Audio Editing 2

Okay, so what things can we do to make our film work better in terms of its continuity and emotion for the audience.

One thing that kills emotion is when we stop watching a film because we stop BELIEVING it. And we stop believing whenever we see or hear something that breaks the continuity; stopping the 'dream' we are watching from feeling 'real'.

Couple of things to help here:

Adjusting volume level for dramatic effect
J-cuts
T-cuts
Patching


OVERVIEW

It's a good thing to remember that loads of little sound touches can increase the drama on screen. Here's a class little video which shows you in real time what the sound editor did to maximise what is a fairly basic piece of filmmaking. You can skip the talking and get to the video bit if you want (at 3.30) but the guy is worth listening too.

First of all - here's probably what you're film sounds like now and some suggestions the sound editor might make.

http://youtu.be/aQOs9j3ZooA

Then, here's the next step, of what the film sounds like once he's sound edited it, with a live text track showing you exactly what he did. It's great.

http://youtu.be/5KWtnqJkUNQ

So, what do we learn? Adding little bits of audio really sells shots for the audience and enhances the picture. So here's how to do some of these tricks.

STEP ONE

Just listen to your film. Not watch it, just listen. And make notes on every problem and every idea you might have to make it better. That's always the first step. Editing in the head first.


ADJUSTING VOLUME LEVEL

Well, from the first video you now know how to adjust the audio using keyframes. So, start there. Go through the whole film and adjust the audio to broadcast safe level - which for us, for now, is -12db.


J-CUTS AND L-CUTS (editing the video)
I'll also show you how to do j-cuts and l-cuts editing the audio

http://youtu.be/4orAPK1Sutk


J-CUT AND L-CUTS (editing the audio)

Is very similar, except instead of editing the video, you leave it alone, and edit the audio. To me this is the way j and l-cuts should be done, since the pictures should already be cut the way the editor wants them. However, sometimes you're audio might be so bad you need to change video too.

There's no video for this so I'll demo it live in class.


ADDING FOLEY

Well, you've seen how much of a difference it makes. It's not hard to put foley in, however it can be difficult to build up a good foley bank. For that, you've got to hoke far and wide, or make your own.


ADDING MUSIC

Not many videos on this that I can find. But the first video shows you how a piece of music can work. Best thing to remember is not to drown your film with music that is too grand, or kill the emotion of the film with something that is inappropriate to the scene itself.

It's a matter of taste, reflection and consulting with other people.

Having a Sound Designer would help too.


PATCHING

Patching is a cheeky thing. It relates to taking bits of audio from other places in your film and using them again for something else - usually atmospheric sound where you didn't record any atmos in the first place. This helps a lot in student films and the videos above use examples of it.

Audio Editing

Great quote to put audio editing in perspective

'50% of a film is the sound'

That's George Lucas.

Taking that literally, that means we should spend at least the same amount of time editing audio as we do pictures.

But...

Students, and newcomers generally don't.

Are they lazy? Nope. It's because audio, by its very nature, is more subtle, harder to 'see' and therefore under the surface. Novice editors concentrate on pictures because that's how they feel they'll be judged; not realising that good audio editing can preserve continuity in ways that pictures simply cannot.

And that's the driving force: preserving and enhancing the continuity of the film; the emotion.

Audio breaks down into four areas:

natural sound or atmospheric sound
dialogue
sound effects
music.

To a lot of people audio mean music, but it means a lot more than that.

However, to get us started here is chap explaining how, on final cut, you can add audio, manipulate it to good effect to make a piece of video work better.

It's a bit silly, but notice the tricks on Final Cut Pro: making tracks bigger, using the clip overlays, using key frames and watching the wave forms; all good basics of audio editing.

http://youtu.be/DZjwH3fFDEs

Great continuity

Back to the world of things we know!

Here's black hole.  A great continuity film.

Look at those cuts.  Perfect.

Where is the join in this?

