Editing Tip 003: Raising Questions and Delaying Answers

Raising questions that are not immediately answered is a great way to keep your audience engaged in your story.

When I was finalizing the cut on my latest feature (“Into the Void” – happy to announce the cut is now locked!), there was a scene that ended with the Heroin asking if his captor would return him. The scene was originally shot with a response from the captor where he tells the Heroin exactly what’s on his mind. He didn’t give a simple “yes” or “no” response, it was a little ambiguous, but I thought the ending of the scene could be strengthened. I decided to cut out the captor’s response altogether and just have him stare back at the Heroin. This makes the audience ask, “Well, is he going to return him?” It made the scene a lot more powerful!

These tips are gathered from experience and study, but as anything in life, are up for debate. If you have any comments/suggestions leave them below or if you would like to write a guest post with an E.T. you have, email me at: jeremywanek@gmail.com.

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Editing Tip 002: Match cuts may cut out continuity errors, but they may also kill all the emotion.

I think, especially when Editors are first learning the craft, there is a tendency to focus on continuity and matched action. It’s not that you shouldn’t put focus on matched action, but it’s down the list a ways from what really tells a great story.

Walter Murch’s Rule of Six:

1. Emotion

2. Story

3. Rhythm

4. Eye-trace

5. Two-dimensional plane of screen

6. Three-dimensional space of action

These 6 things are what makes a cut work. While you should try to accomplish all of the 6 criteria on each cut, it’s definitely not always possible. If you can’t do all of them, start sacrificing from the bottom of the list. You should never cut the emotion out of the scene to make the actions match better. If the continuity is off in a cut but the emotion is right, most people won’t notice a thing because they will be engaged by the impact of the story. IMDb lists loads of continuity errors in nearly every movie.  The fact is, every movie has them. If they didn’t the story would be confusing. Without cutting at the proper time for emotional impact the audience may not understand the scenes subtext.

“I never cut for matches, I cut for impact.”

— Sam O’Steen

Further Reading: In the Blink of an Eye (Murch’s Rule of 6), The Eye is Quicker (Ch. 3).

These tips are gathered from experience and study, but as anything in life, are up for debate. If you have any comments/suggestions leave them below or if you would like to write a guest post with an E.T. you have, email me at: jeremywanek@gmail.com.

If you want future editing tips sent to you by email, subscribe to my blog!

Editing Tip 001: The script is not written in stone

When you’re working on a narrative feature the script is very important — it’s a vital roadmap that keeps you on track and gives you a clear direction to go in. However, following it to a “T” will probably not create the best movie. Words on a script do not come across the same as visuals on a screen.

I began editing my first feature film, “Into the Void, ” (Which will hopefully be released later this year) by simply starting with scene 001 and following along with the script. By the time I had all the scenes put together, the movie was 160 minutes long. The script was only about 90 pages, and even though it was dense in some areas, I didn’t expect a movie of this length. The Director yelled out (on Facebook), “We have an epic!”

Realizing that there was still a lot of fluff in the cut, I began making my second cut by going through and cutting the “fat” — removing unnecessary pauses, finding better takes, eliminating lines of dialogue, etc… After many sets of revisions, the movie was down to 120 minutes. I felt pretty good about it at the time, but it still felt “off”.

Now I realize that it was awful. There were too many subplots, the scenes and sequences weren’t meshing together, there was a ton of unnecessary dialogue or that did too much “telling”, and most importantly, there were scenes that didn’t add any real value to the story.

I followed the script though — how could I have drifted so far off course?

It’s kind of like a movie that is adapted from a novel. If you were to include everything from the novel in the movie, the movie would be crazy long and include way too many different story elements that are not essential. They are totally different mediums. I think it’s a great starting place to begin editing the movie based on the script. After that initial cut though, there is still a serious amount of work to do that can take the story above and beyond the script.

