I started editing, poorly, at nine years old, as I recall, I was editing on something called CyberLink PowerDVD and my camera shot in something south of 144p. Needless to say, what came of it was awful but I learned so much early on, by twelve, I was fluent in Premiere Elements, by 13 I started using After Effects, of course, averagely before I decided to take a break and learn how to write for picture.

This week in our readings, we encounter Scott McCloud’s Blood in the Gutter. I had never even thought of the connection between  comics and editing but it becomes extraordinarily apparent when reading McCloud’s chapter, of course implicitly as McCloud is only talking about comics and the connection/meaning created by the gaps. I was intrigued by this reading because it engaged with unfamiliar taxonomy. I have never heard of edits classified into moment-to-moment, scene-to-scene etc. only ever hard cut, jump cut, J-cut and the like. The gaps theory is something I am familiar with (the idea that audiences create meaning in what you don’t show them rather than what you do), though, I think there is an important case to be made for meaning in what can be seen.

When I made my short film Blind, I was attempting to tell a story in a similar way with many implicit nuances that were neither externalised or necessarily shown. Edits from certain scenes to other scenes that implicitly required the audience to make interpretations. In one particular scene we see the events that lead up to and follow a shooting, though the film leaves it somewhat ambiguous as to who actually was the murderer. The actual shooting makes little difference to the plot of the film and using a scene-to-scene transition I managed to take the audience away from the shooting as it happened. Still to this day people have asked me who pulled the trigger as if it was in some way meaningful to the story. Sometimes creating ambiguity in the gaps only distracts from the story you are trying to tell and for some audiences, spoon-feeding the story is essential.

I am not denying that much of the way audiences interpret a film is in the unseen, I agree however, I do think that in many cases, audiences, especially with my own work, respond better to having more information explicitly than having to read between the edits. Audiences can very easily become disorientated in a medium as diverse and stimulating as film and this is why I believe that the shots themselves are equally as important as the created subtext in between.