CONTEXT 

Clip Name: Do Not Fight The Silent

Clip Duration: 3:10 

Clip Context: Experimental Editing 

​

This is a complete piece of film that took several weeks to make and is about a teenage boy whose mother has passed away and struggles to get along with his new step mother, it is a teenage drama/ thriller What I aimed to achieve in this piece was to demonstrate a combination of formalistic and continuous editing effectively. Such as Sean Penn’s ‘Into the wild’ edited by Jay Cassidy. The inspiration behind this intention would be the death scene of the main character Christopher McCandless where Cassidy was able to combine the use of formalistic editing to convey the emotions of the character however he used continuous to create characterization. By using this technique in my short film I aimed to convey the stress and tension between two characters using montage editing, jump cuts yet still be able to create a story and develop characters through continuous editing. The reason I was inspired by ‘Into the Wild’ was because this film unlike most Hollywood films uses formalist editing for the use of conveying emotion instead of emphasizing action which I thought would be a good example to follow especially when trying to convey the conflicting life of the teenage boy in this film.

My role as the editor meant that I had to work very closely and cooperatively with the cinematographer in order for both of us to create a substantial piece of film that was creative and challenging. As the editor, I had to annotate screenplay along with the cinematographer and list match cuts, L cuts, J cuts and jump cuts, this would have to depend on the action of the character, the plot, if the scene is suitable to build tension and finally what we want to imply about the characters. In terms of actual production, I had to inform the cinematographer for certain shots involving certain aspects such as match cuts and jump cuts, and how long each shot should be. Most of the workload involved post productions where I ran into issues such as time management and particular shots however they were fixed by re-filming and planning and making space to edit.

​

I would certainly say that I have gained a lot of experience during this project mainly involving editing techniques, I felt that I put a large amount of time into editing and put an even larger amount of effort to fix mistakes and learn from them. I think that I was able to demonstrate effectively the use of formalistic and continuous editing and use this to create certain conventions such as tension and stress. I would say that the scenes that had the largest impact on my style of editing in Sean Penn’s ‘into the wild’ would be the final. I found that the formalistic style of editing suited the final scenes and moments of Christopher McCandless and that it was a very expressive, empowering and emotional, which is something I wanted to introduce in my short film. This formalist editing takes place is during the mental breakdown. I think that what I would need to do better would be to always find a way to add a deeper implication into the film and a great example of this would be Alfred Hitchcock’s work, every object or cut or particular edit in his films such as psycho are always there for a reason and I think that if I could take this and use it to improve the editing it would look a lot better in terms of understanding. Such as the scene where the father kills the step mother, I found that it could be challenging to understand that the father is being controlled, yet perhaps if I added a cut of a close up to the cricket bat that he murders his wife with it would have a lot more clarity in terms of story.

Sources

Into the wild – Sean Penn

Psycho – Alfred Hitchcock

​

​

​

​