IAN SEXTON: All right, folks.
Welcome to Lecture 1 of E5.
My name is Ian Sexton.
Over here on my left is Dan Coffey.
We're going to be taking you through today's lecture.
And I'm going to start a little bit by talking about some
of the overarching goals of the course and how they
relate to storytelling more generally.
So if you are just joining us, we released
a short video called Lecture 0 that's available on the course website that
talks a little bit about some of the tools and technology
that we use in the course, whether that's some of the web
resources or the camera resources.
It's available here at exploringdigital.media.
And if you have any questions about the content in the lectures
or any of the content on the website, do email us
at staff@exploringdigital.media.
All right.
So what is this class about?
Our slug line for this is that it's a practical introductory course that
gives a fast-paced overview of a broad range of topics
related to contemporary media.
OK.
And we highlight this idea of practical and introductory.
We're going to talk about photography, video production, audio recording,
HTML, a little bit of JavaScript, which is--
any of those topics could be a course in themselves.
OK.
So we are going to broadly reach across and look
at all of these different tools and how we best might use them.
So if you're coming to this class with not a lot of experience
and you want to think about where you want to go in digital media production,
this is a great start.
If you're coming with a little bit of experience on one of these areas,
then you have time to investigate-- maybe you
have experience in photography, we can spend some time
investigating video production.
The practical component is that we're going to spend
a lot of time actually making work.
We'll take photographs.
We'll produce short videos.
We have a large final project for you guys to work on.
And so, one of the things that we do want to talk about
is how those tools relate to the ideas that you want to express.
Because at the end of the day, a camera, when you're taking pictures,
is just a dumb box.
It needs a very smart operator in order to help it do the things that you
want to express yourself more fully.
All right.
All of the decisions that you make from a technical and a logistical standpoint
either support or detract from the idea that you're trying to express.
This is going to be a foundational idea across everything we discuss.
That media production in itself is a series of trade-offs.
Choices can range from visual and compositional choices--
where I place the camera, what exposure I used to make my image--
or they can be logistical and workflow.
I only have a budget of $10.
Well, that's going to limit the kind of camera
that I can use for this assignment.
Just as a simple expression.
Our intentions and our required deliverables--
what we're hoping to achieve--
will define the options that are available to us.
At the end of the day, we should be proactive decision makers
who manage visual and narrative choices to support our goals.
That's where we want to get to.
And as I said, every decision is a trade-off,
and your choices either support or detract from your intentions.
So at the end of the day, we need to understand
what we want to say so that we can choose
the right technical expression and the right logistical expression
to say that in a way that matters to the people who are listening.
So your trade-offs, generally-- and I think
you may have all seen this before, where you can have either speed, cost,
or quality.
You can have two of them, but you can't have all of them.
It's the normal maximum for this.
And so if we think about this as, in the sense of media production,
if we have cost and speed--
it doesn't cost us a lot and it's very fast-- you could maybe think of a point
and shoot camera.
You can get them for very cheap.
They're mostly auto.
They produce jpgs which can be instantly posted to the web,
or perhaps even your phone.
You take a picture and it can go right to Instagram.
It ends up not costing a lot.
But it also has limited controls.
The image that it makes, it's not easy to adjust aperture or change
the way it looks.
It takes one kind of picture all the time.
And at the same time, it also takes very small pictures.
They're designed to be posted on the web.
So you sacrifice some quality for ease of use, speed, and cost.
Whereas if we have high quality and high speed,
then we end up in this place where it ends up costing a lot.
And I think a good analogy for this is maybe feature filmmaking, where
the budgets are millions of dollars, but they're
able to produce an incredible amount of content
in a fairly short period of time.
And that's because they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people
working for 30 days.
You can make a feature-length movie and shoot it
and do a production in about 30 days, where
you have hundreds of people on set.
That costs a lot of money.
And to finish this, if you have low cost and high quality,
it's going to end up taking a long time.
So it could be that you have to download gigabytes and gigabytes of footage,
as you will for this next assignment.
And that's going to take time.
Three gigabytes.
Right.
It's not that much.
All right.
The trade-offs are not just the idea of logistical trade-offs, which is
this cost versus quality versus speed.
But also that every decision in making an image actually
affects the visual artifacts or the oral artifacts that
are present in your finished piece.
So your technical choices in acquisition matter.
The technical choices in processing matter to your end deliverable result.
And so, as we go through the course, when we talk about photography, when
we talk about video, we talk about audio recording in HTML,
we are going to frame it through this idea
that the visual choices are made in advance.
That you're thinking consciously about--
I want my image to look this way versus this way.
And I think a simple example is actually this image here, which
I think is credit to you, right, Dan?
DAN COFFEY: Yes.
IAN SEXTON: Yes, so this is an image of a dam.
You can see that the water is suspended.
That time has stopped.
It's really, really not-- you can't really
tell what's going on in the background.
But if we look at it another way, this is a different capture.
It's the same frame.
It's the same image.
But it looks completely different.
The water now has this streaky fluid approach.
You can see the background of the lake.
And all this is to represent that there are many different ways
to capture an image.
And each one of them presents us with a different look.
So why might you choose one over the other?
And again, it's this idea of supporting your story.
Oops, went backwards.
Sorry.
So for this image, maybe we are talking about time
and the instance of a moment.
It was at this moment.
And so we want to freeze time.
And maybe for this image, it's more about the quality
of the environment and the space.
When you sit next to a babbling brook, which is this-- not quite what this is,
it's a weird dam, but you get the idea.
DAN COFFEY: Two very different [INAUDIBLE]..
IAN SEXTON: Exactly.
Exactly.
OK.
So intention in storytelling.
How do we use and how do we understand the story and what
we want to say so that when we are confronted
with these technical choices, we can make smart visual decisions?
For this lecture, I'm going to focus on narrative cinema,
in part because narrative cinema is the most freely defined.
It's not really constrained by marketing clients or educational video
or things like that.
And also, our assignment for week one is actually
going to be focused on building a scene out of narrative footage
that we will provide for you.
We'll use this as a scaffold for that assignment.
But that is not to say that these concepts don't apply to other modes
and genres of media production.
If you're doing a photo essay, that essay, in there is your story.
If you're doing a marketing video, you have
some brand that you want to sell to people,
and that brand can be your story.
So again, even if it's not a giant traditional narrative story,
there is this thread of intention that should follow through all of your work.
All right.
So to dive right in, what's the difference between story and plot?
Does anyone here have an idea?
What's a story?
Yes.
AUDIENCE: So the story has character.
It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So there's characters, and they go from the beginning to middle
and the end, which suggests this time and this transformation.
So the story is the telling of them moving from the beginning position
to the end position.
OK.
I think that's really good.
So a story is an unfolding of events.
That's a really good crystallization of that.
Is that different than plot?
And if so, how is it different?
Does anyone have a sense of why they might be different?
All right.
So plot is the unfolding of events, which is essentially a story,
but with an understanding of why it's happening.
OK.
And this is really succinctly put by a quote
from EM Forrester, which is, the story is the king died,
and then the queen died, which is the narrative events that unfolded.
The plot is that the king died, and then the queen died of grief.
It gives motivations to her actions and, or the situation.
All right.
Part of what we're talking about when we're talking about story
is not just understanding the actions that are occurring on screen,
but the larger why.
The subtext of the whole story.
All right.
Plot ends up being the motivated actions of characters in a believable world.
All right.
And this is important because if your audience does not
believe that your character would do something,
no one will believe your story.
This doesn't mean that a believable world needs to be the mundane 9 to 5
that we exist in.
Fantastical elements or exaggerations can exist.
But the relationships of the characters and the ramifications in the world
need to make sense.
That helps out the audience with this willful suspension of disbelief.
I'm willing to believe in flying cars.
If there is a scientist who invented them, and someone has to drive them,
and there's some sort of relationship that
exists between the characters and the objects that exist in that world.
All right.
OK.
So a lot of how we're talking about story
revolves around this idea of characters.
We said that there was this narration of events from a beginning
to a middle to an end.
But one of the things that you also said was
that there were characters in there.
So understanding your characters becomes really fundamental to motivating them
correctly.
There's a basic five questions that we can ask
about any character in any given story.
The first one is what does the character need?
What are they trying to achieve?
These are things like goals.
What does the character want to do?
And a goal could be something as simple as, I want to throw a dinner party.
That's my goal for the day.
For the evening, I should say.
