Film editing articles

New Media Technology is an introduction to the discipline and applications that comprise it. As with all disciplines, there is a strong theoretical component. Here are some articles on film editing, approached from an academic perspective.

Download a PDF of “Maximizing the Moment – Theories for the Practice of Editing.” It is based on the conference of the same name, held at the media Centre Lume, Helsinki, in May 2004.
__________________________

A few memorable quotes from the essays:

“Fundamentally, what happens with the activity of the brain is that we are hard-wired to find meaning – from one image to the other we try and make meaning, we try and make a story. Why does one image follow another?”


“The human mind craves story. Many students don’t believe this until we do an exercise in which I give them a certain amount of insert material of a medical operation. I assign half the class to first construct a story for the material and then edit the footage with that story in mind. The other half of the class is given the task of deliberately avoiding a story but to find some other way of arranging the footage. Some choose color, other choose sizes of shots, and some seem to randomly choose the material. The next time the class meets we screen each cut. Amazingly, every year the exact same thing happens – it’s impossible to tell which edits were story based and which were not. Every single version of the scene tells a story, whether it was intentional or not.

Humans crave order and, as a result, they crave story. It is a powerful lesson.”

Norman Hollyn, “Direct Guidance, Remote Guidance and Misguidance: Teaching Editing in a Portable Non-Linear World”

__________________________

“First, from Metz, is that Cinema is structured ‘like a language.’ It isn’t. Second, from Lacan, the idea that the unconscious is structured ‘like a language.’ It isn’t. Language has this imperialistic approach to everything. It’s very successful. It has been the Microsoft of the brain.”

“…we apprehend, we understand the world – through our eyes and through the connection between the eyes and the brain.

Now it’s important to understand that the eye is part of the brain, it selects, it does not pass all the information it receives back along the chain. It edits the information. A fruitful way of thinking about the brain as a system is as a network of non-linear editing machines. The question then is what is being edited and why?”


“The first is that what we follow on the screen is movement, physical movement. And if we are watching, or even if we are dozing off, a movement on the screen will catch our attention even in the periphery of vision.

The eye developed in order to capture movement – as the most effective way for the organism to defend itself against a predator.

Secondly, the brain developed in order to register emotional movement.”

Peter Wyeth, “Looking at Kuleshov: The Matter of Vision and Visual Articulacy”


__________________________

Click here to download a PDF "On the Importance of Relations between Film Cues and Spectators Perception, and the Possibilities of Selective Compression in New Multimedia Technologies," by Arne Lie
NTNU Department of Telematics N-7491 Trondheim Norway

__________________________

Click here to download a PDF of Alternative Realities / The Multiverse: A Metaphysical Conundrum, by Fred A. Wynn

"Just as the acceleration of technology has escalated, there has been an increasing plethora of films in the last decade that depict characters in alternative realties. These realities are ones in which not only the characters, but the audience may be initially unaware that these realities are unreal. The realities range from virtual to games to media conceived to fantasy to science and science fiction. Yet they are all bound by the objective of breaking through a barrier that separates them from authentic reality. This loss of discernable reality is more than just a narrative theme, but also a theme of current and emergent philosophies as well the theorical concept on which this study is based; that the inability to discern reality is a deep seated collective fear of society in the 21st Century. We have truly reached the age of technology and our culture reflects this paradigm in time. Thus we find that in these films the fourth phrase of image that is characteristic of the era of simulation is reached. The films and philosophies mirror one another."