December 13th
08:19
08:19
Genrocks’s 2011 Film Perspective. Music and film credits here.
2011: The Cinescape | Matt Shapiro
If you take time out of your day to watch one end-of-the-year montage of the films of 2011, make sure it’s Matt Shapiro’s 2011: The Cinescape. This is one of the best things you’ll see on the interwebs this year. Brilliant stuff going on here.
List of films in alphabetical order:
3
30 Minutes or Less
50/50
Abduction
The Adjustment Bureau
The Adventures of Tintin
Albert Nobbs
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked
Another Earth
Answers to Nothing
Applause
Archie’s Final Project
Arthur
Arthur Christmas
The Art of Getting By
The Artist
Attack the Block
Bad Teacher
Battle: Los Angeles
Beastly
The Beaver
Beginners
Bellflower
A Better Life
The Big Year
Bride Flight
Bridesmaids
Brighton Rock
Captain America: The First Avenger
Carnage
Cars 2
Cedar Rapids
Ceremony
The Change-Up
Chico & Rita
Circumstance
City of Life and Death
Columbiana
The Company Men
Conan the Barbarian
Conquest
The Conspirator
Contagion
Coriolanus
Courageous
Cowboys & Aliens
Crazy, Stupid, Love
A Dangerous Method
The Darkest Hour
The Debt
Declaration of War
The Descendants
The Devil’s Double
Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
The Dilemma
Dirty Girl
Dolphin Tale
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
The Double Hour
Dream House
Drive
Drive Angry
Everything Must Go
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Fast Five
Final Destination 5
Fireflies in the Garden
Flypaper
Footloose
Friends with Benefits
Fright Night
The Future
Gainsbourg
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Girlfriend
Gnomeo and Juliet
Good Neighbors
A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy
The Grace Card
Green Lantern
The Guard
Gun Hill Road
Hall Pass
Hanna
The Hangover: Part II
Happy Feet Two
Happythankyoumoreplease
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Heartbeats
Hello Lonesome
The Help
Henry’s Crime
Hesher
Hobo With a Shotgun
Hop
Horrible Bosses
Hugo
I Am Number Four
I Don’t Know How She Does It
I Melt With You
I’m Glad My Mother is Alive
The Ides of March
Immortals
In the Land of Blood and Honey
In Time
Insidious
Insight
Ip Man 2
The Iron Lady
Edgar
Jack and Jill
Janie Jones
Johnny English Reborn
Jumping the Broom
Just Go With It
Killer Elite
Kung Fu Panda 2
Larry Crowne
The Last Circus
Le Havre
The Lie
Life Above All
Like Crazy
Limitless
The Lincoln Lawyer
Littlerock
London River
A Love Affair of Sorts
Love Crime
Lucky
Madea’s Big Happy Family
Margaret
Margin Call
Mars Needs Moms
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The Mechanic
Meet Monica Velour
Melancholia
Mia and the Migoo
Midnight in Paris
The Mighty Macs
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Moneyball
Monte Carlo
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
The Muppets
The Music Never Stopped
My Joy
My Week with Marilyn
The Myth of the American Teenager
The Names of Love
New Year’s Eve
No Strings Attached
October Baby
Oka!
One Day
The Other Woman
Our Idiot Brother
Paranormal Activity 3
Pariah
Passion Play
Paul
Peep World
The Perfect Host
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Point Blank
The Politics of Love
Priest
Prom
Puss in Boots
Queen to Play
RA One
Rammbock Berlin Undead
Rampart
Rango
Red Riding Hood
Red State
Redemption Road
Redline
Real Steel
Restitution
Restless
Rio
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Rite
The Roommate
Rubber
The Rum Diary
Sanctum
Sarah’s Key
Saviors in the Night
Scream 4
A Separation
Shame
Shark Night 3D
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
The Sitter
The Skin I Live In
Sleeping Beauty
The Smurfs
Soul Surfer
Source Code
Snowmen
Something Borrowed
Special Treatment
Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
Straw Dogs
Submarine
Sucker Punch
Sunset Blvd.
Super
Super 8
Sympathy for Delicious
Take Me Home Tonight
Take Shelter
Tanner Hall
Terri
Texas Killing Fields
The Thing
Thor
The Three Musketeers
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Tomboy
Tower Heist
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The Tree
The Tree of Life
The Trip
True Legend
Trust
Tucker and Dale vs Evil
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
Unknown
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas
W.E.
War Horse
Warrior
Water for Elephants
We Bought a Zoo
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Weekend
What’s Your Number?