The other question is, how does the character change throughout the story?
Good stories allow your characters to start in one place
and end up in another, with some transformation in between.
Which brings us to, what is preventing the character
from achieving their goals?
If it was easy for the character to achieve a goal,
there'd be no transformation.
So in storytelling, we'll often put impediments
in the way of our characters.
This is the idea of conflict.
That there's some force in the world that's
stopping the character from achieving what they want to achieve.
And that they have to somehow battle around that, which is the idea of--
that's what gives a story drama.
The other one is, what must the character
give up to overcome this obstacle?
So if we're talking a little bit about how characters transform
throughout their story, then at a certain point,
they have to give up something or change.
And this weight allows the character to have a bit of a dilemma.
They have to struggle with this decision.
I have to give up x because I want y.
Again, it's building this idea of drama.
And how does a character resolve their attempt to achieve their goals?
So in many stories, the character wants to achieve a goal.
They struggle to achieve it.
They achieve it.
And it's like infinite happiness.
It's perfect.
Everything's great.
But in some stories, a character is striving to achieve a goal,
and they finally get there, and they realize they don't really
want to be here after all.
They missed what they really wanted.
So your resolution doesn't necessarily have
to be this perfection of happiness.
The character doesn't have to achieve the goal.
But they do need to-- you do need to understand and realize
how that resolution applies to your character.
We talk a lot about goals, but goals are, as I said,
I want to have a dinner party tonight.
But the stakes are a little bit different.
The character goals are actions that I can make, or that they can make.
I could host a dinner party.
But the stakes are why.
Why am I hosting a dinner party?
Is it because I want to have my boss over and impress them and garner
support for promotion?
Or is it because I want to cement my role as a father figure for my family?
Those are two very different motivations for the same action.
And this is that idea of subtext, where you
can imagine that the words on the screen are something like, wow, it's
going to rain.
Which are fairly flat.
Wow, it's going to rain.
Doesn't really mean much.
If I'm on a picnic, and I say, wow, it's going
to rain, that has a different meaning than if I'm standing in a field
during the middle of a drought and I'm like, wow, it's going to rain.
One is apprehensive and dreadful, and the other is like, oh my god,
this is amazing.
The stakes end up being the why behind the goal.
And this is that idea of character motivation.
If your character is acting or taking actions
that don't align with the stakes that are presented to them,
then it doesn't feel believable.
And it sucks the audience out of that willful suspension of disbelief.
All right.
So the most important thing you can think of about stakes--
and I think we could talk a little bit about what
might be a good example of a stake.
Like, what would be a stake in a story?
Yes.
AUDIENCE: The fate of the world.
IAN SEXTON: The fate of the world.
That's really huge.
That's like Armageddon, or something like that.
What's another stake?
Maybe something smaller?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Wanting to get your dog back that was stolen.
IAN SEXTON: Wanting to get your dog back that was stolen,
which is the stakes in, what, John Wick, right?
I think so.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So one of the things that's interesting is that large stakes often
tend to be less effective.
I don't have a lot of experience with what
it's like to save the world on any sort of large action movie scale.
I do have experience with what it is to feel the loss of a pet.
So it helps me uniquely identify with that character almost immediately.
And I can buy into the narrative that's building
and use it as a framework to understand the story.
The key is this idea of empathy.
Characters can't exist in a vacuum, and having
your audience empathize with them and identify with them
makes this narrative more believable.
So even if there are flying cars, if I identify
with the shared humanity of the characters in that story,
I'm willing to sort of suspend my disbelief at this idea of flying cars.
So building empathy is integral to this.
So we think about-- as you begin to develop stories,
think about relatable moments.
Moments of vulnerability.
Injustice, fear, loss, feeling lost and adrift.
Other ways that we can build empathy are focusing in
on that idea of our shared humanity and personal experiences
that we understand as storytellers and audience members.
All right.
The conflicts in the story, these oppositions,
are often embodied by another character.
I think we've all heard the idea of, you have your protagonist
and you have your antagonist, and they stand off.
They have different and competing goals.
I want to save the world.
The villain wants to end the world.
At its most basic.
Again, overcoming that conflict needs to result
in some fundamental change for your character, which
can be positive, negative, and even in some cases, neutral.
When we think about multiple characters, we
can think a little bit about building relationships.
Building relationships means that even when people are aligned,
or even when they're squaring off against one another
with opposite goals.
So this idea of power differentials-- who's in control?
How do they exercise control?
Does that shift?
So it's really simple, like, maybe it's like, I could take this
and I could give this to Dan, and I'm like, here you go, bud.
That's one kind of relationship.
Give me that back.
And I handed it to Dan, and I'm like, no, you can't have this,
is a completely different kind of relationship.
And it's just sometimes just as simple as that.
The ideas of proximity.
When you're presenting two people on screen, the closer they are,
the more likely they are to be aligned together.
The further apart they are, the more there
is this visual separation that the audience will read
as separation in their relationship.
DAN COFFEY: I don't know what that says about this lecture.
And I see all this space--
IAN SEXTON: We're going to switch in a minute.
We have-- it's a shared duty.
So who are we with?
And where's the visual focus?
And what does that proximity of character suggest?
So here's an interesting example.
Shout out to Scully, who's online watching this right now.
So we have a foreground character who's much larger in the frame
than our background character.
They have a little bit more visual weight.
I understand that the focus is actually still on the background character.
We could shift it forward to Scully to really make this point.
But right here is the same frame, but Scully and Dan are the same size.
It's more natural feeling and has a similarity, sort of equality,
to their positioning and size and frame.
We can take it one step further, and we can
make Dan giant and Scully diminutive.
Shifting the relationship, the way the audience
sees the relationship, of a single photograph
just by adjusting the relative size and frame.
So don't stress too much about how this is done.
When we get to lensing and composition, we'll dive really deeply into it,
but just be aware that you have these tools at your disposal.
So at the end of the day, good narratives and good stories
are drawn by building tension.
There has to be some uncertainty.
And the stakes of the story need to be such
that we're not entirely sure that our protagonist is
going to achieve their goal.
So a character with conflicting desires--
I have to give something up to achieve this thing that I want.
This builds tension in the story.
Something they don't want to give up, they
have to trade for something that they desire.
Uncertainty about your character overcoming their goals.
So this is the idea that the stakes may be so large
that they may not overcome them.
That the conflict is so entrenched that it's difficult for them
to achieve and climb over that impediment.
Uncertainty about who to trust.
And I think we've all seen films where there's a red herring where
one character appears to be friends with another character
and ends up betraying them at the end.
And there's often, if you go back and watch those films,
there's a little bit of foreshadowing that will come about.
There's some visual hint that this character isn't quite right,
whether it's something with the lighting--
maybe half their face is in shadow, to give you that duplicitous
look which is so old timey.
But there's these visual cues that the filmmakers
are putting in there to help guide your understanding of the story.
And the uncertainty about their relationship to the stakes at large.
Will they find their dog again?
Will they stave off Armageddon?
Or what have you?
So at the end of the day, when you get to this idea of resolutions,
how does the character change?
Did they achieve their goal?
And if so, was it what they imagined?
And are they better off or worse off?
Before we jump into this, does anyone--
has anyone taken the class where we've talked about the shapes of story?
We sent out a link to Kurt Vonnegut talking about the shapes of stories.
Have you all watched that?
It was short and sort of sweet.
His humor is really dry and beautiful.
But so, when we talk about stories more generally, I think oftentimes,
you'll see this drawing here.
Is it this way?
Where you have your character's starting position,
and they're going up to the conflict.
I love the smoothing.
It hits its climax here.
And it resolves here.
And I think in some ways--
you'll find this in a lot of books, but it belies the point
that this is not actually what's happening in a lot of the stories
that we are exposed to.
What may actually be happening is that your character makes some advancements,
and then they're set back, and then they make a little bit more advancement,
and then they're set back, and then they finally
achieve their goal, which is a totally different picture.
And I think what was interesting about the Vonnegut piece was
that it allowed us to think a little bit more about the structure of the story
and where it's going.
So that you can make informed decisions about how you're
going to present any given moment.
So if we think--
if we draw axes here, where that's the E and that's the B,
and we have good fortune up here, and terrible fortune
down there, the story of--
he described it as boy meets girl, but it
doesn't have to be about a boy, or a girl, for that matter.
But that a person starts here at some not mediocre, a little better
off than mediocre, and something good happens,
then something terrible happens, and then something wonderful happens.
