the image in the material is tilted or even reversed. Obviously, I want to realize freestyle image narration, while those curved surfaces shot with fixed lenses present a delicate taste. If I want to combine the two shooting methods, I must edit narrative clues and time and space in a mashup way. If I recombine the current movies in time and space, we can find that not only the narrative becomes lengthy, but also some contents are missing, and the drama is far less intense than the current movies. This story consists of three parts, namely Jamal's turbulent growth experience (main content), Jamal's answering process at the million-dollar fund site and Jamal's trial process. The emotion to be expressed is not only the love between Jamal and Latikka, but also the affection between Jamal and his brother.

But in the process of telling the story, we will find that if we tell the story in the order of time and space, what happened during the period from my brother's expulsion of Jamal to the appearance of little Jamal, the emotional clues that Jamal and Latikka have spanned more than ten years are either completely missing or sketchy. In order to make the story compact and beautiful, and at the same time to bridge and repair these shortcomings, the editor established four nonlinear fragmented three-dimensional narrative modes interspersed with time and space in the film. This is obviously the result of careful thinking, calculation and arrangement after the editor "takes the pulse" of the script and material. The whole film was reborn because of this reconstruction (the plot trend structure diagram and nonlinear fragmented three-dimensional space-time of this film have been analyzed in detail in chapter 2, so I won't repeat them here).

In the choice and combination of shots, because the director intends to combine shoulder-to-shoulder photography with fixed photography, a large number of unconventional free compositions and conventional compositions coexist in the material, so the editor has formed a scheme of mixing traditional editing techniques such as visual consciousness transition, jumping, upgrading frame extraction, freeze-frame extraction, similar connection, delay and post-effect to adapt to those magnificent shots and push the director's turbulent image style to the extreme, thus achieving a visual scene.

For example, there is a scene where a fat policeman holds Jamal's head in the water. Editors deliberately create visual effects in the selection and combination of shots, so that the audience's eyes form a sense of jumping. In addition to selecting a group of shots with oblique composition, he also connected this group of shots three times on the editing table by taking three squares, one square and three squares again, creating a sense of turbulence. But this sense of turbulence is different from Godard's movies. It is not an unreasonable cut-in, but the jumping of the characters' emotions, which produces an emotional tension, so that when the audience watches this scene, it will not affect the fluency, but also form a strong visual feeling and psychological influence.

In a scene where Jamal was chased by the police in his childhood, when selecting materials, the editor was more interested in finding some shots with tilted composition in the process of shoulder photography, and adding special effects to create a dazzling and smooth visual experience. For example, he used the halo of the sun in the picture to assemble a process of children running. The editor chooses a large dynamic tilt lens in the running process of shoulder-mounted photography, and breaks the integrity of the lens with jump cutting to form a strong sense of movement. In the process of action, he uses the sun halo in the picture at three key assembly points to attract the attention of the audience, so that the running composed of multiple jump cutting lenses presents a smooth feeling in one go. These three repeated halos form a rhythm with jump cutting and tilt composition.

Even in some paragraphs of the film, the mask made by reverse composition and special effects plus translation composition (as shown below) is selected. These horizontal and vertical compositions not only create extraordinary visual experience, but also create a sense of thrift and unique expressive force through changes or periodic repetition.

These are the lens choices and techniques made by the editor after confirming the conception of the script and the material style adopted by the director, so as to forge a delicate narrative framework, realize rich stylized visual effects, accurately convey the thoughts and feelings that the film wants to express, and create a visual feast, making the whole film both atmospheric and fashionable, exquisite and delicate.

The above two films are examples that combine scripts and conform to the shooting style of the director's material. After careful consideration by the editors, the most suitable editing scheme is established, and the film concept and image style are pushed to the extreme.

However, sometimes, after trying to figure out the script and establishing the plot structure diagram, the editor will find that the image style of the material is not suitable for expressing the ideas and stories of the script, or the shooting material has great defects and flaws when reviewing the director's shooting material. At this time, in order to better realize the idea of the script and the shooting purpose of the film, the editors may have different ideas about the shooting style from the director after taking the pulse, and sometimes even subvert the shooting style. In this case, editing should be especially cautious, because it is possible that the director has other ideas when shooting and does not perform completely according to the original intention of the script, which is not uncommon in the shooting stage. At this time, don't rush to the editing stage, but better communicate with the director, put forward your own suggestions, listen to the director's opinions, and establish the final editing plan through mutual learning. This plan may be a subversive opinion I originally imagined, or it may be redrafted according to the director's shooting style after understanding his final intention. For example, the film Box is an example of editing subverting the shooting style of the director's material.

Box is a small-budget commercial film. It tells the story that the hero found a box with a dead body and triggered a series of events, and finally killed his wife by mistake, with elements of commercial plot construction such as extramarital affair, suspense and murder. After reading the material, the editor found that there were a lot of long shots, which used hand-held shooting and natural lighting effects, and had the temperament of an art film, but it did not conform to the theme of the script and the commercial nature of the film.

The editor didn't rush to start the operation, but repeatedly tried to figure out the script, established the plot trend, and then carefully examined the material to determine whether the material shot by the director could change the shooting style and realize the commercial temperament of the film while completing the narrative. After drawing up the editing idea, the editor communicated with the director and producer and finally decided to subvert the director's shooting style. Cut off the long shot by breaking, and change the "art" of shooting shots into "business" by using editing techniques such as jumping, digging and cutting, and marginal shots.

This editing scheme determines the criteria for the selection and combination of shots during rough cutting and fine cutting, and finally unifies the director's shooting, script and actor's performance, and edits a series of excellent and low-cost commercial films, which won the "My Favorite Asian Film Award" and the "Most Popular Film Award for College Students" at the 10th Shanghai International Film Festival, and became one of the three China mainland films in the newcomer award unit (ten films from all over the world were shortlisted). Some film critics call it "a strange, suspicious, horrible and humorous black whirlwind." Wen Juan, a veteran Hong Kong filmmaker, once wrote an article praising "The Box" as a new domestic film that can't be missed, showing the rare black humor of domestic films. Andrew chow, a mainland film critic, said, "This film has both the visibility of commercial films and the aftertaste of art films ..."

"If you want to do a good job, you must sharpen your tools first." The reason why editing should keep the pulse of the film before the editing stage is to accurately draw up editing ideas: to find out what the film is going to say, what style the director wants to use, and what means editing can use to penetrate his style and push it to the extreme-when to find the pulse of the film and when to "scissor hands".