Foundations of Documentary Editing - How to Edit Scenes Like A Pro

what is every good film comprised of well it's just a series of scenes and so if you don't know how to edit a scene you're probably not going to have a good film and you're probably also thinking oh is he going to start talking about art of documentary again rather than talking about it I'm just going to show you it we have a full video today about editing scenes and this is taken from our new course the perfect cut we have a secret weapon today Lewis Gordon he's created this entire course it's 50 videos and he's talking about how to edit scenes he does a deep dive into this Lewis has a special type of humor that he's introduced into this I think anyone who is ever going to edit any sort of video should watch this because scenes are the building blocks of your films so I'm going to shut up and just let Lewis take this one away it's not going to be me today but enjoy this this is one of 50 videos from the perfect cut our new course launching on March 13th so enjoy foreign having trouble putting that scene together sorry do I uh do I know you I said are you having trouble putting that scene together I mean yeah it's just a bunch of these like shots and they're all jumbled together and just kind of mess you know what they should call that timeline what should they call this timeline they should call that timeline [Music] a crime scene [Applause] [Music] okay let's talk about scenes here so in this video and actually this entire chapter we're going to be talking about scenes and why do scenes matter well when you think about it your entire film is just a collection of scenes strung together in a very distinct order that tell your Story from beginning to the middle to the end I think on a deeper level though why it's important for documentary editors to understand how to build out scenes is that it's critical that we do aim to build out scenes in our films I think far too often with documentaries you see the instant reflex is to create montages that have some kind of VO underneath it that tells the story and that's honestly my gut instinct too who doesn't like to build a montage out it's fun you add some music fast paced it's what you know editing is all about the issue with montages is that they hold up for only a very short amount of time it's really easy to burn out your audience with too long of a montage or too many montages strung together and it's really difficult to draw out things like character development to dry out the emotional aspects of a story um solely through montage is strung together and unless you are someone like boslerman I would strongly advise you to intend to build as many scenes as you can and only rely on Montage at very specific moments so let's just assume that you're not baslerman let's assume that boss Lerman is not watching this video uh and let's break down scenes we're gonna look at scenes from two very distinct points of view in this video the first point of view is macro and the second point of view is micro by macro I mean let's look at scenes from a bird's eye point of view how do scenes Stack Up and create things like story arc how can we use that to our advantage by micro I mean the actual nuts and bolts of a scene how should you go about building a scene from the various shots from the various bits of information you have in front front of you in your footage and that really weird uh intro that I put on this video actually has a purpose is called educational content I wanted to educate you on what a good dad joke looks like just kidding we'll be talking about it a bit later looking at how that scene was built and why I built it the way that I did so let's take a look at the macro point of view of scenes and we've already kind of been through this before when talking about story arc and doing that cue cards exercise but I think the magic word that we're going to come back to is the word intention when you're stacking your scenes on a story arc it's very important that you understand what the intention of each scene is supposed to be and I think there's different types of intention in a scene there's the intention of the scenario so what physically happens in your scene and then there's also the intention of the underlying message or the emotional aspects of your scene and of the story that you're trying to tell and to add to that point I'm going to throw your way some pseudo mathematics here this is this is not a verified statistic but I think nine of ten scenes are trying to progress the story or they're trying to offer the audience information that is integral to the understanding of the story of things like character of things like emotional messaging on something like this Kenya doc I I would say those progression scenes are the scenes in which we show Wesley going on all of these different training runs he wakes up in the morning we see that it's a brand new day he goes on a run we're not really seeing anything different in these runs but what we're supposed to know is audience members is that there's being a passage of time and that lets us exploit uh other things through vo we can kind of go into his mind offer a little bit of introspection but in terms of the scenario that's unfolding uh we are really just aiming to see uh that progress that Forward Motion in the story in terms of information scenes I I would point to those big scenes the scenes where he comes home and we learn about his emotional reaction to coming home or the scenes where he's running in the Houston Marathon and we're finding out what happened in that marathon and then in the ensuing scenes we're finding out how he feels