This blog post will be a lesson in doing things in a timely manner because my notes for this lectorial are terrible and my memory is worse…

This lectorial looked at editing, specifically why we do it.  The Kuleshov effect stood out to me, as it is such a common phenomenon (both on a cinematic/spectacular level and a cultural level) but we never look that deeply into it.  It stands out especially in comics, which relates back to our reading for this week.  Readers (and viewers) are required to make relationships between the two panels (or shots) in order to understand what is happening, and to derive meaning from it.
(The reading this week was fantastic, by the way, and I’m not just saying that because it referenced Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha series, which I grew up reading and is possibly my favourite book series.  It offered a new way to deliver information, which helped me because I don’t do well with big chunks of text.  It was also interesting to see the difference in communication styles between Japanese and American media (with Western media using virtually only action-to-action, subject-to-subject, and scene-to-scene edits, and Eastern media adding in moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect edits, and using far less action-to-action edits))

The lectorial also showed how editing has an impact by comparing two scenes of train robberies, one with edits and one without.  The edited version clearly had more of an impact, with it’s new ability to build suspense, draw the audiences attention, and an overall clarity.  This also cemented my dislike of long takes.  Unless you have a great director who knows how to handle this choice, it will be boring.  Hitchcock is the only director whose use of long takes has kept my attention.  I’ll never understand why directors choose long takes for fight scenes.  Unless it’s one on one, it just looks crowded and messy and, worst of all, slow.

Finally, we underwent a task that had us trying to piece together a short story that had been cut up.  While we weren’t asked to piece it together the same way it was written, that’s what a majority of us did, or tried to do.
Reflecting back, I did not do too well.  I started trying to piece it together without reading all of the pieces, which is like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture or any of the individual pieces.  My method was to put all of the images into a video editing software and put it together in sequencing.  This was actually a good idea as I was able to see the story so far and group together parts that I felt went together without having to give it a definite order.  However I didn’t finish the task.  I don’t think I’m cut out to be an editor…