How far can you stretch editing?

Below is famous artist and experimental film maker Stan Brakhage's film 'Mothlight'.

You might get through about ten seconds, try and watch all of it.

This breaks most of Walter Murch's rules.  Certainly there is no story.

But what about emotion?

It is a visual poem of sorts.  It has a theme.

What effect though does it have on you?  What, if anything, do you feel when you watch it?

What can we all learn about editing from watching this and the other clips?

I think I get something about speed and how it reacts with the mind of the audience.

Also, there is something primal in this, it creates a gut reaction and is unafraid to push the audience into understanding or not understanding.  Again, a brave stance for any film.  It's like somebody that doesn't totally care whether you like them or not.  You can take them or leave them.

These type of films, on the fringes of the mainstream, can often influence mainstream film makers.

Student made this film about the Russians.

It's low-fi, home made, but contains a lot of interesting information on the particular period of Russian film making I've looked at.

Assimilating Eisenstein

The world of mainstream films is still dominated by classical continuity editing, not Russian dialectical montage.

However, the effects of Eisenstein reach far and wide and new film makers when they come to him can't help but be affected by his, still fresh and original cutting.

He continues to influence editors today.  And to take us right back to the start.  The Bourne Identity bears some passing relationship to the some of the action sequences in Battleship Potemkin, certainly for speed at least, as well as for conflict.

"In the late 1950s and early 1960s, films of the French New Wave introduced a more aggressive editing style than was typical of the Hollywood studios. À bout de souffle ( Breathless , 1960), directed by Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), used jump cuts that left out parts of the action to produce discontinuities between shots, and American directors a decade later assimilated this approach in pictures such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). As a result, by the 1970s the highly regulated point-of-view editing used in classical Hollywood began to break down as an industry standard, and the cutting style of American films became more eclectic, exhibiting a mixture of classical continuity and more abrupt, collage-like editing styles."


Source: http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Editing-THE-DEVELOPMENT-OF-EDITING.html


Can you think of films you've watched that use aspects of Russian Montage?  Either very fast editing, or where the rules of classical continuity have been abandoned?  


You could argue Eisenstein, and his contemporary, Pudovkin went too far.  You could argue they sacrificed the attention of the audience in pursuit of the vision of film as art.

Certainly, some of the Russian films from this period are no easy watch.

Brave though.

So what is Eisenstein's Contribution to Editing

Eisenstein pushed the grammar of film editing to its limits with his films and his style and what he learnt about what an audience understand is definately something that a lot of editors, and hopefully you, will learn from.

A typical American film at the time would have had around 300 cuts, an Eisenstein film had around 1000.  

Here is his contribution put very nicely:

"Eisenstein believed that editing was the foundation of film art. For Eisenstein, meaning in cinema lay not in the individual shot but only in the relationships among shots established by editing. Translating a Marxist political perspective into the language of cinema, Eisenstein referred to his editing as "dialectical montage" because it aimed to expose the essential contradictions of existence and the political order. Because conflict was essential to the political praxis of Marxism, the idea of conflict furnished the logic of Eisenstein's shot changes, which gives his silent films a rough, jagged quality. His shots do not combine smoothly, as in the continuity editing of D. W. Griffith and Hollywood cinema, but clash and bang together. Thus, his montages were eminently suited to depictions of violence, as in Strike , Potemkin , and Ten Days . In his essays Eisenstein enumerated the numerous types of conflict that he found essential to cinema. These included conflicts among graphic elements in a composition and between shots, and conflict of time and space created in the editing process and by filming with different camera speeds.":


Source: http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Editing-THE-DEVELOPMENT-OF-EDITING.html


So, as I said earlier, you can't really seperate easily Eisenstein from the political background he came from.  I wonder does you're political background effect your film making?  Does mine?

We really don't do very many stories that you could say - that's Northern Irish.  Maybe that's a challenge for us.  What would you say about things here?