Editing Concepts & Techniques

Continuity editing

• Editing establishes the structure and content of the production, along with the production's overall mood, intensity, and tempo.

• Continuity editing refers to arranging the sequence of shots to suggest a progression of events.

• Continuity editing can be divided into two categories: temporal continuity and spatial continuity. Within each category, Continuity editing primarily suggests guiding an audience through a sequence of events, and, in the process, showing them what they want to see when they want to see it. The techniques therefore causing a passage to be continuous, giving the viewer a concrete physical narration to follow, or discontinuous, causing viewer disorientation, pondering, or even subliminal interpretation or reaction, as in the montage style. Overall, by the end, you've told a story or logically traced a series of events to their conclusion.

180 Degrees Rule

• In filmmaking, the 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. An imaginary line called the axis connects the characters and by keeping the camera on one side of this axis for every shot in the scene

• Another aspect of the 180 degree axis is that the closer to the axis the camera is, the more the viewer's point of view resembles the characters, and thus he feels with the character. This encourages the important identification with the characters which viewers should feel.

• Crossing the 180 degree axis can be very confusing since the directions established for the viewer is changed. An example of this would be like watching a football game with the runner going to the right and all of a sudden we cut to him running to the left. It would make the viewer wonder if he was running the wrong way or not.

Matching On Action

• Cutting on action or matching on action refers to film editing and video editing techniques where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot's action.

• Cutting on action gives the impression of continuity when watching an edited film.

• By having an event commence in one shot to be further shown of completed in the next, the editor is creating a visual bridge distracting the audience from noticing the actual cut or unfortunate error of continuity between the two shots.

• This technique is rather quite popular in today's day and age of films yet it matters if the director has used this technique to its full potential which is seen rarely, except for numerous movies one film series for example is the “Die hard” series of films.

Shot Reverse Shot

Also known as the reverse angle shot, commonly used in close-up dialogue scenes. The camera adopts the eyeline trajectory of the interlocutor looking at the other person as she or he speaks, then switches to the other person's position and does the same.

This is a film technique where one character is shown looking at another character (often off-screen), and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other

Shot reverse shot is a feature of the "classical" Hollywood style of continuity editing. It is an example of an eyeline match.

Eyeline Matching

A term used to point to the object continuity editing practice ensuring the logic of the look or gaze. In other words, eyeline matching is based on the belief in mainstream cinema that when a character looks into off-screen space the spectator expects to see what he or she is looking at. Thus there will be a cut to show what is being looked at:

1. view2. another character3. Eyeline then refers to the trajectory of the looking eye. For

example, character A will look off-screen at character B. Cut to character B, who-if she or he is in the same room and engaged in an exchange either of glances or words with character A-will return that look and so 'certify' that character A is indeed in the space from which we first saw her or him look. This "stabilising" is true in the other primary use of the eyeline match which is the shot/reverse angle shot.

Graphic Matching

• Whenever your making a cut it is important to realize where your viewers center of focus is on the previous shot. If possible you want the focus of the next shot to be in a similar place.

• Alternatively, if you want to cause an uncomfortable feeling to your audience or jar them on a cut you simply have to make sure that the images don't match graphically.