Thinking about how you would approach the filmmaking here versus here
is an interesting question.
What might it look like generally, in general terms,
for this section of the story?
Something good just happened.
You walk out your door, you find $100.
Or you walk out your door, and you meet someone wonderful.
Things are looking up.
What does that seem like, visually?
How might you do it, Dan?
DAN COFFEY: Some glowing light, flattering camera angles.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
So we're talking about flattery, maybe it's a little bit brighter,
yeah, vibrant.
AUDIENCE: Colorful.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
DAN COFFEY: Saturation.
IAN SEXTON: So there's these visual elements
that we could pull in to be the stylistic choice here.
What about here?
What are some thoughts on how it might look?
AUDIENCE: Muted.
IAN SEXTON: Muted.
OK.
You could go all the way to saturated.
You could end up in black and white.
Totally.
You could go to that extreme if you wanted to.
OK.
Muted.
OK.
So now we're bringing in some audio.
We can use audio cues that help push and pull our understanding of the story.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Off-kilter camera angles.
IAN SEXTON: Oh, OK.
Great.
So we start to adjust our composition to suggest a mental state.
Those are all great ideas.
Absolutely.
So we're going to say-- let's say muted.
And then, let's say, off kilter.
OK.
So now my question for you is, what about over here?
AUDIENCE: Super bright.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So we pinned ourselves into a bit of a corner.
If we pulled out all the stops right here,
where is there for us to go at the end of the story?
Visually.
OK.
So maybe you actually-- now that we've begun to think about this,
maybe we want to scale this back a little bit.
It's not super vibrant, but it's definitely not muted like this.
And then when we get to this end part, maybe it is super vibrant.
It goes off the charts.
So taking the time to do your first steps in pre-production,
which is thinking about the shape of a story,
can help you define how you're going to approach your visual choices.
And so, don't stress out too much about how
to achieve vibrant colors or off-kilter compositions.
We'll get to that when we cover the ideas of photography and video
production.
But begin to think about the context and the content that you've seen,
and how you can apply it to stories that you want to tell.
Beautiful.
Should we do one more?
Or should we watch a clip?
What do we got?
I think we will--
let's run over and we'll watch a clip.
I want to show a short opening of a film that sets up the larger narrative.
And then tease apart some of the choices that were made there
and how they might support the story that we won't see,
but also the story that's going to be told.
The film I want to show today, the opening sequence is from a film
called Blue, which is part of the Three Colors trilogy, by Krzystof Kieslowski.
Excuse me.
And it's the first in the trilogy of films called Blue, White, and Red,
which represent the colors of the French flag.
And are loosely evocative of the ideas behind that.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[CAR ENGINE HUMMING]
[FLUTTERING]
[SPEAKING FRENCH]
[KNOCKING]
[TIRES SCREECHING]
[CRASH]
[DOG SCREECHING]
[END PLAYBACK]
IAN SEXTON: So what did you see in the beginning of this film?
This is setting up all of the film to come thereafter.
AUDIENCE: It seemed sad because of the blue tone.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
Yeah.
So overall, there's a incredible cast of blue to all but really one
or two moments in this opening sequence.
They were able to adjust the color temperature of their camera
to make this cool looking shot, rather than something maybe more neutral,
which you might be looking at online right now,
or something that's much more warm and golden and brighter.
So you associate this coolness with sadness,
so that warmth maybe is associated with positive emotions.
OK.
That's a good observation.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: There were some elements of danger.
IAN SEXTON: OK.
Some elements of danger.
What do you mean by that?
AUDIENCE: The camera angle that looks at traffic
moving very fast that doesn't give a complete view of what's happening.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So it's obscured.
We're looking at everything from the underside of the car.
All right.
DAN COFFEY: Just a reminder [INAUDIBLE].
IAN SEXTON: Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Later on, there's the fog that's appear on the road.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
And the car seems to--
there's fog that's appearing on the road,
and the car seems to be traveling fairly recklessly, at high speed.
And we get that sense from the way the cars move in front,
as it's overtaking vehicles, and that sharp horn sound.
The very beginning the film has this rhythmic audio that is playing.
The sound of the tires rolling over the concrete lulling us
into this false sense of security.
And it's sharply detonated with the sound of that horn.
OK.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Secondary shot of the real world.
At least in the beginning two-thirds, there's a close shot.
Except for the sort of imaginistic perspective of the child looking
backwards, it's also the only shot that's not
blue in the beginning of the section.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So the comment is that every shot of the real world has this blue look to it.
OK.
With the exception of the--
imaginistic was the word I think you used?--
when the child is looking out through the back window
at the cars and the light, in that ethereal moment in the tunnel.
And I think that that's really interesting, too,
that all of this real world sadness is not falling on the child.
The child has a much more innocent outlook.
OK.
So precisely this moment of mystery and wonder at the world.
We're not yet burdened with maybe the sadness of adulthood.
OK.
I think that's a very interesting read.
OK.
And then we're here, where, this is the only time that we see her,
and it's not blue.
There's this weird green.
And she's literally just staring at us.
That's all.
Ostensibly, she's looking at the cars in the background,
but really, we're just getting a look into her eyes.
And you'll often hear people talk about the eyes being
the most relatable part in filmmaking, or the window to the soul,
or something like that.
And so there is this moment where we're asked to just
be with this child for a minute.
I think it's maybe 10 or 15 seconds.
I don't want to give away too much of the film that follows on,
but I do need to contextualize it a little bit.
So this is the father and this family.
There's a mother and a daughter.
In that car crash, the father and the daughter die.
And I hope I'm not ruining the film, but it happens literally three minutes in,
and the whole rest of the film is about the aftermath of that.
So one of the things that we see is the driver of this car.
We never see this man's face.
But part of the story that follows is the wife dealing with her relationship
to this husband and the aftermath of his life and experience.
But we never see his face.
Because this story isn't about him.
It just relates to him.
It's about someone else's perception and memories and experience of this person.
Very easily could have just flipped the camera and shown us his face.
But it's a conscious decision not to.
One of the most important things that we can use as a tool as storytellers
is this idea of dramatic irony.
And this boils down to this simple question
that you can ask yourself-- who knows what when?
We are underneath this car and we can see the brake lines
dripping brake fluid out of them.
We are aware of this.
But the characters are not.
There's no way they would drive off in that car
if they knew it was leaking brake fluid.
So what does that do for us as audience members?
How does that change the way we're interpreting
the story that's unfolding?
AUDIENCE: It brings worry.
IAN SEXTON: It makes you worry?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, because you know something bad is about to happen.
IAN SEXTON: Right, exactly.
It increases this idea of tension, like, are they
going to make it to where they're going safely?
Before this becomes a problem?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: The anticipation of something that's already really clear.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
It's surprising, too.
This anticipation of something clear in the moment that you're saying is like,
I know that something bad is going to happen,
because you're showing me this brake fluid,
but I'm still hoping that it won't.
It's very powerful to show us this bad thing that's about to happen,
and my gut reaction is the hope that it won't.
And that's the beauty of very craft oriented storytelling.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: It's interesting because the first scene is of the wheel.
So it's like foreshadowing that something is going
to go wrong in that area a little bit.
And I didn't catch it until it was over and then I was like, oh, wow.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
So the idea that the film begins on the wheel, which
is down where we are in this shot, brings up this idea of foreshadowing.
There's also in this background, you can see the little girl,
who be central to our character's sense of loss
as they navigate through this traumatic incident.
What's something really interesting about this three minute clip
that I showed you?
I said there were three characters.
There's the little girl, who we spend a significant amount of time
with in this three minutes.
There's the father, who we see for a couple seconds,
but we don't actually see him, just the back of him.
And I said that there was the mother.
You only hear her voice.
That's it.
You never see her.
And so this, again, is another conscious decision
that he's not going-- to not present that character in this moment,
and that the rest of the story will be about her,
and we will be with her the whole way.
It's a creative inversion, if you will, of who we are with in any given moment.
A couple of other tidbits that are interesting.
There's this character at the end who's waiting and hitchhiking.
He's playingd he's got a skateboard.
He's got that wooden toy to get the ball on the stick.
And so, there's this concept of these missed chances.
He's trying to hitchhike in this car that only seconds later crashes.
In a terrible car crash.
So you can play with these moments of situational irony, as well.
One of the things that, as a crafts person who makes films, I do
love this moment of this crashed car.
Because it's pretty obvious that they didn't crash it in that moment.