The Whistleblower
Win Win
Winnie the Pooh
The Woman
Wrecked
X-Men: First Class
Young Adult
Your Highness
Zookeeper
Today, when Schoonmaker and Scorsese are editing, she still arrives at the office before him and leaves after he’s gone. She works in a cheap-looking office chair at a low wooden desk with worn edges, flanked by large speakers. Scorsese sits behind her in a tan-colored armchair, literally looking over her shoulder, watching her work roll on a giant, MTV Cribs–size monitor. He keeps a nearby TV permanently tuned to Turner Classic Movies, running silently in the background. Occasionally he’ll catch a glimpse of something inspiring, perhaps in an old Fellini movie, and he and Schoonmaker will pause to admire and discuss it. Directly in front of the director’s seat is what looks like the rearview mirror from a large truck, duct-taped to a speaker. “That’s so he can see who’s behind him,” Schoonmaker explains. “When his assistants come in, he can see from the look on their faces how serious it is.” (He keeps a bigger one on set, above his monitor.)
Asked how it feels to be the right hand—even a universally admired one—throughout a lifelong career, Schoonmaker shrugs. “I don’t see it that way,” she says. “I don’t think of it as him being in the front and me being behind—it’s just a wonderful collaboration. I love being around great artists, and I’ve been around a few of them.” Here she lets loose a particularly throaty chuckle. “There’s nothing like it, I tell you. It’s an addiction.”
February 24th
07:24
07:24
a message from ginasomething
thanks so much for the editing stuff. i'm rereading "in the blink of an eye" and finishing up my first project for editing 1 and i definitely needed the morale boost. thanks again!
You’re very welcome! Glad to help seeing as I’ve been in your shoes and have needed morale boosts on more than one occasion. I hope all goes well for you on your project. And I know you’ve got loads going on right now, but may I rec The Conversations which has a lot more inspiring editing advice. Here is an excerpt (and another) from the book.
MovieMaker: Do you think that it’s a good idea, then, for those who are just starting out in the craft to learn to edit mechanically, then advance to digital? Walter Murch: Probably not. It is a disadvantage, but there are so many other advantages to digital and the whole purpose of being young and starting a new technology is that you’re going to discover things that I never knew. So if it happens that you edit a film normally, it’s not a bad experience to have under your belt. On the other hand, the wind is blowing so irrevocably in the digital direction, I think you just have to be aware that the creative process should push you in directions not necessarily that you want to go but that you need to go. Doing what you want is not always the best thing. What I’ve done to compensate is come up with techniques such as printing a frame or two or three from every setup and mounting those on boards and putting those boards up on the walls of my room as I cut a film. In a sense, that compensates for the lack of browsing because I’m browsing with my eyes over these images always. They’re always saying ‘Don’t forget about me.’ Eventually, we will find the digital solution to my problem. But it’s a fairly deep problem because it relates to the way images are played on a computer. When you thread up a roll of film on the KEM and run at high speed, you’re actually seeing every frame of the film as it goes by very fast, whereas if you ask any of the digital systems to go fast, they do it by deleting material. If you want it to go 10 times normal speed, it will show you one frame out of every 10, so you’re just not seeing 90 percent of the material. It’s a very different kind of experience-and not a pleasant one for me at least. That’s why I don’t browse so much in the digital world-it just isn’t as rich an experience.
17:39
Apocalypse Now intro (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
Walter Murch (editor): The opening scene of Apocalypse is a good example of what you can achieve editorially that’s not based on the original script. There were some collisions of images that occurred to Francis as he was shooting the film that were at variance with what he had planned to begin the film originally.
Richard Marks (supervising editor): The trees being napalmed was originally shot for the surfing scene which comes much later in the film.
Murch: There was a shot of jungle bursting into slow motion flames with helicopters flying at odd angles in slow motion through the frame. When Francis saw that shot in dailies which was simply done to record the explosion, it wasn’t intended to be used in the finished film. But he looked at it and said that’s the film right there: jungle, flames, helicopters.
16:51
![“Oliver Stone is a very wonderful director for an editor because he gives the editor free rein. He says to the editor, “Play jazz. Just go free form.” There’s a scene in JFK where Oswald walks from a house to a theater and he said, “When you cut this scene just make it very chaotic.” So I cut this scene in what I thought was a chaotic way, showed him the next day and he said, “No, no, no, it’s got to be way more chaotic than that.”
“Since we cut JFK on a three quarter inch linear editing system, one thing it had was the ability to hit these buttons and change where the edits went. So I just banged on the keys like this [drums repeatedly on his lap], and I showed it to him the next day, and he said, “That’s it!”. And it’s in the movie.” - Editor Joe Hutshing.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lh1p190PoF1qztqsao1_500.png)
“Oliver Stone is a very wonderful director for an editor because he gives the editor free rein. He says to the editor, “Play jazz. Just go free form.” There’s a scene in JFK where Oswald walks from a house to a theater and he said, “When you cut this scene just make it very chaotic.” So I cut this scene in what I thought was a chaotic way, showed him the next day and he said, “No, no, no, it’s got to be way more chaotic than that.”
