PE3_iMovie

Audio and Montage

This was the first lynda.com lesson I have completed. I have impatiently come in and watched a few chapters here and there just to help me with the projects I have been working on.
I was really impressed with this iMovie training, this lesson was excellent! Garrick was very well-organized and concise and I feel like I finally have the solutions to some of the problems I have struggled with in these past iMovie projects. I was wearing headphones, but found my family frequently laughing at my ohhhh's and ah-ha's. Especially with the audio controls, I finally understand the distinctions iMovie is making between background and attached audio, pinning and ducking. Cool.


One thing about this use of video rather than text in education that is being embraced here at Full Sail and on lynda.com, is that videos are completely linear. If I discover that I have forgotten or may have misunderstood some detail I learned, it is very time consuming and difficult to go back and skim to find that detail. I have to watch the video in real time, listening to all the irrelevant moments like pauses, ums and ahs (very rare here in Garrick's lesson but quite common in wimba sessions) to find that bit I need to review. I hope some sort of speech to text indexing system is eventually deployed so we can tell just where in a teaching video one can find the topic they need to review.

Walter Murch working on Coppola's Tetro in Argentina - courtesy wikimedia commons

What is most notably really missing here is any instruction in the art of the montage or any sort of editing theory. Stanley Kubrick was quoted as saying: "I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making . . . . I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit."


Interestingly, motion picture editing is such a new art, that someone like Walter Murch, who has been nominated for an academy award for editing on every editing technology from Moviolas to flatbeds to Avid to Final Cut, and who has developed so many of the basic principals of editing, is still working. I highly recommend his book In the Blink of an Eye to anyone who is interested in the art, science and politics of editing.


Murch uses six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are, in order of importance:
· Emotion - Does the cut reflect what the audience should be feeling at that moment?
· Story - Does the cut advance the story?
· Rhythm - Does the cut occur at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'.
· Eye-trace - Does the cut respect to the audience's focus of interest within the frame?
· Two-dimensional plane of the screen - Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?
· Three-dimensional space of action - Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the narrative


Blacklisted director Edward Dmytryk (who my father happened to work with on Walk on the Wild Side and Raintree County) used seven rules of cutting:
· Never make a cut without a positive reason.
· When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short.
· Whenever possible cut 'in movement'.
· The 'fresh' is preferable to the 'stale'.
· All scenes should begin and end with continuing action.
· Cut for proper values rather than proper 'matches'.
· Substance first - then form.