If you watch it, you'll see that it falls down,
and the hood closes, and then someone throws paper
out the window, which becomes a little bit humorous.
Because you can see the mechanism of them creating the violence of this car
crash.
And they're like, let's make this more violent,
we'll throw paper out the window.
And to a degree, it does make it more violent,
but it also adds this weird subtext, where I find it humorous,
because I know there's a person in there throwing paper out.
But so, ask yourself, does that help the narrative at this moment?
Or does it end up hindering it?
So you increase the--
you made a choice.
I want to increase the violence of the car crash by throwing paper out of it.
But now, there's this interpretation where it's actually a little bit funny
and staged.
And it actually reduces my connection emotionally to the moment,
and increases my connection intellectually as
like a crafts person of making movies.
Which may not be the intention.
So even when you're working through these stories,
sometimes you will make a decision, and it may backfire a little on you.
And that is OK.
The point is to then take time, look at the work, reflect, grow and adapt.
And that's one of the reasons that we're going
to build in a lot of critique time as we move through the semester.
So that yeah, maybe we'll try something interesting,
like increasing the violence by throwing some paper out.
It worked.
It sort of didn't work.
We can talk about that overall.
And the final thing is this character's loss of innocence.
This character shows up again later in the film.
But you can see that they throw away their childish toys or childhood toys--
their skateboard and that little game.
I don't know what it's called, I should look that up.
As they run over to this scene of carnage.
And this is just a really simple symbolic device.
He carries a bright yellow skateboard, that
is the only bright thing in this whole image.
It's foggy, it's muted, it's all the things
that we said would be when we were down in the bottom of that story.
And this young man has this bright vibrant object
that he casts away in this moment.
As he moves from childhood to adulthood, maybe.
So I'm going to turn it over to Dan briefly to dive
into a little bit about the story choices in editing
and talk a little bit about Shotcut more generally in preparation
for the next assignment.
DAN COFFEY: All right.
Welcome back, everybody, to round two of exploring digital media.
Thanks to Ian for the great primer on storytelling.
So now we're going to dive into the business of editing.
So what is editing?
If filmmaking is telling the story and taking it from conflict to resolution
and writing a story arc along the way, editing is deciding how we tell it.
Ian talked a lot about the elements that you
can use in composition and color temperature and other decisions
you can make to tell the story.
And as an editor, you're the one taking these media pieces
and putting it into a timeline, into a sequence,
and actually assembling the story.
How do we edit?
In the olden days, it looked like this.
So this is a--
what is this, Ian?
A steam [INAUDIBLE] machine?
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
A flatbed editor.
DAN COFFEY: All right.
I've never actually touched one of these machines myself.
Ian has.
But you've got reels of film that go through it.
You cut it.
You splice it.
You physically actually tape film together to put these shots together.
So it's really hard to command Z and undo.
But fortunately, in the world of digital media, we have what are called NLEs,
or non-linear editors.
And there's a whole bunch of them out there.
Some of the big ones right now are Adobe Premiere.
We've got Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Avid.
And up here in the top left, we have Shotcut,
which is the editor we're going to use in this class.
And the reason we're using Shotcut is because it is free.
It is cross platform, so if you're on Windows or on Mac,
it's very easy to use.
But you get what you pay for sometimes.
It's a great piece of software, but there are
some pitfalls that come along with it.
One of the first things I really want to hammer home as we get
started is that you need to stay organized.
And that's all the way through the production process,
starting back in pre-production.
If you're thinking about your story and how you want to tell it.
When you're actually shooting the film, you definitely want to be organized.
And when you get to post-production, as simple as how
you arrange the files on your hard drive matters,
because you need to know where everything is.
And if you need to access a file or a piece of music,
if you have a standard convention for how you do this,
it'll make life a lot easier as you try to sift through all your footage.
Because as you build bigger and bigger projects, your files on your hard drive
will actually enumerate many times over.
And it'll be hard to find things.
So stay organized.
And we don't specify any specific organization in this class.
You're welcome to use this example.
But find whatever works for you and stick with it.
All right.
As I said, staying organized starts in pre-production.
But even on set, it's really helpful to use something like a slate
here where you can write information about the scene that you're working on.
You don't need anything as fancy as this if you don't want to.
You're certainly able to use a whiteboard or a piece of paper.
But if you're doing several versions of the same shot over and over again,
it's really helpful to know which one is which.
And in the assignment that you'll get tonight,
the first thing you'll see in every take is
the slate that sets up for you what shot it is
that we are working on in that moment.
There's also a practical benefit to this.
If you're actually syncing audio and video--
which we'll get to later in this course--
actually closing the sticks and having the audio sound mark
where you're sync point is will help you synchronize your audio and video.
This is a frame of Shotcut.
This is our non-linear editor that we're working on.
And so, there's a few pieces of it that I think it is helpful to understand.
I'm just curious, how many people in the room
here have experience using non-linear editors before?
How many people have done editing.
Few hands.
And just shout it out.
What are you using to edit?
AUDIENCE: iMovie.
DAN COFFEY: iMovie.
AUDIENCE: Premiere.
DAN COFFEY: Premiere.
AUDIENCE: Camtasia.
AUDIENCE: Premiere.
DAN COFFEY: Premiere.
OK.
Is anybody here planning to use Shotcut?
AUDIENCE: No.
DAN COFFEY: No?
OK.
Well, this is a question for the online students, too.
Let us know if you're planning to use Shotcut,
because I'm going to spend a little bit of time
going through how to use the software today, but we do not require this.
Certainly, if you're comfortable and you know another editing software,
please use that.
This is simply if you're trying to get into this.
I think that where Shotcut falls for me is one step above iMovie.
There's a few more complex things you can do.
But definitely a step below the rest.
And it is a little bit buggy.
As I've been using it and getting ready for this class, it does crash on me
a reasonable amount of times.
There's a few annoying things that you can't do that we'll get into you,
as well.
But, the price you cannot beat.
All right.
Down in the bottom of the frame we're looking at
is our sequence, our timeline.
And this is where we're going to start to take our media
and assemble it so that--
as we play back, think of this x-axis as time--
as we move along time, this is what we're going to see visually.
So whatever the top layer is, hierarchically,
is what we're going to see.
So if this clip overlaps this clip, this is the clip
that we're actually going to see in our viewer when we watch.
Down here, we can see audio clips that have waveforms in them.
And those are just representations of the loudness of the audio.
And then over here, this purple and blue box is a transition,
which means that there's--
instead of just cutting and abutting two clips together,
there's actually some kind of transition that's happening between them,
either a cut or dissolve.
We'll get into those.
I like to think of editing like this.
You are making this beautiful piece of art-- yes?
AUDIENCE: Can you go back one slide?
I have a quick question.
DAN COFFEY: I'm going to go back one slide for a quick question.
AUDIENCE: The waveforms for the audio--
DAN COFFEY: Yes.
AUDIENCE: You described the top one being the one you see for the video.
For the audio, is it the same?
DAN COFFEY: Great question.
So how does it work when you have multiple tracks of audio?
You do hear all of them.
And so, it-- depending on how you've got the sequence setup,
it will sum them together for you or sometimes, you
can have one channel be your left channel,
and one channel be your right channel.
Sorry, one track be your left channel, one track be your right channel.
It depends on how you set it up.
For most of what we're going to do in this class,
we're not going to worry about those details.
We're going to let it sum our audio together and hear everything
in both ears.
But yes, you can actually turn tracks off globally.
There's a little speaker button here.
And this is common in every NLE, but you can--
if you decide, oh, I don't want any of this track,
you can turn it off and get that sound out of there.
And going back to being organized, it's helpful to put your soundtrack
on one track so you can turn it off and hear just the dialogue if you've
got the dialogue on one track.
Or if you have two people talking, put person A's dialogue
on one track and person B's dialogue on another
so you can quickly hear who's saying what
or turn off the music just to make it more quick to make changes.
All right.
So my analogy about what is editing.
We're making this beautiful tapestry together
of visual elements and audio elements.
So I like to think of the sequence as our canvas.
That's what we're actually applying our paint to.
The clips are our paint.
And often, we talked about the difference
in colors and contrasts and everything.
So I think it's a fit analogy.
And then the transitions are our brushes.
So how do we move from one shot to another?
Or one scene to another?
We want to think about this not just in terms of what is the mechanism,
like a cut or dissolve or a wipe, to move from one scene to another,
but also, how do we progress the story and sequence our shots to move
from one scene to another?
