The Doorway of Editors —— Reading Notes on Blink of an Eye

Excerpts from the original text

& lt blinks > read notes.

(1) Emotion 5 1%

(2) Story 23%

(3) Rhythm 10%

(4) line of sight 7%

(5) Two-dimensional feature 5%

(6) Three-dimensional coherence 4%

What I am proposing here is actually a priority. When you have to give up a certain principle, don't sacrifice your feelings to take care of the story, the story to take care of the rhythm, the line of sight to take care of the rhythm, and the plane to take care of the continuity of the three-dimensional space.

If you are on the scene most of the time, like actors, producers, directors, photographers, production designers, etc. You may witness some thrilling or incredible processes, but when watching the material, your eyes in your mind will involuntarily see the scene at that time, so you will see all kinds of things outside the edge of the picture, and you will imagine that everything present at that time can be seen physically and psychologically, although it may not exist in actual shooting.

I think I am advocating some simplicity, so that the editor will not be unnecessarily disturbed by various things on the production site.

The director is undoubtedly a person who knows all the shooting details, so he is also tired of information surplus and can see all the information outside the screen.

Therefore, the best thing for a director (and the best thing for the film) is that he will say goodbye to everyone, disappear for two weeks, go to the mountains, the seaside, Mars or anywhere, and try his best to completely unload his redundant information.

Wherever he goes, he will try to think about things that have absolutely nothing to do with his movies. It's not easy, but it's necessary, otherwise a wall can't be built between shooting and editing. Fred. After the filming, Zeniman will climb the mountain in the Alps and put himself in a dangerous situation that may threaten his life safety, so as to fully cope with the immediate difficulties instead of daydreaming about the problems in the film. In a few weeks, he will come down from the Alps and set foot on the ground. He will sit in a dark room, alone, and when the arc light is on, he will start watching his own movies. Naturally, off-screen images will still overflow his mind (a director will never completely forget it), but if he comes back directly from the set and sits in the editing room, the confusion will be even more serious, and he will irrevocably confuse the two different ways of thinking: shooting and editing.

When reading the materials, I sometimes make a small mistake, similar to the mistake I make when I audition for an actor. For an actor who walks in the door, this audition is his or her only chance to show you himself or herself. It is an extremely important moment, but for you, he (she) may be the sixteenth person you met that day, and a fog will inevitably rise in your mind, which will hinder your keen thinking.

The material is the same. Every shot is auditioned in front of you and approved by you. Article 5 says, "What about me? I can do this. " Then article 7 pushed the door and said, what about me? How's this? Article 9 says, "How about this?"

In order to maintain your sensitivity and truly form a vivid understanding of the possibility of each material, you must constantly beat yourself, keep fresh, see wonderful and not so wonderful things, and make records. That's what you did when you auditioned for an actor.

At the end of the Julia clip, Fred? Zineman found that after being alone with the film for several months, the director and editor could only finish 90% of the film, and the final 10% needed "audience participation". He thinks the audience is his last collaborator.

For me, the perfect movie seems to be just around the corner. Your own eyes are projecting it, so you see what you want to see. Film, like thinking, is the art closest to our thinking process.

Look at the desk lamp at the other end of the room, and now come back to see me; Then look at the lamp, and then look at me. Did you see what you did? You blinked. This is "cutting". You took one look at me, and then you knew there was no need to roll from me to the desk lamp, because you knew what was in the middle, and your heart made an incision.

But even so, the visual jump caused by turning your head can be huge, such as from the Grand Canyon in front of you to the big forest behind you.

After reading that article, I began to observe when people blink, and then I found that the reason for blinking was not what our middle school biology textbook said at all, but to wet the surface of the eyeball. If that is really the whole reason, then for a given environment and a given individual, the frequency of blinking should be relatively fixed, mechanical and predictable, changing according to different environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity and wind speed. You blink only when your eyes are quite dry, and that second is fixed in any environment. Obviously, this is not in line with the actual situation: people sometimes blink for a few minutes, sometimes blink repeatedly, and there are many changes in the middle. So the question is, what makes people blink?

In this way, the frequency of our blinking is more related to our emotional state, the characteristics of thinking and the frequency of thinking, not just the air environment we happen to be in. Even if there is no head movement (such as Houston's example), blinking has some function to help the inner split thinking, or it inadvertently reveals that our hearts are going through this split process.

It is not just the frequency of blinking that explains the problem, but the timing of blinking itself is more meaningful. Go talk to someone and see when he blinks. I believe you will find that once your audience "understands" what you are saying, he or she will blink at that moment, neither too early nor too late. Why is this happening? In fact, the act of speaking is full of all kinds of unnoticed words and extended explanations, which are equivalent to the functions of phrases such as "Dear Sir" and "Sincere/Yours" in the dialogue, and the main points we want to talk about are mixed between the opening and closing remarks. When the blink of an eye happens, the listener either realizes that the "prologue" has ended and is about to enter the important content, or thinks that we are finishing up and won't say anything important for the time being.