Here is a list of some of those things:

• Remove scenes (Just because they work in the script, or were at least expected to, doesn’t mean they will work in the movie)
• Re-arrange scenes, and sequences of scenes, to get the most emotional impact
• Cut dialogue (Dialogue can sometimes get too wordy or might not sound like something the character would say or be feeling at a given moment)
• New scenes or dialogue may need to be added to fill gaps in story
• Your movie shouldn’t be 160 minutes unless it truly is an epic… 90 minutes is a good target for most movies I think.

I’m happy to report that “Into the Void” is now at 90 minutes and is extremely close to a final cut. This was accomplished by using the tips above and many more that I will continue to share every week.

These tips are gathered from experience and study, but as anything in life, are up for debate. If you have any comments/suggestions leave them below or if you would like to write a guest post with an E.T. you have, email me at: jeremywanek@gmail.com.

If you want future editing tips sent to you by email, subscribe to my blog!

Over the past year I’ve been focusing on bettering myself as a Video Editor. I’ve been doing this by reading books on the subject, watching TV shows/movies/commercials/etc more closely, learning new editing software and continuing to edit personal and paid projects.

Last week I thought it’d be cool if I could find a website that gave weekly editing tips. After looking for nearly 20 minutes (!) I decided to just make my own.

The Weekly E.T. (Editing Tips) will feature, as one would imagine, a new editing tip every week.If you are someone who wishes to refresh or improve their skills, as a Video Editor, subscribe to my blog and you will receive an email notification for every new tip. I would love for this to be a social thing as well, so feel free to leave comments/suggestions on every post. If you have an E.T. of your own you’d like to share, email me at jeremywanek@gmail.com and you can write a guest post for my site.

The first E.T. will be posted tomorrow!

What I ended up making was something much simpler, that basically just showcases some of my best work over the past couple of years. I mean, isn’t that what a demo reel is for anyways? I did however, come up with an interesting front and end bookmark to the whole video.

I was going to try and fit in camera operating jobs but it was just too tricky to say my exact role on each project. So I decided to make a separate reel for that, that I will hopefully get around to soon.

Glasses & Braces = Me at 10

In 7th grade I stopped playing basketball – it just wasn’t interesting to me anymore. After that, I got into extreme sports like BMX and skateboarding. I would tape myself trying to learn new tricks or tape my friends skating all over the place. A box of tapes proves my passion to perfect the ollie and stick the kick-flip. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that I liked using the camera more than the skateboard.

A force to be reckoned with.

From then on out I haven’t really looked back. Filmmaking definitely took over all my free time.

About a month ago I was recommended, by a former co-worker, to an Editor, that worked for Yokal Sports. The show is a local sports TV show that airs on KSTC-45, here in the Minneapolis – St Paul area. I didn’t follow local sports, but I had also never worked as an Editor for a TV show, so I was willing to give it a shot.

I worked on the last 3 episodes of the first season as an Editor on the interview segment. There were some late nights and the workflow was a bit different than I’m used to, but it didn’t take long to figure things out. Overall, it was a great experience and I learned some excellent tips from the Senior Editor, Mark Ferris.

Last Friday we celebrated the end of the first season with a wrap party at the Seven Ultralounge. Besides the restaurant/lounge being pretty awesome, if not a bit too hip for me, lol, I met lots of cool people and it was a great conclusion to the first season of the show.

A second season is still up in the air, so we’ll see what happens. If it does take off, it sounds like it will start up sometime in January.

Here are a few links to some teasers I edited to promote the show (Highly compressed, but you get the idea):

I’ve spent the past 2 years as a full-time contractor at Marketing Architects editing and shooting for direct response TV commercials (I will be posting some of those commercials on this site in the following days). I was doing a decent amount of freelance on the side, but now I’m opening up my door to take on as much freelance as I can handle. If anyone is looking for an Editor, Motion Graphic Artist, Camera Operator or DVD Author I’d be happy to help! Check out some of my work on this site or on my Vimeo page.

You can contact me by email at jeremywanek@gmail.com.

This post includes SPOILERS, so if you haven’t watched the movie yet check it out!