about how the Houston Marathon went and so when we're doing exercises like writing each scene down on a cue card and putting it on a bristol board and trying to figure out uh what that forward momentum is it's really important that we know the intention of the scene is it progressing or an information scene because then we can separate them and make sure that there's not too many information scenes coming in a row or not too many progress scenes coming in a row I've said this before that contrast creates Focus you don't want all of your scenes to have similar intention um because that's how a story gets stale or monotonous you need to keep that Variety in there so that the audience is learning and witnessing different things but also that they don't know what's coming around the corner it keeps them guessing it keeps them interested in the story that's unfolding and to use a very tired cliche but I think it applies to this variety is the spice of life if you want to keep your life spicy offer some variety in your stories right so now let's try to take a look at scenes from a micro point of view let's see what's actually happening on the ground level in each one of these isolated scenes in filmmaking scenes kind of sort of have a formula there's at least a formula to your standard scene um and part of the fun of scene building is understanding that standard formula and then playing with it over time and I think that what was key to my understanding of scenes and how scenes develop is not through film but it was actually by learning about stand-up comedy and sketch comedy I think Bigfoot big three that's the problem it's not the photographer's fault Bigfoot is blurry and that's extra scary to me because there's a large out-of-focus monster I think that stand-up comedians are among the best writers uh in terms of storytellers they have to know how to transmit information to an audience in in a really entertaining way but then there needs to be that joke at the end they need to build to something and it and it needs to hit and so let's look at the elements of scenes from the perspective of a comedy writer there's four elements to every scene there's the intro there's the setup there's the punch line or what they sometimes call the button and then there's the out and now to use an example of what these four elements look like in a scene of a film let's take a look at one of the worst jokes around uh let's break open the intro to this video and take a look at how I developed this scene thinking about the elements of a stand-up comedian's craft so in case you've maybe forgotten about this scene you might have done it on purpose uh which I don't blame you if that's the case here's how the scene played out we have uh editor I don't know who that could be uh clearly struggling with their edit um random hunk shows up at the door um he's got kind of a joke in his head it's a stupid joke though um he finally hits that joke he hits the punch line and then we get our out and the out here is also a bit tied to the punch line but that's the end of the scene so these purple Clips right here I would suggest are part of the establishing most scenes in film start with what's called an establishing shot that's your wide shot it's very quickly supposed to give you all of the information on the setting that this scene takes place very clearly in this establishing shot we see our editor we see the edit that he's working on we know that he's a video editor we also have that information ahead of time that he's probably a video editor because he looks a lot like a video editor you may know we can clearly see it's his office it's his editing suite and then we also see very clearly on the left here an open door and that open door is key because that's where a lot of the action happens some of this action wouldn't really make sense if we didn't see that door very clearly from the first shot side note let's also uh keep in mind that this this was made with education in mind uh framing shot selection maybe not the best I did this all myself but uh anyway yeah let's just look at this for educational purposes so another key part of the establishing is really making sure that the audience sees that this is an edit in progress and can hint at the fact that this person is struggling you can hear all the clicks when you're editing and you're trying to build out a scene that might not have been shot as intentionally as this if you're looking through the footage and you see a nice wide shot or you look at a shot that explains very quickly all the information you need to know um select that footage put it into your sequence and start building around it that's a good hint for you that you may be able to use this as some kind of an establishing it might bring us into the story now these blue clips that you see here are all a part of this setup and they're all medium shots um the content of it doesn't really matter that much there were some lines that I took out what matters is that they're building on this establishing and the important thing is that we feel like it is progressing to something uh it's progressing to the punch line in this case and the punch line is another word for the intention the intention of the scene the intention of any joke is to bring you to that punch line and smack you on the side of the head and say this was the point of the joke this was the point of the scene and so in this case the green clip is to signify where that punch line is where that button is in this one clip it becomes pretty obvious what the point of the scene is is to deliver this sort of dad joke but also doing it in a very David Caruso uh CSI Miami way