So when we ponder an idea or a series of interrelated ideas, we blink to separate different ideas, just like punctuation in movies. A shot presents us with an idea, or a series of ideas, and then a clip divides these ideas into a "blink". At the moment you decided to cut, what you said to yourself was actually like this: "I want to end this idea and start another one."

Therefore, no matter how you look at it, I believe that "movie-like" visual juxtaposition exists in the real world, not only in dreams, but also when you are awake. And I will even go further and say that they are not accidental psychological phenomena, but a necessary way for us to know the world: we must cut the real world into incoherent pieces, otherwise the real world will become an endless string of letters without punctuation. When we sit in the dark cinema, we will find that watching the edited movie is a (surprising) familiar experience, which, in Winston's words, is "closer to our thinking than anything else".

I believe this is the secret of hackman's performance that I discovered while editing the dialogue. He has regarded himself as a role. Harry? Cole, my brain is thinking about what Harry is thinking, so the rhythm of blinking should match those thoughts.

Another task as an editor is to immerse himself in the sense of rhythm brought by a good actor's performance, and try to extend this sense of rhythm to those places where the performance failed to reach, so that the film rhythm as a whole is a deep interpretation of those thinking modes and emotional changes. A good way to do this is to observe when an actor blinks intentionally or unintentionally.

I think the order of thinking activities, that is, the rhythm and frequency of editing, should be adapted to what the audience sees. In extreme cases, the blink frequency in the "real world" is between four and forty times per minute. If you are fighting, you will blink dozens of times per minute, because you have dozens of different decisions to make, so watching a fight in a movie should also have dozens of cuts per minute. Statistics show that the blink frequency in life is very close to that in movies. We can compare it. According to the arrangement, a convincing fight needs 25 shots per minute, while a "normal" conversation (for American movies) only needs 6 minutes or less.

You should find the right time to blink, maybe a little earlier from time to time. I certainly don't expect the audience to blink at every editing point. The edit point should be a "potential" flashing point. In a sense, by switching, through this sudden change of vision, you are winking for the audience, and you have found the juxtaposition of two ideas for them, which is the effect they achieved by blinking in the real world, just like Houston.

If you put the camera in the center of the stage and shoot a high-contrast infrared movie in front of the audience, you will see the bright spots of an entire galaxy in the dark background. If someone blinks, you will see a brief interruption of a pair of light spots.

If this is true, if there are thousands of stars shining almost evenly, then filmmakers have a powerful tool. The consistent twinkling stars strongly show the audience thinking together, and the film firmly captures the audience. If the stars are scattered, the movie may have lost the audience, they may be thinking about where to eat midnight snack, or their car is parked in the right place, and so on.

When people are deeply immersed in the movie plot, you will notice that at some point, no one coughs, even if people catch a cold. If coughing is purely a natural response to cigarettes or suffocation, then no matter what happens on the screen, coughing will be persistent and irregular. But the audience will hold back their cough at some point. In my opinion, this is the same as blinking. Many years ago, pianist Sviatoslav? Richter played Musorgskiy's Photo Exhibition in Bucharest, leaving a very famous live recording. It can be clearly heard that no one coughed when he played some paragraphs. At that time, the flu made many people catch a cold, but the master's performance art actually suppressed the impulse of 1500 patients to cough at that time.

Part of editing work is to consider the audience's thinking in advance, and part is to control the audience's thinking. Giving them what they want/need just before they "ask for it" makes them feel both unexpected and reasonable. Too backward or too advanced will have problems. If you are just right and early from time to time, the progress of the story will make people feel natural and exciting.

I think this subconscious attention to blinking behavior is also a secret element that can be found in daily life. Someone will make you nervous, because you feel his wink is wrong instead of knowing it. "He blinks too often" or "He doesn't blink very much" or "He blinks at the wrong time", which means that he is not listening to you and doesn't keep up with your thoughts.

The person who really listens to you will blink at the right time and with the right rhythm, and you will feel very comfortable in front of this person. I think we know these things by nature and subconsciously, and no one tells us. I wouldn't be surprised if I found that this is part of our innate communication strategy.

In this way, we return to the editor's central responsibility: to establish an interesting and consistent emotion and thought rhythm on the most microscopic and macroscopic scale, so that the audience can trust and entrust the film. A poorly edited movie will make the audience subconsciously say to themselves, "The idea of this movie is a little scattered and the presentation is a little neurotic. I don't want to think like that, so I won't give myself to this movie. " On the contrary, a well-edited film will make people feel that it seems to be an exciting deepening and extension of the audience's own thoughts and feelings, so they will put themselves into the film, just like the film gives themselves to the audience.