Web Chapters
“DAN ZIMMERMAN: I think Hitchcock said it best: "Movies are never finished. They're abandoned." You can cut forever, you really can. But there are deadlines and you have to hit them.”
“MARK LIVOLSI: In live action, you have the material in front of you and the manipulation of the material is binary in a way. It is what it is and you just manipulate it to its best advantage. If an actor throws in an amazing look you use it. [With Visual Effects] we had to slot in blank chess-piece close-ups that had no facial expressions on them and where I assumed, imagined or hoped there would be a great reaction. Everything was a leap of faith.
“Consider that sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in a movie and the only way to have that investment actually pay dividends is to get it into the theaters. So the faster you can get a high quality movie from the first dollar spent to the first screening of a movie for a paying audience the better off you are, investment-wise. Two editors can’t necessarily deliver a movie twice as fast, but they can definitely work faster than one.”
“This web chapter provides details of the editing of specific scenes in movies. Sometimes these scenes can be viewed on-line and concern scenes in the movies for which I interviewed the editors, originally. Sometimes they recount specific scenes for scenes from previous movies. There is certainly general wisdom that you can pull from the specific approach or problem-solving involved in cutting these scenes, so reading this chapter can definitely inform you about general editing principles.”
“Talking about the tools we editors use to do our work can be a heated topic. It’s also something that is subject to radical change from software release to software release. This chapter is a discussion of the NLEs that various editors use and the good and bad features of using those tools to cut feature films and TV shows. While this book was written to be “evergreen,” (the subject matter will always be relevant and fairly unchanging through the years), this chapter could easily be outdated by the time you read it. These are the thoughts of editors, mostly in the year 2015, but also dating back into 2014.”