All right.
Transitions.
On the left, we have a frame from iMovie.
On the right, we have a frame from Shotcut.
And so as you can see, the creators of these software
have given us a multitude of options.
We have cross dissolve, cross blur, fade to black, barn door
diagonal, northwest to southeast.
Tons of options.
How many people have spent time throwing this into your project?
See what they look like?
As a rule, don't use any of them.
I'm just kidding.
These are my rules.
I think when you tell an effective story, it's not about gimmicks.
It's simply about moving and progressing your scene very simply.
And we're going to talk about how you make an effective cut,
because cutting is really the biggest transition you're going to use,
I think, when you're telling stories.
So just to zoom this in for you, you might
be wondering what is matrix snake parallel horizontal--
I wondered that when I went to this.
I didn't want to leave you disappointed.
Here it is.
AUDIENCE: Are you kidding?
DAN COFFEY: It's gimmick-y, right?
What does this actually do for our story?
And if you go back to Star Wars and George Lucas,
he certainly uses wipes in a creative way and effectively.
But I think for the purposes of this course, as we're starting out,
it's our goal to equip you with the tools
for telling an effective story without having to resort to anything like this.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, thanks.
We appreciate it.
DAN COFFEY: All right.
So as I said, the bread and butter of your editing
is going to be the cut, which literally looks like this.
We have shot A that abuts to shot B. And dissolves, where they overlap,
and there's a transition between them that's smooth and gradual.
All right.
Everybody's heard the term three point editing in this room?
Maybe?
Maybe not?
Anybody want to throw a definition on it for me?
Three point editing is really the foundation of starting to take a clip
and build our story.
And so literally, the first step is to say, where do I want to--
in your editor, you're going to have a list of clips.
You're going to pull one up, and you're going to start to watch it.
And you're going to say, where do I want to start telling the story from?
And you literally pick your in point, and you
say, OK, I'm going to have this clip go from here to here.
And you pick your out point-- that's we're going to end the clip--
and then you have to decide where does it go into the timeline?
Am I going to put it before the shot?
Am I going to put out after the shot?
Do I want to have it come in halfway through where I had the previous shot?
There's some shortcuts to do this, because this
is what you will do as you start to build the story very frequently.
So in Shotcut, and in many other editors,
Premiere included, it's the I and the O key.
So as you're playing along your preview window here, you hit the I key,
and it'll literally shorten your clip, the in point marker here,
and then you keep playing to where you want to end the clip.
And you hit O, and that's the out point.
And then there's a shortcut to drop it into your timeline, which
in Shotcut, is the A key to append it to the end of your sequence.
And the B key just to drop it in and overwrite whatever clip your marker
is on.
And this white line here is the play head,
and so wherever that is where you're going to append things to--
when you hit the B key, wherever the clip will end up.
All right.
How do we organize our story visually?
This is the question.
How do we want to tell our story?
Ian give a great example of what choices you make when you start here?
And then you go down here.
And then you come all the way back up.
Like, what do you leave yourself?
So you want to start to think about these things
when you unfold your story in editing, too.
And the real thing you want to start to ask yourself is why cut?
This is the big question.
So why would you-- when do you want to make the transition from the medium
shot, let's say, of somebody, to the wide shot of the next person
or the close up of the next person?
Or the close up of the same person?
Why would we want to change the shot?
Yes.
AUDIENCE: Because based on the feelings that we want to do,
if we want to get more intimate with the character
or get closer to be able to see something important after establishing
where they are.
DAN COFFEY: Sure.
So you might go closer if you want to be more intimate with somebody.
Because a close up shot--
we're typically talking about the face--
gives you much more information about their emotions.
You can read their face.
You can see their eyes much bigger.
Makes total sense.
There's a few reasons.
There may be more information that you want to show.
Maybe you want to come in and show this person is actually upset.
So it's a reason to cut and come closer.
There's something from the scene that's not visible that you want to see.
There's nothing else to gain from the current shot.
That's also a reason to get away from your current shot or transition
into the next scene.
But every time you make an edit, you are making a decision now.
I feel like once you're informed of this and you
start to think about putting a story together, every cut that you make
or every dissolve that you make should be informed
and it should focus around telling the story that you
intended to set out to tell.
We talked about shot progression there when
we talked about going from a wider shot to a close up shot.
So let's take a specific example for a second
and talk about how we might unfold it visually.
So let's take a horror scene where we have an axe murderer who's
chasing somebody through a factory.
How do we want to it-- what's the first shot
that we want to show to tell the story?
AUDIENCE: Show the factory.
DAN COFFEY: Show the factory.
So this is probably a wider shot.
And it's going to give us more information about the location
that we're at.
OK.
So maybe in the same shot, we introduce a character.
And then we maybe meet the person who's being chased.
And we're getting a little bit tighter here as we work our way in.
And then, we cut to the reverse.
But what I'm trying to get at here is that a common pattern
as we start to progress our shots, really immaterial of the scenario,
is that you start wide because you get a lot more information in a wide shot.
We're going to talk a lot more about this in the composition lecture.
We work our way in tight to build that tension and show
emotion show the state of our character, our antagonist.
And then we work our way back out.
Or we transition-- we ignore this part and transition right to the next scene.
But this is a typical pattern of building that tension.
Alfred Hitchcock here has a great rule about this.
Does anybody know what the Hitchcock rule is?
And I'll just say, every rule is meant to be broken.
These are conventions as you get started that are helpful to get you
to meet expectations of your audience.
But there's certainly times to break all of the rules.
So Alfred Hitchcock's rule is that the size of what you see on screen
corresponds to how important it is in the story at that moment.
So if you go to a close up of Ian's show here, get a close up of that,
it's probably very important to your story.
Otherwise, why would you do it?
And I think that makes sense.
And a good example of this from Hitchcock's own work
is that in Dial M for Murder, there is a shot where
we see this finger dial this phone.
And this is the shot that follows it.
So this is going to repeat here.
And so, the limitation of the time was, they
didn't have the technology or lenses to get this shot.
So what he ended up doing, because this shot was so important to him,
was that, they built a big phone that was this big and a big wooden finger
so that they could actually get that shot.
Can you imagine like how painstaking that would be to actually
have that kind of construction just to get that one moment of a close up shot?
What's that?
AUDIENCE: My goodness.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
So that's where Hitchcock's rule comes from.
But it's really important to think about what you're showing onscreen.
And the size of it can relate to how important it is, as well.
All right.
Continuing down our shot progression here.
Let's watch a clip here of this gentleman.
And without giving anything else away, I want you to watch this scene
and tell me what your impressions of the gentleman are.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
DAN COFFEY: So what are your impressions of this guy?
What's he all about?
[END PLAYBACK]
AUDIENCE: He's waiting to cross the street.
DAN COFFEY: He's waiting across the street.
Normal guy?
Weird guy?
AUDIENCE: Weird guy.
DAN COFFEY: Weird guy.
Why weird?
AUDIENCE: Because the face he's making.
DAN COFFEY: OK.
The face he's making.
But the shot is fairly neutral.
There's nothing sinister about it.
We're close up so you can see all his glances and whatnot.
All right.
How about this scene?
Ready?
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: What's he thinking here?
No?
AUDIENCE: Kill someone.
IAN SEXTON: He's thinking, maybe he could kill somebody?
Like, could he be a serial murderer?
That look to the side definitely helps in that context.
All right.
Shall we look at one more?
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: How about that one?
What's the similarity in all three of these scenes I just showed you?
It's exactly the same beginning and end clip.
Different-- middle shot is what has changed.
Because we presume, when we see somebody close up and looking,
the next thing that we see is what they're looking at.
And so, context matters for everything.
What that middle piece does changes dramatically the before and after.
And this is known as the Kuleshov effect.
Viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two clips shown
sequentially than in isolation.
And so, when we think about patterning our shots and the order of which we
reveal things, context becomes key, like, what you just
saw versus what you see next.
So it's something to keep in mind as you choose the next shot that you're doing.
Go back and watch the last few seconds or minutes of your film
and see what kind of story you're telling.
There's a great explainer for this that I'm going to link to here.
But I'm not going to play in class, where Alfred Hitchcock explains this,
as well.
All right.
As we start to build our sequence and pattern our shots,
how do we make our edits more natural?
There's a few different ways that we can do this.
And this is where I said that the heart of editing
is using cuts and using dissolves.
