Editing techniques essay By Caitlin Marsland-Barker Cinematography was created by the Lumiere Brothers in 1895. However, with limited resources and their basic understanding of the technology, the films created were just a constant long still. This changed in 1901 when Edward S. Porter introduced jump cuts and changed the film industry. Many other people followed his footsteps by introducing different editing techniques, giving the audience a more interesting experience. This technology has advanced greatly throughout the years and has created some of the best cinematography known today, such as Avatar and Schindler's List. Jump cuts are a huge part of cinematography, used to capture the audience’s attention, indicates that time has passed, demonstrate a change in space, or a conversation between two people. A good example of where this technique is used is in the film ‘Old boy’ by Chanwook Park. In this part of the film jump cuts are used to help show a drunken man’s night at a police station. One scene shows the man being very calm whilst sitting down, yet after the jump he becomes violent and rowdy. The contrast between each jump helps the audience understand how, in his drunken state, this man is very unstable; also telling the story of the drunken man’s night. As well as showing how unpredictable drunk people can be, the point in using this technique is to shorten the scene as a whole. They use the key parts of the night and piece them together so that it keeps the audience interested and so that they don’t waste time showing minor parts of the night that are almost irrelevant to the film. Another example of this technique is in the film ‘À bout de souffle’, in which this technique is used to show their journey. In each jump cut you can see that the characters are in a different location, which suggests that they’re on a long journey. The point of doing this is, like in the other film, so they don’t bore the audience with irrelevant journey time. By using jump cuts it also grabs the audience’s attention since the sudden change in scenery is abrupt and also interesting for them to watch. It also uses these jump cuts since the film its self was over two and a half hours long, yet had to be shortened to ninety minutes, hence the reason they cut out the constant flow between the shots and use jump cuts. This shows that jump cuts also help save time in the film in general, making sure that valuable film time is not wasted with unnecessary footage. There are other techniques such as a cut away, usually used in between the main source of action. The scene used for the cut away usually takes place at the same time as the previous scene, unlike a flash forward or flash back. The scene used for the cutaway is also at the same time as the main action scene to show that the two are happening simultaneously. Using a cut away can also create interest in the audience, establish context and meaning of the main scene of action, or crate emotion. An example of this technique is in the film is ‘Divergent’, when a character is hanging off a bridge whilst others are made to watch her save herself. The cutaways are of the people surrounding the character, which helps cause tension in the scene. If they had not cut from one to another then the audience could assume that there was no one there to see the situation going on. By adding in the cutaways you can feel the tension between the group of characters and the hanging girl. It creates the feeling that they’re fighting back the urge to help due to the quick and rapid change in scenes. This scene is used to show the impact of the situation on the people who are watching on, which helps add to the film’s story line. If the audience didn’t see the onlooker’s reactions or there were no cutaways used then the audience would possibly loose interest due to the lack of tension.
Jaws is also another example of where a cut away is used. The film cuts between the sea and a man, which creates a feeling of dread since the man keeps looking at the water as if something is about to happen. Each cut away seems to become a little quicker each time as well, which indicates that soon something is about to happen, and creates a sense of adrenalin in the audience since they know that what’s about to happen is going to be bad, yet they have no idea as to what it is. Using cut aways in this scene helps grab the attention of the audience since it’s a change between scenes, instead of either panning or a static shot of just one thing. CGI, or computer generated imagery, is also another form of editing that can do things for films that we, by ourselves, could not do. An example of this is in the film ‘Jurassic park’, a film that revolves around genetically engineered dinosaurs. For this film to feel more realistic, they turned to animators to create realistic looking dinosaurs. Although there was only four minutes’ worth of CGI in the whole film, which took about a year for the animators to create, yet these four minutes helped transform this film into mediocre to a classic. This film helped inspire other films to use CGI, using it to create apocalyptic scenery and mythical creatures. Another example of a film that uses CGI is ‘Maze Runner’ and ‘Maze Runner; Scorch Trials’. CGI helped create the ever changing maze in the first film and a destroyed, abandoned world in the second. Creatures such as cranks and grievers were all computer generated to help stick to the book, another reason why CGI is such an important editing technique; to create well-loved stories and make these ideas come to life. Unlike Jurassic park, which only featured four minutes of CGI due to lack of advancement, the films both rely on the use of CGI to create the feeling of ‘the scorch’, a natural disaster scenery in which buildings are falling apart at the seams and desert like terrains bury the golden gate bridge. Another reason why they use CGI in films is due to the cost, since it costs less money to film in one place and create their scenery than moving the set from one location to another. It also means there’s less money spent on physically creating huge sets, since they can also be created by CGI. One last technique is match cut, which is a cut between two different objects that hold similarities either in image or meaning, almost creating a seamless scene. An example of where this technique is used is in the film ‘Psycho’. This occurs when a woman is murdered in a shower, the camera cutting to blood draining down the plug. The scene is of the woman’s eye, which shows that the match between the two is that something is being drained in both scenes; blood in the shower, and life from her body. It creates an eerie feeling in the scene since we’re watching the life being drained from a body in both ways. The use of match cut is also aesthetically pleasing to the audience due to the the match in shape and colour. It creates more meaning between the scenes instead of just a death. There’s a link created which the audience pick up on due to the match in images. Hitchock used match cuts in his films because of the impact it had on the audience, since he also decides to use it in his film ‘The birds’. Another film that uses match cut is ‘Space oddyssey’, which shows a connection between a bone and a nuclear space shuttle. The reason that these two shots are connected is to show how time has evolved between the two. Although the objects hold the same shape, they are totally different. It also shows how weapons and technology has advanced, since one object is a bone, a prehistoric weapon, and one is a nuclear shuttle, a more modern weapon.
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