Tuesday 5 August 2008

Walter Murch


It's difficult to put into words what makes a good cut. Most editors cut instinctively and know when the edit works because it feels right. Here's an extract from Walter Murch's essay on film editing 'In The Blink Of An Eye' listing the priorities he gives to each factor that determines whether a cut works.

An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and "right"; 4) it acknowledges what you might call "eye-trace" - the concern with the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects "planarity" - the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography to two (the questions of stage-line etc.); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another).

1) Emotion (51%)
2) Story (23%)
3) Rhythm (10%)
4) Eye-trace (7%)
5) Two-dimensional plane of screen (5%)
6) Three-dimensional plane of screen (4%)

Emotion, at the top of the list, is the thing that you should try to preserve at all costs. If you find you have to sacrifice certain of those six things to make a cut, sacrifice your way up, item by item, from the bottom.

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