But there's ways to make them really effective.
So one example is to do what's called a smash cut.
And this is all where the cut appears.
And so typically, what we're doing is we're going from very quiet to intense
or vice versa.
But it hit your viewer in the face and is unexpected.
I'm going to play a clip now and just talk over it as we go.
But this is from Inception.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: Could we get a little more volume up here?
I've got to turn it up here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- If it's just a dream, then why are you--
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: All right.
There's this really dramatic moment.
The world is literally exploding around them.
And all of a sudden, they are ripped back to reality.
And it feels very different.
But it's very sudden and unexpected.
And you don't even--
it brings this heightened sense of that transition
that you made for dramatic purpose.
That's a smash cut.
A match cut.
This is when you've got two frames that are framed the same way.
Sometimes there's audio that overlaps and helps make this transition.
But let's take a look at a transition of a match cut.
This is from Breaking Bad.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- [SIGHS]
[WATER DRIPPING]
[PHONE RINGING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: A very short clip.
But how does it how does it help bridge the two scenes for you?
Versus just cutting from him working on the appliance, whatever
it was, to her in the office here?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
You're not really taken out of the moment.
It's not jarring at all.
The flow of the camera is the same.
Another way to make an effective cut.
You could have an audio match altogether.
Here's more of our serial killer.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WOMAN SCREAMING]
[KETTLE WHISTLING]
- Hey.
- Hi.
- I just had the weirdest dream ever.
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: So again, we're bridging these transitions
and just a clever way that keeps your viewer hooked in.
All tools to keep in your tool belt.
So really, the most effective way to make edits
when you're working in the context of the same scene
and trying to cut between camera angles, is to match on action.
What this means is, as--
let's look at an example.
We've got a scene here where this woman's
going to walk in with a shotgun, and we're
going to-- we want to go from a wide shot to a close up.
So let's take a look at what this looks like.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Now.
Look right.
A little wider on the--
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: And so, you can hear, this is a group called framelines.tv
and they give footage for free that you can practice editing with.
But what happens-- that's the audio that you hear in the background--
but what happens is, we could cut here, as she's
walking in, to her from the other side.
We could cut at any point.
But when we cut when she starts to spin, and we
match on the next shot in the same action,
it hides the edit much more effectively.
And this is just called matching on action or cutting on action.
And this can be--
we'll look at a few examples of this when we do the editing demo.
But this can be really crucial to bridging different shots back to back.
You can take some of these to the extreme.
We can hide cuts altogether.
It's when you literally-- we'll look at some examples--
but you make it so it's seamless to the viewer
that there was a transition at all.
This is called the whip pan.
This is from Ocean's Eleven.
And it's literally when we hide the cut or the dissolve
between a camera whipping between position A
and position B. So let's watch this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Like I said, a machine.
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: It's almost hard to see because the whole frame blurs
as we spin the camera.
But what this takes on the production side
is that, you've got your shot tracking the bank manager moving
through the gaming floor.
And then you whip.
And just spin the camera very quickly.
And in your next shot, you whip the camera of these two guys
here, spinning in the same direction, trying to match the speed.
And then you stop on them.
And it's between those two shots that you put in the dissolve
and hide the clip.
And really makes it very seamless between the two shots.
And this has an old history, going back--
another Hitchcock reference here-- to Rope in 1948.
It's a film--
I'll just play this in the background-- but it was really interesting,
because Hitchcock wanted to make a film that felt like one continuous shot.
But the technical limitation of the time was that--
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Oh Mr. Kent, he's coming mainly--
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: And the audio is irrelevant here, so don't worry about that--
but the limitation at the time was that they could load a film
magazine that lasted only 10 minutes.
And so it was a technical limitation that you
couldn't tell an hour, hour and a half film
and have it be a continuous shot, because you to stop
and change out the magazine.
And so what he did, as you probably saw, was, as you move through--
we'll just back this up for a second--
you move the camera up through something that lets you change the shot.
You could see the flicker there.
And just match the frame as you do it to really blend these transitions in.
It's interesting.
If you think about this today, this is what
this film would look like if you took it into your editor.
This is a timeline from Premiere.
But literally, a bunch of 10 minute scenes that go back to back to back,
because that was the limitation of the time.
And it's also interesting to think about,
because if you think about the choreography and rehearsal that it
would take to like nail long takes like that,
it's just impressive how this film came together.
All right.
So we have L cuts and J cuts.
Anybody know which is which?
Or what they are?
Because I put spoilers in the bottom of the slide here.
L cut is--
J cut is when the audio comes ahead.
So if we're on shot A and we're progressing to shot B,
and the audio from shot B comes in early as we transition from one scene
to another, it just helps bridge the moment for you as a viewer.
And on the flip side, if the audio from the first scene
extends into the second scene, that's just called an L cut.
So you'll hear the term J cut or L cut thrown around by editors.
This is simply all it means.
But it's a really good way to keep your viewer in the moment and transition
from one scene to another.
So let's look at a couple of examples for this.
And if we can have sound for this.
This is more important.
So this is from Saving Private Ryan.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[CRASHING WAVES]
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: If you noticed, what we saw as we dallied into the old man who
was at a funeral service or something like that,
you started to hear the waves come in from the next scene
before we even got there.
And it built. And I think on the cut, there was a big crash of a wave.
But it was much more seamless than just cutting from man sitting in wheelchair
to cutting to ocean spraying.
The opposite of that is an L cut.
So let's take a look at this from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Here.
- Adler.
- Here.
- Anderson.
Anderson.
- Here.
- Bueller.
Bueller.
- He's sick.
My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard
from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris
pass out at 31 Flavors last night.
Guess it's pretty serious.
- Thank you, Simone.
No problem whatsoever.
Fry.
[TELEPHONE RINGING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: Skip over that there.
We get this double meaning, where we hear the echoing of the names
through the trees, as well, at the end.
A way to bridge the gap there, too.
Editing dialogue is one of the harder things that you'll do as an editor.
And there's no really good way to get good at it except for practicing it.
In the scene that we gave you for homework,
there's only a few words, so you won't struggle with this too much
in this first assignment.
But just a few helpful pointers as you start to think about editing dialogue.
With two people having a conversation, often, you'll
find you need to take out a word or you need to take out a breath or a pause
or something like that.
And so, it's easiest to join between words.
We've occasionally had to fix things where you have to take the same word
and try to merge it together, because somebody misspoke and said a word
the wrong way.
So one, nail it in production when you do it the first time.
And if not, use the consonant sounds to make edits.
And the breath is actually really important.
So if you are taking out all the breaths,
you're going to lose that natural flow, natural rhythm when you are editing.
So make sure that they exist where they should,
especially if you have to splice in a line
that you decided was important that wasn't recorded originally.
All right.
So continuity.
How many people have seen movies that have bad continuity?
Do we know what continuity-- everybody raised their hand.
Continuity is obviously a discrepancy when something
exists in one shot not another.
Or there's a jump in the action.
So let's say that your actor raises his right hand in one shot.
You cut to the next one, and the other actor raises their left hand instead.
Again, this all comes down to paying attention on set and being organized.
But it happens to the best of us.
Just by way of example, this is a short film that we did last year.
And see if you can catch the continuity error here.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
Did we see it?
What was it?
AUDIENCE: The cup.
DAN COFFEY: The cups Yeah.
I spoiled it.
I shouldn't have used the hand example before.
But yeah, as he puts the cup to his mouth at the end of this montage, where
we see things very quickly, he's got both hands on the mug in the next shot.
Hands holding the saucer.
What are you going to do?
As the filmmaker, I kick myself at this moment
every time when I started editing this film, I was, like, oh,
because you spend so much time making this beautiful montage
and getting your shots just right.
And when you're actually covering the scene, what you're doing is
you're starting with all master shots, your wide shot,
and you're capturing the wide shot of everything that happens.
And then you change lenses, and it's later in the day,
and you go back for that close up to get the drinking of the mug.
And you forget.
And it's important to either have somebody
on set to keep track of this for you, or to review, pull a clip,
hit playback on the camera, to see what matches.
It's just so easy to overlook things like this.
And so-- yeah, if you didn't see what happened here,
we had the left hand just go from the mug and disappear.
It's heartbreaking.
But how do you deal with it?
The key is to distract your audience.
We had really fast pacing on most of those shots leading up to that.
Some sound design to help distract you.
So that hopefully you didn't notice it.
