Editing, Music and Structure
Ive never met an editor yet who wasn't, if not an actual musician, a avowed music fan - one of those perpetually headphone wearing, mp3 player plugged-in types. There is good reason for this; Editing is synonymous with music. Any good moving image sequence, any good scene that ebbs and flows with an organic seamless rhythm, is one that has found a distinct musicality. Any good movie sequence, I believe, can be understood by analyzing it as a form of song structure.
As I found myself pondering this and thinking of a way to describe classic movie sequences by way of musical structures I stumbled across another superlative blog post by my old colleague Mr Tom Ellard. In a decidedly eloquent blog post entitled
Music Class: Lets write some music, Tom artfully and humorously lays down how a song structures are formed by drawing connection to games of Peak-a-boo played with young babies (or, alternatively as Tom muses, Senile Old Uncles)
Classical composers are good at Peek A Boo. They give you an
overture, which provides the rules. Then they start messing with the
melodic structure, wandering off in apparent disregard for the game,
but just when you think theyre halfway to China they pop back into
view to ensure you know theyre really just teasing. Then they give you
a finale that shows how it only seemed to wander off"
The post is most definitely worth a read regardless of whether your interest is music or movie editing as the notions of supervise, familiarity, tension and expectation are part and parcel of both.
This connection, of the structure of music arrangement to moving image editing, is one that I attempt to exert upon my students and the tools for this sit often unrecognized right under their noses. Whilst most (all to easily) dismiss the idea of scoring a film project with simple audio loop sequencing tools such as Acid or SoundtrackPro, these tools provide a perfect, and totally accessible, means to explore musical structure. With pitch and tempo correction taken care of, a pack of loops becomes, by way of the DAWs visual arrangement of blocks of sound, the perfect place to experiment with the assembly of experience. You may never be a working muso or wish to actually score your own films but there is not a filmmaker alive who wont understand dramatic structure, surprise, familiarity and anticipation better for having played at loop sequencing.
Its why I think any good DJ is potentially a world-class editor waiting to get their calling. By nature of what they do they understand assembly, how to get the listener into a groove and then surprise, offer them something familiar and then shift it to take them somewhere new. These are the qualities every editor needs to hold dear when hey sit in the edit bay.
Posted at 12:00AM Jan 15, 2009
by Mike Jones in video |
The George Lucas & John Williams tandem even went a step further: John Williams heavily leveraged the idea (pioneered by classical composer Maurice Ravel) to associate specific musical themes to specific characters in the story. Just like in classical ballet "Daphnis & Chloe", you find that Princess Leia has her theme, the Emperor has his, and so on. So John Williams superimposed musical structure (for twists and turns in the story) and character themes. This was cleverly used in Episodes 2 & 3, with the character themes giving emotional hints of what would occur in older Episodes 4-6.
I agree that classical composers are good at this twist & turn game, especially those from late 19th century to early 20th. If you can find images or topics that will fit music by Ravel, Fauré, or Debussy, get ready for a wild ride in your editing session because that music, with its very complex quasi-organic structure, gives you countless opportunities to exercise yourself in structuring edited footage, leveraging both image rhythm and music rhythm for purposeful emotion making. On the tech side it also requires heavy work to adjust sound levels on the timeline - just too much dB dynamics in classical music.
Alternatively, using existing musical soundtracks is also a very nice & challenging exercise - I used Ben Hur's soundtrack, and also some from Fellini's films. They're full of twists and turns - so much fun to edit videos with rhythm and with style, and quite difficult too. So I agree with your point about "Editing [being] synonymous with music". It really takes close familiarity with music at large, to be able to identify the structure of music and think about editing in terms of overall clip structure.
If you could work the musical rights issues and such, using existing soundtracks can be an interesting challenge for your students: start from the music (not from a script), build the script from the music, and see who can generate visual emotions from the musical emotions. That person is an editor at heart!
P.S: maybe Norman Hollyn would instead state on his blog that editing is synonymous with story-telling. Also true! Okay then, maybe editing is just synonymous with... classical opera (just kidding!)
Posted by Stephan on January 15, 2009 at 02:39 AM EST #