For the Record: Editing Research

As we near the time to edit the footage we've filmed for our opening, I decided to do some research about editing to see what I could find/re-fresh my mind on. As I've mentioned before, neither my partner or me are very skilled editors, so i hope that this research helps us work through some new skills.

First of all, I liked a blog post by the Nashville Film Institute (Film Editing: Everything You Need to Know) because it provides lots of visual examples of the different/basic editing techniques that could be used for a film, as well as the different things that can be achieved through editing like editing for tension and creating juxtapositions (and telling you how to do this). I will definitely be taking this information into account, specially when it comes to editing to create tension and capturing emotional themes, since these will help me tell our own story more successfully.

I found a different article by the organization Raindance, titled "6 Stages of Editing as a Film Director" which, as the title suggests, shares the process of editing and the different steps there is to it. According to this article Violette and I will start our First Assembly soon, which means that we'll take all of the shots we filmed throughout the last weeks and put them together in a way that makes sense. I'm looking forward for the Rough Cut and Variations part of editing. This is when me and Violette look at what we have put together so far to see if it is continuous and looks good, and depending on what we find here we can make any of the necessary changes. As of now I can already think of some scenes that might not look the best, so i will start thinking of ways to fix this.

Also, since one of the editing techniques me and Violette definitely want to use is a little more advanced and we had never done it before (parallel editing) i thought it was important to research about this as well. I found a great article on Soundtripe called "Everything You Need to Know About Parallel Editing and Cross Cutting" which I found super helpful. The first thing this article states is that although cross-cutting and parallel editing are very similar, they aren't exactly the same. They are both used to show that different sets of action are happening at the same time, but parallel editing focuses more two sets alone, meaning to connect specific themes, while cross-cutting includes several sets of action that are meant to entertain the audience. Considering this useful differentiation, the article also recommends to know what you want to transmit to your audience before choosing which of the two to choose. In my case i would use parallel-editing because I'm only connecting two sets of action and I'm definitely more focused on transmitting the themes of frustration and mystery that my character and her situation involve. According to this article one of the most important tips when editing this technique is to storyboard a bunch; planning roughly where each of the parallel-editing cuts will take place and how that would look is extremely important to maintain organization. Another very useful tip from this article was to balance the narrative between the scenes I'm using, meaning to sense which warranted more or less time on screen.

Here are some examples of parallel editing that I will be taking inspiration from:

-The Silence of the Lambs (1991)