We had a couple of people with sharp eyes certainly grab it.
But you do your best to bury it when you notice a mistake like that.
All right.
Pacing your story is also important.
We talked about the emotion behind the story that you're telling,
and that'll affect the pacing.
I think that is fairly straight forward.
And so, the longer that you stay on a shot,
it tends to also add more weight to it.
Really, this comes down to, if you have a conversation between two people,
and I'm talking to Ian, who do you choose to focus on?
Is it always the person that's talking?
Or do you sometimes focus on the person who's not talking?
And how do you make this decision?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Based on what the dialogue is--
DAN COFFEY: Sure.
AUDIENCE: --if your reaction to what he's saying is important to the story,
then at that time, I might decide to cut to your reaction.
DAN COFFEY: Yeah.
So, to sum this all up, whose story is it?
Is the story about me?
Is it about Ian?
Because maybe the story is about me, so while Ian is talking,
it's more important to see my reaction, like you said.
You might want to see the reaction shot.
So it matters what you choose to see in that moment, whose face you
choose to see.
And it all comes back to, who is the story truly about?
There we go.
Who is this story really about?
That's the most important thing as you develop your script
or develop your story.
So from beginning-- this is all the stuff
that Ian demonstrated earlier, but, what causes them to make this change?
And you are the one who's going to chart the course for them from end to end.
So I won't dwell on this, because Ian is the one who set this up nicely for us.
But know whose scene is it?
This is going to inform all of your decisions as you go through it.
Music-- I think we talked about this earlier--
is a really easy way to also impact the emotions of your audience.
And the same piece with different music will feel completely different.
So definitely play around with different music choices.
And before we get to a couple of examples,
just a few helpful pieces of advice.
Stay organized.
Review your footage.
Watch everything before you start editing.
And that's like-- this would be really helpful,
I think, for the first assignment.
We've given you-- we call it super coverage amongst ourselves.
But we've given you a scene where you have a whole bunch of camera angles
and different shot sizes for this really simple story that unfolds.
And so, which one do you choose?
And part of it, since you weren't there on set as the editor, necessarily,
you need to stop and review everything and take notes
on what exists so that you can decide, was there
a good moment in this shot versus this shot?
Or, this shot is close up and has a really good reaction from the actor
in it, so I want to focus on that.
So take the script, mark it up, and decide on the important moments
that you want to highlight.
And then take a break, because it'll become easy,
just like anything, to lose sight of what it is that you're doing.
So get up, take a break, come back the next morning.
If you've done any software development, I
think it's the same way, where you get stuck in the code.
You can get stuck in the visuals of it, as well, and make a bad decision.
And just for a few resources-- we're going
to post these slides online after the lecture, so don't worry about writing
all this down-- but there's some good resources for some free sound effects
and free music.
YouTube just-- not just, but recently-- launched
a music library of royalty free.
And also, they have public domain content.
So there's a bunch of things that you can look at.
But in our last 20 or 25 minutes, I want to just actually open up
Shotcut and look at starting to put some footage together and take
a look at that.
So are there any questions about putting a story together?
Storytelling?
Editing in general?
That we can answer for you?
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So before you said about non-linear editors,
is there such a thing as linear?
DAN COFFEY: So linear is the film version
where you literally, because it's physical film--
or, if you come from the tape world before we had,
could import footage into computers-- the analog
was literally analog, where you had to take a piece of film
and splice the next piece on before you could move to the next one.
IAN SEXTON: I think the best analogy is if you
think that you have a 10 minute reel of film,
and you want to make a change five minutes in,
you have to spool off five minutes of that film to get to that point.
You have to go all the way down the line to edit in the clip
that you wanted to edit in or take out.
Whereas in non-linear editing, you basically
can just randomly jump to any point that you want
and access it and remove it and delete it or add new clips in.
DAN COFFEY: Or undo.
IAN SEXTON: Right, exactly.
So it really does make things 1,000 times faster and much more accessible.
DAN COFFEY: You can do an experiment without having
to copy your whole roll of film.
IAN SEXTON: Yeah.
And I think the idea is, too, like duplicating a sequence is much easier.
So you edit out a sequence and you're like, I'm happy with this,
but I want to try something really experimental.
You can duplicate that sequence and go wild on it.
And if you don't like it, you still have this copy of your sequence.
So it's not the same thing, where if you cut up all the film in one way,
you have to uncut it and recut it back together in another way.
So there are ways around that.
You could make prints, et cetera, et cetera.
That's a rabbit hole.
DAN COFFEY: But that comes back to a trade-off,
there's a time versus cost trade-off, as well.
But it's very cheap with non-linear editor,
because you simply have it at your fingertips.
All right.
So just give me a second here.
I'm going to flip over and I'm going to open up Shotcut.
All right.
And as we come along here.
I'm going to through the real basics of how to use it.
You open it up and it says, you want to make a new project?
And you say, yes.
So there's a blurb of text here that just says,
the first piece of footage that you add to Shotcut
is going to define what timeline you create.
So that is both frame size and frame rate.
And so, if you--
the footage we give you for this class is probably going to be 720p or 1080p.
That's the actual size of the frame.
At 24 frames per second, which is pretty typical of film.
And if you-- this says, if you start with audio,
it's simply going to be 25 frames per second.
Just the default that they pick for you.
If I'm ready to get started, I can add some files.
If I hit the Open File button.
Let's go in here.
And let's start with the match action that I showed.
IAN SEXTON: Let's look at how organized you are, first.
DAN COFFEY: Yes.
So I follow a pretty typical structure.
I have my project file with my--
I pre-built something in case I ran out of time tonight.
But it looks like we can dive right in.
So I have the project file itself.
That's just a clip I exported.
But in Capture Scratch--
I know that anything in Capture Scratch is
the folder that contains the contents I want to start with.
It's the raw assets that I'm building from.
So I'm going to go ahead and just add a couple of clips here.
All right.
It started playing here.
So on the left, we've got, they call it the play list in Shotcut.
But this is like your project panel in Premiere.
It's where you keep things organized.
I don't think there's any notion of bins,
if you've used Premiere before, where you
can make a folder to organize things.
So you will drop clips in, and they will just exist,
and you can double click on them, and they will show up here
in your source monitor.
And so, I can click and drag along this to look at the clip and the footage.
I can double click on the other clip, and it pops into the source monitor.
But down here in my timeline, I haven't actually done anything yet.
So let's start.
What's the first step of three point editing?
Anybody remember?
DAN COFFEY: Chose the endpoint.
DAN COFFEY: I got to choose my in point.
So let's see.
Let's start, if we match what I did before--
I think I had her walk in from here.
So I'm going to--
I'm going to watch forward.
And there's some shortcut keys for this.
If I hit K, it pauses the frame.
If I hit J, it goes in reverse.
It plays in reverse.
And if I hit L, it goes forward.
So J, K, and L, they're right in a row on your keyboard.
And I think it's really helpful, and that's
pretty common across most editors, as well.
So I'm going to go forward and back.
And I wanted to start just out of frame.
I don't want to have too much lead up to it.
So let's say that this is the moment I want to start.
I can hit the I key, set my in point.
And if you noticed down here, click undo, or just stretch it back out.
Whoops.
Oh boy, it's getting away from me here.
Back it up.
So if I hit I, you're going to watch the little blue indicator jump.
That shows where the duration of the media that I'm working with is.
I'm going to play forward.
And she turns.
I know that because I want to match the action of her turning, that's
where I want to make my next edit, I'm going to just back up.
And I can use the arrow keys and go frame by frame.
You can hear the audio scrubbing, as well.
And let's say here.
She spins there.
I'm going to hit the O key.
You can see that that got much shorter.
And then, you can hit one of these buttons.
So like I said, A appends it to the current track,
which means it just goes at the end.
Or I can hit the, I think it's the down arrow,
and that'll overwrite the clip on the current track.
So I'm going to press one of those.
And then, bam, down here, as I start to play,
I have the clip that was just the piece of what I selected.
I wouldn't draw attention here to these two words-- they're source and project.
Some non-linear editors like Premiere will separate these
into two windows for you.
But in Shotcut, I don't believe you--
let's see if we can just drag it out.
So you have to choose if you're looking at the source monitor.
And that's where you're-- think of it as where you're picking from.
You haven't made any commitments to the media yet.
But the project is your timeline.
So anything in your project is going to be literally just
playing back your timeline.