so the question becomes Alex was the mob sent to draws to the crime scene was sent to destroy it where you see me put the sunglasses on I mean wait wait when you see this hunk at the door put the sunglasses on it's kind of a key to ah aha that's that's what it is this reminds me of Caruso from CSI and then this pink clip is really an extension it's it's reaffirming that intention the punch line you get it now and as soon as you get it we are out that's the really important thing I find when you're building a scene we do all of these tricks to understand what the intention of your scene is you're building the scene you finally get to that point where the scene's in tension is hit uh and then I see in a lot of scenes we kind of linger there you kind of stick around for some reason the character keeps on talking the conversation continues I suggest that once you get to that point of intention get out of the scene as fast as possible there are some pacing moments um that might be necessary you know in Clear Sky for example there were a lot of scenes where he would say something or something would register that was really impactful and we would put a shot of him just thinking to end the scene but as soon as that thinking shot sunk in with the audience we were out and on to the next scene it's a lot like a joke there's nothing worse than that person who hits the punch line of their joke and then they keep going they keep going they keep going they try to build on that joke more and it just doesn't hit I should know best because I am the king of doing that I never know when a joke is over but when I'm editing luckily I know when the intention of a scene has been hit and I know when to move on from there it took me some time but now I know baby now I know and so to just build on that a little bit let's take a look at an isolated scene from an early assembly of the Wesley Kip 2 short dock that I've been working on keep in mind this is just an assembly this is very early on in the editing process but even at this early stage in a scene I'm going to have those four elements set up for me and over time I'm going to shape them a little bit more and work around them but even from an early stage those are the foundations that I'm looking to have visually in any scene that's what I'm trying to build out so right here we're picking up this is a new setting that we're introducing we're meeting Wesley at his home in Flagstaff Arizona this is a very brief scene let me just play it back for you and then we can go over the elements oh when I was still back home I was seeing friends while like outside the country and that they were like you know life is different out there and I was just imagining if I will be in the same situation one day but and now I can believe like I'm like I'm a professor it wasn't hard to find Wesley Wesley was very good at the NCAA level winning a national title indoors being runner-up at NCAA cross country the kind of things you're looking for when you're building a pro team and see so as we can see here we're picking up with Wesley in Flagstaff Arizona we have a text card right up here that just shows us it's Flagstaff we came from the future actually we were in the Houston Marathon uh two months later that's where we were previously and now we're just picking up we have our nice wide establishing shot we're showing Wesley's house uh it's reasonably small house we can see everything we could see all of these running shoes on the right here huh I wonder what his profession is and then we're gonna come in continue from this shot and show that he is making chai and chai is like basically the morning drink of Kenya it is their their coffee or at least for Wesley it is reminding him of home you can actually see this uh uh wristband that he has on that has the Kenyan colors on it it has Wesley's name on it as well so that's like another little bit of information that we're giving the audience who knows who's gonna pick up on that but it is nice to have that there and now obviously underneath we're hearing his vo he's talking about now I'm here you know never in the past would I think that I would be here in America now I'm finally here I can't believe it and so we feel like the scene is progressing the action is progressing we're we're progressing to something the setup is continuing we're about to hit that final intention soon and we're about to hear it right here he can't believe it he's finally a professional Runner and with that with these two shots we are now out of the scene we're presuming he's putting his shoes on to leave the house he's gone we're getting a little bit more information we haven't introduced his little baby yet but we'll come back to that later you're getting you're picking up a little bit of information on the way out the door and then this video here from his coach you might think that that was the scene progressing but really what we're doing is we're just tying that into the out it's helping us transition from scene to scene we're leaving out the door with this little shot of all of his Awards and then by the time we hit this shot of his coach we are completely out of the scene but that transition has done a nice job of tricking us in a way making it feel a bit more smooth and then when he picks up outside here we are fully out of the scene we're in something right brand new we'll be talking about transitions those are key but even in this little short scene we have all four of those elements that we just discussed foreign [Music]

Channel: Mark Bone

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Id: _MbHN-9d30Y

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023