More Film School Tips

A few months ago I wrote about a talk I gave at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference which I called “15 Film School Tips in 20 Minutes.” During that posting I gave three of those tips:

• Use L-Cuts — as much as you can
• Cut on action
• Matching Action is Overrated

Last week Marcin asked if I’d post some more. And, while you won’t have the benefit (??) of watching me leap around on stage, giving examples to these tips, I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to give you three more of them.

Attract The Eye

Let me start out by stating the obvious: filmmaking is all about manipulting the audience. Now, that’s not a word that I’m afraid of. If we’re good filmmakers we all should have stories that we want to tell other people. When we show our audiences our finished films we want them to be affected by them. For better or worse. When I edited HEATHERS there were clearly people who were affected by the film — some of them hated it.  Of course, a lot of people also liked it, equally as passionately. And that’s why I loved working on that film — it affected people.

But you can’t affect people in a direction that you want, without manipulating them. So, alot of filmmaking is about trying to get the audience to see and feel what you want them to see and feel.

Much of that is about controlling their eye.

There are three main ways to control the audience’s eye and you’ll usually use them in some combination. [I know that I’ve oversimplifying here. If you want to go into more details about this, come and take a class with me. You’ll hear more than you probably want to know about all of this.] The first is by size. If you’ve got five people standing in a row and one is taller than the other, the audience’s eye is generally (all else being equal) going to go the taller one. The second is by color. If you’ve got five people standing in a row and four are wearing black and one is wearing white — well, the audience’s eye is (generally) going to go to the one wearing white. The third control method is action. If four of the people are standing and one is moving in some bigger way, the audience’s eye is almost always going to go to the character who is moving.

This last point is the most potent of them all, for editors. We use movement to distract the audience from seeing mismatches, we use it to attract the audience’s attention to an important plot point, and we certainly use it to keep energy moving at a cut.

So what do all three of these points have in common? They are all about creating change. And that leads to point number two

Change Things

What this means that is that, if you want to impress a point on the audience, you can best do it by changing something at that point. Cutting from a wide shot to a closer one emphasizes what is happening at that point. Adding a piece of music emphasizes what is happening at that point. Dropping out most of the sound emphasizes what is happening at that point (look at the Caravaggio interrogation scene in THE ENGLISH PATIENT for a great example).

Put another way, if every scene in your film is high energy then none are high energy. If every moment in a scene is frought with deep pensive thought, then none of them will feel deep and pensive to the audience. A movie like IN THE BEDROOM was, to me, made much less effective since the lead characterswere constantly undergoing heavy, meaningful moments.

This means  you want identify these individual scripted moments in a scene.  Oddly enough,  I’ve written an entire book to help you do exactly that. It’s called THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT and it takes you through this process in every filmmaking craft, not just editing. And once you identify these moments, then you can decide what things to change around them. The Lean Forward Moments are always identified with important story points, and there’s at least one in every storytelling chunk/scene in your project. Finding them, and then using that knowlege to help to make the audience lean forward and pay added attention to what you’re saying, is what effective storytelling is all about.

Matching Sizes

A corollary to the previous point is that you shouldn’t change anything if you don’t want the audience to lean forward and pay added attention. Don’t begin music at Point A, if you want the audience to feel an important point later on down the line at Point B.

Since changing lens sizes is an effective way of creating a Lean Forward Moment (banging into a closeup when you’ve been working in medium shots is a sure attention-grabber) you will want to make sure that you don‘t change lens sizes unless you want to. What this means is that, in a dialogue scene between three people, you should make sure that you have matching medium shots on all three.  That way, when you cut from one character to another, you’re not emphasizing one of the characters more than another, and you’re not calling attention to the editing moments if you don’t want to.

That’s also why most narrative directors will cover all of their characters in matching sizes no matter what size shots you use. If you cover Character A in both a medium and a clean single shot, you will make sure that you cover Characters B and C in both sizes as well. If you don’t have time to shoot all six set-ups (plus a wide shot of all three) then you should lose pieces of coverage on the least important person in the scene, though even that is horribly risky. Sometimes cutting from a series of matching closeups to a medium carries as much impact as cutting from the medium to the closeup.

In other words, changing anything on screen is going to have an affect on the audience. It would be WAY better if that affect was something that helped push your story forward rather than a side effect of a random production decision you made in order to save time or money.

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So there you have it.  Three more handy-dandy tips from Film School.  All without the tuition fees.