It seems from conversations with non-editors, articles I’ve read, comments made by people online, and even reviews by professional film critics, that many are under the impression that editors do what the Director tells them to do, that we push buttons, that we remove the actor’s mistakes and the boring scenes, or that we simply put the film together in the way the script tells us. These things are all true to some degree, but that doesn’t explain why when a film has taken weeks to shoot, it will take months to edit, nor does it explain the true nature and impact of an Editor’s contribution.
Why the confusion?
I think part of the reason people find it so difficult to understand exactly what Editors do, is that we don’t seem to create anything tangible. After all, you can get some idea of an Actor’s contribution from watching their performance, or that of the Cinematographer from the images on screen, or the Composer from the music, Costume department from the costumes etc. etc. Then there’s the Director and their contribution, which covers everything above plus much more. However, where, for the average viewer, can we see or hear the Editor’s contribution?
Viewers also see films and TV shows fully formed, very rarely do they see alternate or work in progress versions. If you don’t see any of the process this fully formed work has gone through, it’s easy to think that there isn’t a process at all. How often are Editors interviewed alongside the cast and the Director when a film is released? How many behind the scenes videos have you seen that jump straight from the end of the shoot to the Premiere, perhaps with a short scene of an orchestra recording the music? How many Wikipedia entries for films talk about Development, the shoot, and then the release with no mention of any post-production? Given these circumstances, and when so little of a film’s success or failure is publicly attributed to its editing, is it any surprise that there’s so little understanding of what happens during Post-Production?
When I started to get interested in filmmaking I watched a lot of DVD extras, Directors commentaries, Behind The Scenes promos, and deleted scenes, and I wonder if deleted scenes (alongside Directors Cuts) are the closest to the “editing process” that the general public gets to see, a handful of short, usually pretty dull and unnecessary scenes that ended up “on the cutting room floor”.
What happens in the cutting room?
I talked elsewhere about the role of the Assistant Editor and how much of the technical and managerial work the AE and their team take on, with the intention of leaving the Editor free to edit. On a feature film or TV show, there really is a whole team of people to deal with the “technical” aspects.
So then where does the Editor fit in? Well, you could certainly say that the Editor’s job is to take all the tangible contributions of the many many other people who have, and are, and will be working on the film, and to work with the Director to figure out how to use that material to tell the most interesting and engaging version of the story they possibly can. In other words, an Editor’s work is visible in what does and does not exist in the film, and in how the picture and sound captured on set and created in post are put together.
It’s easy to look at a film, even as a filmmaker, and regard the final finished work as the obvious endpoint of the process. It works, right? So why wouldn’t you have arrived at those decisions which make up the final film? Why wouldn’t you have put it together in that particular way? However, once a film shoot is finished, there are hours and hours of footage, with dozens of scenes shot from multiple angles, all done with multiple takes, and there’s nothing telling the Director and the Editor the best way to put all that material together. The final form of a great film may seem natural and obvious when looking at it finished, but rarely is that the case when you have a mountain of rushes and almost innumerable different ways it could be put together.
It’s also misleading to say that the Editor simply puts the film up on screen, or that filmmakers simply present actor’s performances to a passive audience. The real art of editing, and by extension the art of filmmaking, is in HOW you tell the story. Simply presenting the material in a wide shot may allow the audience to feel something on the strength of the writing and the performances, but there is a reason why films are broken up into hundreds of shots, and not all simply played as one feature-length performance from a single perspective.
How does the editor influence the film?
If you’ve ever seen an Assembly of a film, it can be difficult to believe that the extremely long, slow, unfocused, and sometimes downright boring and confusing thing you see before you is ever going to turn into anything engaging and moving. Director-Editor relationships operate in different ways, with some Directors spending every day in the cutting room, and others giving feedback and direction to the Editor while generally leaving them to do their job. But however the relationship works on an individual film, the Editor is intimately involved in shaping each and every beat, scene and sequence in the film.
During the weeks and months of the edit, we will make thousands of choices on what angle and shot size to show a moment on, which shot to cut to next, and where in that shot we should begin. Close attention will be paid to clarity, will the audience be able to understand what is going on, what the characters are doing, and why they’re doing those things? We will remove lines of dialogue and whole scenes, move a line to elsewhere in a scene, or move a scene to a completely different part of the film. We’ll steal a shot from one scene to make a completely different moment in another scene work. We will adjust which takes of an actor’s performance are used in order to alter how sympathetic a character is, or how intimidating they appear. We will suggest removing a moment that makes an audience feel a particular emotion about a character that we think we don’t want the audience to feel.
We’ll step back and look at the film as a whole, make changes for clarity, for pace, for emotion. We’ll show the film to trusted friends and confidants so they can tell us if it makes sense, if they care about the characters, if they enjoy the experience of watching it. We’ll screen the film for Producers and Execs and deal with the things they say and feel about the film. Then we’ll dive back in to address what this fresh audience has told us, things which we can’t see because the film is so familiar to us.
All this time we will work hand in glove with the Director, helping them identify problems and figure out solutions. We will challenge each other to assess and re-assess our own work, building a creative collaboration, and often a friendship, which may last for decades.
In the end though, the job of the Editor is pragmatic more than anything. There was never enough time on set, the performances are never as strong as they could be, and the script is never as refined as it should be. There’s a lot of egos and money involved, and the Editor’s job is to navigate and negotiate a way through this process as gracefully and as productively as possible.
If filmmaking is manipulation of the audience, then editing is at the heart of that manipulation. Events on screen don’t just “happen” in front of the audience, they are shaped in very particular ways to make the audience experience particular emotions. This website is all about exploring exactly what it is that Editors ACTUALLY do. It’s an often challenging, intimidating job, but it’s also an enormous amount of fun, a giant emotional Lego set that sometimes hundreds of people will spend millions of dollars shooting, sending all of that footage to the cutting rooms so the Editor can play and experiment until we’re as sure as we can be that the audience too will have an enjoyable, exciting, moving experience sat in front of the screen.
“Editing is the mass accumulation of small detail to present something simple and meaningful”
– Kirk Baxter
Additional Videos
This video from the now dormant YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting exploring how editors make decisions is an excellent primer on what an Editor REALLY does:
As is this promo for the documentary editing course Inside The Edit:
And if you want to sit down for some serious introspection on the art and craft of editing, there’s The Cutting Edge, a feature-length documentary featuring a who’s-who of Hollywood discussing the work of the Editor:
If you didn’t click on it above, here’s another chance to read our article on What an Assistant Editor does, or to find out about two key responsibilities of the Editor, shaping Information and Emotion.