Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay on editing, how it can just seem natural, and the science of why edits “feel right.”
You can tell that an edit in a film is “off” the same way you can tell when your shirt is on backward. It just doesn’t feel right. The question, then, is why doesn’t it feel right? Why do some cuts feel natural while others feel awkward?
When trying to put into words why some edits are more natural than others, there’s a temptation to throw your arms up and exclaim that some edits feel natural because they just do. That there is some enigmatic knowledge, embodied in both the audience and the editor, that knows and feels when an edit is “natural.” There is some truth to this answer. Editing, as an art form, does engage in a kind of musicality. Cuts can “feel right” the same way major chords do.
And yet, editors and audiences “just knowing when an edit is right” undercuts the reality that editors are expressive artists. That a cut can contain everything from explicit arguments to coded subtext. Continuity, while it often goes unnoticed, is no accident. And in the right hands, jarring edits that break the flow may be the natural choice for a given scene.
As the video essay below underlines, as an audience we identify with the camera first and the characters second. And editors make thousands of tiny decisions to affect how we experience the camera’s perspective, from its attention span to its dramatic and thematic interests. In the end, there is no hackable code as to why some cuts feel right and others don’t. But listening to editors describe their process is the next best thing.
Watch “Why Does an Edit Feel Right? (According to Science)“:
Who made this?
This video essay is by This Guy Edits, a.k.a. film editor Sven Pape, an A.C.E. award nominee, whose credits include work for directors James Cameron, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and James Franco. You can subscribe to This Guy Edits on YouTube here. And you can follow them on Twitter here.
More Videos Like This
- Want another sample of This Guy Edits’ work? Here’s their video on the differences between editing for film and editing for YouTube.
- And here’s their video on how the editing in Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk adds to the film’s suspense.
- And here’s their round-up of ten lessons on editing, sourced from the top film editors out there.
- Here’s RocketJump Film School, a favorite of this column, with an introduction to the (many, many) different kinds of cuts and transitions at an editor’s disposal.
- Want an example of cuts that feel “unnatural”? Say no more. Here’s Thomas Flight with a look at the terrible, no good, very bad (and Oscar-winning) editing of Bohemian Rhapsody.
Related Topics: Editing, The Queue
