Walter Murch. The Jordan of film editing.
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under video
When it comes to film editing it doesn’t get better than Walter Murch. If you have the slightest interest in the power of a strong edit I highly recommend his book In The Blink of an Eye.(it’s about $7 used on Amazon)
“My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame,” he says. “And I do that by manipulating, by how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.”
These next few quotes come from The Search for Order in Sound and Picture:
The strange thing is that you take the emotional treatment that sound is giving, and you allow that to actually change how you see the image: You see a different image when it has been emotionally conditioned by the sound.
I, of course, couldn’t have said it better myself. Sound brings an incredible emotional level to our work, which makes it very easy to abuse if you’re not careful.
The best sound is the sound inside somebody’s head. What does it take to trigger that? That’s the key to it all because those sounds will be unique to each person in the audience. They’ll naturally be the most personal and the most high-fidelity of all the sounds.
People eat with knives and forks, they eat with chopsticks, and they eat with their hands. The real goal is getting the food into the mouth. Balzac wrote 80 great novels in 20 years with a quill pen. So from a certain aspect, technology is irrelevant. What is always relevant is what you want to say. If you have something to say, you will find a method irrespective of the technology.
What do you have to say? It’ll always more important than the tool you use, but that’s probably commonsense for you all.
A quote from this interview:
Look at how we use sound in The English Patient. Many times the sound for the scene that’s about to happen starts to bleed into the end of the earlier one. You are aware of something happening, but you don’t quite know what is is. Then, when you cut to the second scene, you find out.
We’re seeing this a lot more as our editing matures. Bring the audio in slightly before the cut to “cue” the audience for what’s about to take place.
More links to articles and interviews by Murch. Some of the links are dead, but it’s still worth a peak.
Further Reading:
Tags: inspiration, murch, video
