These editing tips will get your next project shaped up and ready to kill it at film festivals!
Transcript from the episode:
Hello crew. Welcome to The Film Look. Rob & Rich here with another filmmaking knowledge bomb. Today we want to share with you 5 essential editing techniques YOU should be using on your next film project!
Cut on Action
The first editing tip we want to share is the cut on action. To demonstrate, we have set up a basic scene. I’m going to enter the scene, grab my laptop, drink some coffee, and start typing on my laptop.
So, all of these little moments in the scene are called actions. These are physical things an actor does during a scene.
Each one of these actions can be used as a cutting point in the edit - hence the term “Cut on Action”. Cutting on action can help to smooth over and hide the edit from the audience, helping to provide a seamless continuity in the scene.
If you shoot the cup being placed down in a wide shot and also shoot the same action in a close-up, it’s safe to say these shots should cut together quite well. So when you are building your shot list, you can treat these actions like checkpoints during a shoot, overlapping them between setups.
Just make sure not to cross the 180-degree line! We have a video on that fundamental filmmaking rule if you follow this right here or the link down below.
Right! Let’s get down to editing this sequence. Before we open up Premiere Pro (or your preferred editing programme), we can quickly go to youtube.com/thefilmlook and hit subscribe.
If you aren’t subscribed, this is the first thing you will want to do. Then we can open Premiere and begin.
So here I have two clips. Currently, the moment when Rob places the cup down is synchronised right on the cut point. But this isn’t necessarily the best place to cut for a smooth continual scene.
Sometimes you will want to cut a moment after he places the cup down, or maybe even halfway through placing the cup down. So how do we play around with this cut?
There is a tool in most editing programmes called a rolling edit tool, and it essentially lets you peel back footage to reveal more footage on the other side of the cut - and vice versa.
And I think for this demonstration I will cut halfway through the action as the movement of the cup is what will draw the audience’s eye.
The rolling edit tool is my preferred way to play with the cut on action point, but everyone edits their own way so just find the tools that you prefer. It’s the technique itself that is important.
On the flip side of this demonstration, please don’t think you NEED to shoot a close-up of a cup. It might be an action beat for the character, but is it a key moment in the scene or is it just a mundane task for the character to perform so they have something to do?
Remember, a close-up tells the audience “this is important”. So in this shot, it’s not necessarily the cup that we want the audience to look at, but maybe it's the book beside the cup titled “your screenplay sucks” which tells the audience the context of the scene.
Don’t just be shooting close-ups of cups if they aren’t important information. Right! Next tip.
Repeated Frames
If you are dealing with a fast-moving action point you can actually repeat a few frames after the cut. To demonstrate, me and Rich are out here in the back alley and we are going to shoot a scene where Detective Rusty Johnson is going to whip around and aim his gun.
So these shots have been clipped together and it all feels quite smooth when you first watch it.
But if we go frame by frame to Rob spinning round, you can actually see that after the cut point, he goes back in time for a few frames. So why didn’t it look weird when we first watched it?
That’s because our brains need time to catch up on the action after a cut. There is a small moment after the cut when our brains need to recalculate all the new information and work out if there is any shared information to the previous shot. In this case, it’s Rob spinning.
If you give the audience some repeated frames after the cut point, it helps them process the information and lets their brain catch up on the action. It will seem completely normal to them because it’s happening so fast. It’s subtle but it really helps with a better viewing experience.
As an editor, you have the power to pause, repeat, and scrutinize the footage, which is great for editing but it also means you are anticipating the cuts. This is why editors should take lots of breaks. Once you start anticipating the cuts, you are no longer watching it as an audience member.
One trick I use, and it is going to sound stupid but it honestly does work, is to watch the edit in your peripheral vision. So look away from the screen just a little bit and watch it again.
You get a feel for the edit without anticipating it because you aren’t staring directly at it. Speaking of staring, the next technique is called “Editing on the Eyes”.
Editing on the Eyes
This is an editing trick that uses the eyes of the actor to guide when and what we will cut to, and we are going to use a scene in our film Sixty Seconds as an example.
If you haven’t seen Sixty Seconds yet, there’s a card in the corner and a link below.
The scene begins with the bomb being defused. We move up to Stu who is staring at the bomb on the table. Then he looks up to someone. This is going to be our first cut point. Let’s edit on the eyes and provide the audience with what Stu is looking at.
We cut to Daniel. Daniel looks up to Stu. Let’s edit on the eyes again, following Daniel’s viewpoint.
Cut back to Stu. He nods.
Cut back to Daniel. He nods back then lowers his head to defuse the bomb.
Cut back to Stu one more time. He looks from Daniel to something on the table. Edit on the eyes. What’s he looking at? Cut to the bomb.
We follow the characters and provide the audience with a view of what they are looking at without having to shoot a POV-style shot and you also get a rhythm in the scene which is really smooth, hiding the editing process from the audience.
The cuts back and forth also get progressively quicker. The audience will need some time to understand the shots at first because they are brand new. But once we go back to a shot we’ve already seen, the audience is familiar, which means we can spend less time on it and it won’t feel overly choppy.
If you are interested in seeing more behind the scenes from Sixty Seconds, we have a special features pack that includes over an hour of on-set footage, a director’s commentary, and a bunch more. Links below.
https://www.thefilmlook.com/store/sixty-seconds-special-features
Cutting the blinks!
The next technique is called “cutting the blinks!”. To demonstrate, me and Rich are gonna sit down and have a really basic back-and-forth conversation. Then we are going to deliberately leave in every single blink just to make you guys feel really uncomfortable.
As you can see, a cut during the middle of a blink is really jarring. Even a single frame into a blink can create a scene of “What the bloody hell was that?” to the audience. It’s subliminal, and an audience member might not notice it consciously, but it definitely prevents a smooth experience.
In addition to this, a blink doesn’t just occur from an actor’s eyes.
You can get a ‘blink’ in an edit if, for example, a bird flies in the background for a single frame, the camera changes direction before it cuts, or the sun just escapes the clouds before a cut.
In Sixty Seconds, we had blinking issues with the police car lights. The lights would flash red and blue, but every now and then in the edit, we noticed we were cutting when the lights were off completely, which made the cut feel really jarring. So just be aware of blinks during an edit. You will likely pick up on these, but if a cut feels off, look for blinks.
Before we get to our last technique, we just want to say thank you to our supporters on Patreon for helping us to provide videos just like this one.
If you like what we do here and want to support us, head on over to our Patreon where we have a bunch of rewards including a community discord page, bonus filmmaking videos, and we even provide 1-on-1 chat sessions! Right! Tip number 5!
https://www.patreon.com/TheFilmLook
Match Cuts
The last thing we want to share is a more advanced technique called a MATCH CUT. These are cuts in the film which use similar shapes between the cuts to bring those shots together in a really interesting way.
If you are interested in learning how to prep, shoot, and edit a great cinematic match cut, that video is already on the channel!
It’s somewhere on screen now! This is where you should go next. Thanks for watching, and...bye!
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