“Since we cut JFK on a three quarter inch linear editing system, one thing it had was the ability to hit these buttons and change where the edits went. So I just banged on the keys like this [drums repeatedly on his lap], and I showed it to him the next day, and he said, “That’s it!”. And it’s in the movie.” - Editor Joe Hutshing.
16:23
Walter Murch
![Editor Lee Smith: ”I loved simply being able to hold a shot as long as I did when [Gordon-Levitt] runs down and clubs the security guard. Then you notice they’re suddenly landing on the side of the room, inexplicably. You don’t get to do that very often in movies. So that was a treat.“You never forget your first reaction, looking at shots like that where everyone sits there and goes, ‘Wow, how did we do that?’ So the tendency to sort of jazz it up with editing — you have to restrain yourself and go, ‘No, that’s actually an amazing shot.’ You can only do that for so long; then as the fight progresses, you have to inject more energy into it by using multiple angles.“Basically, though, to slow the editing down, you have to be seeing something amazing, especially if you’re in a fight sequence. This was one of those ‘big idea’ sequences, and it deserved its place in the movie and as much time as I gave it.”](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/stayforthecredits/2175300514/1/tumblr_ld9uiyIkPn1qztqsa)
Editor Lee Smith: ”I loved simply being able to hold a shot as long as I did when [Gordon-Levitt] runs down and clubs the security guard. Then you notice they’re suddenly landing on the side of the room, inexplicably. You don’t get to do that very often in movies. So that was a treat.
“You never forget your first reaction, looking at shots like that where everyone sits there and goes, ‘Wow, how did we do that?’ So the tendency to sort of jazz it up with editing — you have to restrain yourself and go, ‘No, that’s actually an amazing shot.’ You can only do that for so long; then as the fight progresses, you have to inject more energy into it by using multiple angles.
“Basically, though, to slow the editing down, you have to be seeing something amazing, especially if you’re in a fight sequence. This was one of those ‘big idea’ sequences, and it deserved its place in the movie and as much time as I gave it.”
"Jaws is still one of my favorite movies. I didn’t know I could be manipulated like that—so wittily, so teasingly, in a way that made me laugh at my own fear. (The only Hitchcock film I’d seen in a theater was Frenzy, which was too sick to appreciate in the same vein.) What clinched it was that unbelievably brilliant sequence that begins with a high-angle shot of Roy Scheider dropping fish entrails in the water as shark bait. He was resentful; he said to Shaw and Dreyfuss, “Why don’t you guys come down here and shovel some of this shit?” And we started to laugh—he said “shit!” heh-heh—and then the head of the shark appeared in the water (no music, no foreshadowing), and I felt my mind detach from my body and my laugh turn into a shriek and merge into the collective shriek of everyone in that huge theater. I literally shook for the rest of the movie: Every cut by the late Verna Fields had me poised to leap out of my seat."
— David Edelstein.
August 5th
10:00
10:00
Be the audience
“You have to have an intuition about the craft to begin with: for me, it begins with, Where is the audience looking? What are they thinking? As much as possible, you try to be the audience. At the point of transition from one shot to another, you have to be pretty sure where the audience’s eye is looking, where the focus of attention is. That will either make the cut work or not.
“If you think of the audience’s focus of attention as a dot moving around the screen, the editor’s job is to carry that dot around in an interesting way. If the dot is moving from left to right and then up to the right-hand corner of the frame, when there’s a cut, make sure there’s something to look at in the right-hand corner of the next shot to receive that focus of interest.”
Walter Murch, The Conversations.
I’ve got loads of editing to do before the end of Friday, so I hope you enjoyed these quotes as much as I’ve found them to be helpful. Happy rest of the week!
August 4th
22:24
22:24
"
When I was a student at John Hopkins, a group of us made some short silent films, and I discovered then that editing images had emotionally the same impact for me as editing sound. It was intoxicating. Michael Ondaatje writes eloquently about that in “Anil’s Ghost”, about the state of mind of a doctor in the middle of surgery: You get to a place where time is not an issue at all, and you’re oddly at the centre of things but also you are not. You’re the person doing it, yet the feeling is that you’re not the origin of it, that somehow ‘it’ is happening around you, that you are being used by this thing to help bring it into the world. I felt that way when I was eleven, playing with my tapes. I didn’t know how to interpret it then, but I discovered, when I was twenty, that editing images gave me the same feeling. Then when I got to the University of Southern California as a graduate student, both of those things—sound and picture—came together.
As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
— editor Walter Murch, The Conversations.