I’ve been asked a lot of questions from people about my latest short movie, “Voice Inside”. They were all fairly easy for me to answer with the exception of one. “Where did you get the idea for the movie?” This question seemed simple enough, but the final conclusion that I came to surprised me.

2 years ago I watched Vaughn Juares’ short movie, “Fragile” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkDqmzMgLWw). I really enjoyed it and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of finding talented child actors. The idea of shooting a short starring a young kid sounded fun and challenging. A perfect incentive to start writing!

While trying to come up with the definitive script, I went through many iterations. The first couple of rough drafts seemed to be lacking something. Something that made it worthwhile and meaningful to me. Originally I planned to have the ending much more grim. Basically I was going to have the kidnapper take the kid away from her dad, never to see each other again. This didn’t feel quite right and my wife called me out on it. So I changed it to a positive ending where the dad does get his daughter back. But how?

I’ve learned from the book “Story”, by Robert McKee, that the best and most powerful movie endings are ironic.

How could I make the ending ironic? That’s when I came up with the idea of the drunken dad stumbling out into the woods and tripping on the log. He looks into the sky, thinking about his recently deceased wife, and decides to give up drinking right then and there. As a sign of his change, he smashes all the bottles and starts to smile and laugh for the first time since his wife’s death. This single action, both on purpose and inadvertently, saves his daughters life. On purpose, he decided to give up drinking which would obviously have a positive impact on his daughters life. But also inadvertently, later on, the kidnapper trips on the same log the dad tripped on and slits his throat on the broken bottles; thus saving his daughters life. Great irony!

One of the most surprising takeaways I got from thinking about this question, was how it corresponded to my childhood. First off, no, my dad was not an alcoholic. He took me to WCW and WWF (Before the WWE switch) wrestling events, loads of sporting events and along with my mom pretty much spoiled me (their only child) rotten. Although he did so much for me and obviously loved me, he had a hard time showing it with hugs and actually saying it. In the past couple of years though, I’ve learned that people show their affection in different ways and my dad did it through gifts and taking me places.

There really isn’t a short answer to how I came up with the idea. The idea sprouted out from inspiration and slowly took shape. I kept revising the script until it felt right. So the idea itself changed again and again until the final script.

What a loaded question!

If you want more behind the scenes, here are some images:

Nowadays I work on projects that are shot with really awesome cameras; the Red, Panasonic 2700 and 3000, Sony PMW-F3, HDSLR’s and loads more. It’s a lot of fun to work with all the digital formats these cameras have to offer.

My only regret is that I’ve always focused on digital cameras and never really thought of film as a legitimate option. The reasons being that film is really expensive and the workflow is more cumbersome. Almost all the movies I saw in the theater growing up were shot on 35mm film and the overwhelming majority still are today. However, this is changing rapidly. The Red camera has really changed the game and movies like The Social Network, The Book of Eli, District 9, Pirates of the Caribbean 4 and many more are proof of this. It seems like film will be more of a niche thing in the future with digital video on the uprise.

Then I saw Super 8 (the movie). It sounds kind of cheesy saying this, but watching the characters shoot on Super 8mm film really inspired me. I want to shoot on film! After looking into it, Super 8 seemed like a reasonable way of doing it without breaking the bank. I planned on shooting a couple of test rolls, but figured I might as well shoot a simple short movie first.

Yesterday I got my Canon 814 Super 8 camera in the mail… After going through the manual and doing a bit more research I will be shooting my first film project.

Above is a picture I took today, holding the camera (Kind of fun/frustrating lighting and shooting yourself)!

Welcome to my NEW website!

I made my old website with iWeb and everything was well in the world… Then, one day (last week) my Mobile Me account and my website went down. Confused and frustrated, I wanted answers. I did a live chat with someone from Apple and eventually found out that the credit card they had on file was old and when they were switching things around to prepare for iCloud they closed my account.

I wanted to get a new website up and running as fast as possible. I was pretty sure it would take longer than it has, but WordPress made it easy. Thank you WordPress!