Editing Techniques Give Us the Movies of Today

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According to Retchless, earlier films were not edited at all and everything was done in one shot. The camera could not hold a large amount of film resulting in short films. Filmmakers and audiences wanted longer and more detailed films. This was accomplished through editing techniques. Intercutting is an editing technique that cuts back and forth between two or more scenes that are occurring at the same time to create high drama and gives the viewer the sense that the scene is moving quickly. (Retchless, 2006). When using rapid intercutting between two locations and people, it increases the tension and suspense of the film. The Kuleshov effect is the belief that an actor’s expression is interpreted according to the image it is paired with. For example, if I was to take a picture of a little girl and paired that picture up with a puppy and again paired the same picture of the little girl with a picture of a snake, the interpretation of the person’s expression would be viewed according to what they are paired with. We could see the same little girl look admiringly at the puppy and again interpret her expression as fear when paired with the snake.
Action movies are filled with editing techniques such as rapid intercutting, sound effects, and expressions of characters. The movie I watched was “Abduction” by Director John Singleton, 2011. This movie had a lot of rapid intercutting scenes, as do most action films to allow the viewer to see what is going on in two places at the same time. One example is when Nathan, the main character, is riding his motorcycle on his way to school and Karen is at school during cheerleading practice. At one point Nathan is trying to contact the operator for missing kids when the scene intercut between...

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...hat is real and what is not. It makes us wonder whether we should believe what we see, since film can be so easily manipulated. We want this medium to look as realistic as possible but that is the problem. As our textbook states, “can we-indeed, should we-trust what we see? If it can so easily create “believable” imagery, what are the possibilities for belief itself” (Sayre, 2010). Because of cinematic re-creation, we have to question everything we see. For example, television shows can be edited to make you believe that someone said something in particular, but it was spliced together to make the person sound like they said something that they didn’t. Another example, we see tabloid pictures everyday that could have been sliced together to give us an image of two people together somewhere, when in fact they were there but at two different times and not together.

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