The Hunger Games Editing Analysis

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The Hunger Games, directed by Gary Ross, was released in 2012. The film is about a young girl who lives in one of the twelve districts of the Capitol of Panem. To keep these districts from resorting to war like past times, the capitol now forces one girl and one boy to fight to the death until only one remains. Jennifer Lawrence, staring as Katniss Everdeen, has been chosen to represent district 12. The film uses many different elements to display all the emotional and physical struggles Katniss must endure while participating in the games. There are three major types of movies: narrative (a fiction story being told), documentary (nonfiction recording of reality, educating of the audience, or political and social analyses) and experimental …show more content…

The editor controls what the audience sees, when they see it, how fast they see it, and what they understand from it. Editing is such a powerful tool which allows captured shots to be combined and created in to the wonderful films we see today. Alan Edward Bell, the editor of The Hunger Games, in my opinion did a fantastic job at assembling all of the many components of editing. In the editing world there are two major approaches: continuity; telling a story as clearly, efficiently, and coherently as possible and the opposite, discontinuity; which is creating transitions that are not smooth, continuous, or coherent. The Hunger Games definitely uses the techniques that maintain continuity. Some of these technique are shot/reverse shot and point of view editing. A shot/reverse shot is when the editor switches shots between different characters. This is usually used during conversation. This technique was used constantly in the film with all the conversations that took place. Point of view editing is the formation of shots together so that their sequence makes the audience aware of the characters point of view. An example of this would be in the beginning of the movie when Katniss was hunting deer and the camera shot was on Katniss ready to shoot her bow and switched to a shot of the deer. Many other editing techniques were used that were very neat. For example, in one scene of the film Katniss was stung by tracker jacker, a wasp engineered by the people in control of the games. These tracker jackers caused her to have many hallucinations. The chopped up shots in this scene made it possible for the audience to see Katniss’s point of view. Imagine a scene of the world spinning vs a shot just of Katniss stumbling. The editing adds a whole lot to the audience’s

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