Editing is something that can make or break a movie, when editing is done right it can be seamless and hardly noticeable but when it is done wrong it can pull you out of the story and becomes distracting. There are multiple different examples of bad and good editing but I’m going to talk about two scenes of particularly bad editing that I have come across recently.

The most recent Oscar winner for best editing in a movie went to Bohemian Rhapsody. If you haven’t seen Bohemian Rhapsody it is about the life of Freddie Mercury whilst he was in the band Queen. Overall the movie is edited quite decently with interesting ways of showing time passing and there tours. In fairness a lot of Bohemian Rhapsody is edited quite well however it falls short with there dialogue scenes. It is as if the editors don’t know how to edit dialogue and just did it in a way to keep the tempo of the film up. The result of this are extremely fast cuts that make no sense to the actual scene. Giving the audience what feels like editing whiplash. The main example of this and one that many people are talking about is a scene where the band is meeting with there new agent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNctAdr7jy4   (this is the scene we are talking about). The scene starts off fine with only a few cuts showing us where they are and setting up the scene. It is when John Reid enters is when we notice the cuts get far too fast. Cutting between characters with no real on screen direction. For example a character would be talking to another and then the shot would cut to someone not apart of the conversation. Getting reactions of characters that don’t make sense to get reactions of because we had seen the same reaction only 2 seconds before. They also don’t show the movement of characters on screen which is not always a bad thing but can be another jarring thing for the audience to get around. There are ’60 cuts spread throughout [this] 104-second scene’ (AV News 2019, para 1) this makes the average length of a shot 1.6 seconds. That is insane especially if we compare it to other movies, for example YouTuber Thomas Flight pointed out that one action sequence from the movie Transformers had 49 cuts in a 136 second clip with an average shot length of 2.8 seconds. This is a large very action heavy fight scene compared to a simple dialogue scene between mainly 5 characters. There is no reason for the editing of this scene to be that fast paced. There could be some reasons why they edited the scene like this. One is probably because they didn’t have a good medium shot of all the characters so they had to jump back and forth to get reactions of everyone. This obviously couldn’t be fixed by the editor. An other may be that they wanted to keep the fast pace of the rest of the movie so decided to make the cuts very fast to keep the audience entertained. There are many examples of great dialogue scenes in cinema history but this is a great example of how not to edit a dialogue scene.