And the software is smart enough that it shows you
what you want to see if you're playing back--
your play head, from the timeline, it will show you the project window
automatically.
If you double click on another clip, it'll
put it in the source window for you.
All right.
I think I must have hit a keystroke and lost my shot,
so I'm just going to open that one back up.
OK.
I've done something to filter it.
Let's see, is this the one that we just used?
Let's see if we can find a moment to cut to match the action.
There's a spin there.
So I'm going to arrow forward.
She starts to spin.
I'm going to hit the I for in point.
Go forward to the out point.
All right.
So she spins there and looks down the barrel of a gun.
And I'm not sure where I'm going next.
We could pick the next shot.
But I'm ready to put this into the--
the next shot in the sequence.
So I going to hit the A key.
Or the, I think it's the plus key, and I will drop it to the end of my sequence.
And there it is.
Now we can go back to our timeline and play these back to back.
How does this feel?
Choppy.
Why?
It's not in sync.
We have duplicated action here.
I was not very careful when I did this.
But this is OK.
This is a good way to work.
You rough in your edits when you move from the project window or the source
window or the preview window, depending on your software.
And then you can refine it once you get it down to the timeline.
So I'm going to go frame by frame here and watch the spin.
And look at this.
She literally turns in the same direction a couple of times.
So I think I like the timing from here.
So I'm just going to remove some of the frames.
She's got the gun vertically still.
Let's try trimming that there.
And so I can hit the plus button here to zoom in.
And I can grab-- you can see that the cursor changes as I do this.
It goes to the little grabby arrows.
And now, if I click on this media, I can click and drag.
And with this magnetic U on, this magnet, I can--
it'll snap to either the next piece of media or to the play head, as well.
Thank you.
And now, one of the things that is tricky in Shotcut specifically,
if-- let's say that I had--
I'm going to make an edit over here.
Undo.
Let's say that I had a bunch of clips here,
and I wanted to move them around together.
There's no way to select multiple clips.
So I do have to pick each one independently and move it around.
Just one of the shortcomings of the software.
But certainly not a deal breaker.
And then to move this back, I can click or drag and move it back.
It'll snap, because I've got snapping on.
Or I can right click on this gap here, and say Remove.
And so now, let's watch this transition that we just built.
How's that feel?
That a little tighter?
So we can certainly flex with this and go frame by frame
until it feels absolutely perfect.
But I might do a rough cut first, where I
don't worry too much about all the timings of these things,
and then go back later for a finer pass.
Keep that in mind as you start to work on the homework assignment, as well.
All right.
Let's go ahead and start a new project here.
Some footage you haven't seen.
So Ian got me thinking.
He was talking about flying cars earlier.
And so let's look at--
let's make a new project.
Put this right on my desktop here.
OK.
And I'm going to call this Flying Cars.
All right.
And I don't have to choose automatic.
If I know what my footage is, I can pick it,
but I think it's easier to let the software do that for me.
So I hit Set.
I'm going to open some files.
And let's go into the flying cars demo.
Oh, no.
Here it is.
OK.
So I've got a bunch of media that I've preselected here.
I'm just going to--
Open File.
There we go.
I'm going to just select all these pieces of media.
I believe you can also drag and drop.
And I can drag them from here.
Whoops.
Oh, boy.
It's my first day with a computer today, huh?
All right.
Select all these clips.
And you can drag them in and drop them.
And they'll show up, and starts playing for you.
There is no thumbnail on the audio clips.
They're just audio.
But I can click and play back and hear it.
All right.
And then, a few different audio selections here.
And then I've got some clips I can look through.
So I'm just going to start looking around, see what I've got here.
And so what should we start with?
Looks like we have this ship taking off.
Cruising down the runway.
Flying over some terrain.
I'm just going to click and drag and skim through this clip very quickly.
Engineer working on it.
More flying.
Uh oh.
That doesn't look good.
All right.
So let's start setting up a story about the hover car taking off,
making a trip, and maybe the--
we don't know what's going to happen.
It could be dramatic ending.
It's the first inaugural flight.
So let's start with it on the ground.
Let's see.
There's a shot with the engineers looking at it.
Let's find that clip.
So my three point editing--
I can skip to this clip real quick.
All right.
I like that moment.
I like the orange jumpsuit here, like, the engineer walks away.
And that signifies he's good to go.
Could've been giving him a thumb's up there.
I'm going to start here.
Play it forward.
But nothing happens in the end of this clip.
So we need to move on to something a little more interesting.
So I'm going to go ahead and just add that to my timeline.
There it is.
Now let's think about what comes next.
If we want to start to tease our audience
and we're building anticipation of what's
going to happen with this flight, maybe we don't know,
the shot of people looking out the window could be interesting.
We've got a whole team of people waiting,
watching, to see what's going to happen.
So let's see what happens with these guys.
Looks like it's a pretty short clip.
I'll go ahead and just put the whole thing in for now.
I'm hitting the A key to drop it down into my timeline.
And so, now, OK, here we go.
We've got the engineer walking away.
Some people looking in anticipation.
Maybe the next thing is having it take off.
I can do that with this one.
There it is.
Anything interesting happen at the end of this clip?
Heads toward us, but not really.
But we know we want to start at the very beginning of this clip.
And then we want to get it lifting off the ground.
OK.
Again, I'm roughing this in at this point.
I'm not worrying about fine tuning.
Hit A to append at the end of my sequence.
This is a big dramatic move.
Maybe I don't go quite that far that fast.
And I'm just clipping around here.
If I was doing this on my own for a real project,
I'd probably sit down, review all these clips,
take notes on what the file names were, and note each one.
But since we're doing this on the fly--
maybe that earlier clip was better, where
it comes cruising down the runway.
All right.
And I like the reveal that happens in this naturally.
Looks like a film artifact here.
But it comes out from behind the tail of the airplane here.
So I'm going to keep that moment in.
I like that.
Reveals that we had success.
Comes cruising by.
And I set my out point.
Append it.
And let's stop and back up for a second and just watch what we've made so far.
We've got our engineer giving the thumb's up.
Guys looking out the window.
All right.
It's not-- how could I heighten the drama here?
Besides music?
I think in this shot, specifically.
We go from people looking out the window.
Maybe we're wondering, is it going to actually get off the ground?
I let it take off right away.
There's not really any waiting.
So maybe I put a little bit of a pause there to extend that for a moment.
So let's go ahead and do that.
And again, I can't pick--
I need to move these two clips to do that.
I can't move them both.
So I need to move them one at a time.
And then I can just drag this out at the beginning.
Or maybe this is the beginning of the clip.
So here's a limitation that I'm hitting.
I just-- I don't have it.
So let me back that up.
Put this back.
Maybe not the smoothest transition.
If I had little more time, I spent some time
finessing and maybe choosing a different shot in between,
but we'll say that's good enough for now.
And then let's go--
we'll get a little bit closer on the pilot here.
I like this shot.
Shows him mastering control of this.
He's flying by some people in the background.
Drop that in.
And then-- should we put the explosion in at the end?
See airplane pieces flying?
Ah, we'll skip it.
OK.
So if we want to add some drama to this--
the whole point of this exercise is actually
a music assignment and how different pieces of music
make it feel differently.
Let's take a listen to what we have here.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DAN COFFEY: It's kind of powerful.
Let's drop that in and see how it feels under our clip.
You can do the same thing.
You can choose in point, out point, and hit append.
And there you are.
Another annoyance of Shotcut is that, right now,
because I don't have an audio track, I can't drop it in the audio track.
So it literally dropped it into the video track as white video.
So I'm going to right click and I'm going to say, Add Audio Track.
All right.
Great.
And so now down here, I can make this window a little bit bigger
by grabbing this handle, I have A1, which is my first audio track.
And I can drag and drop this down here.
If I need to zoom out, I've got the zoom control.
I can come back to the beginning.
Zoom back in.
The plus and minus keys are shortcuts for the zoom control.
Also common in most editors.
And I'm going to drag this audio up to the beginning.
I can see that there's a little gap in between where the audio starts.
I'll just trim that up to.
I will just trim this up to.
Let me show you how to make a split edit or a cut.
So I'm going to put the play head where I want to make the edit.
I make sure that I have the right track selected.
And I hit the S key, or the razor--
it looks like a razor blade-- to split the play head.
And there we go.
Now I can just delete this first part.
And drag that back.
So let's watch this now and see how this feels.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAN COFFEY: A little somber.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
Maybe we get to this point.
The pacing doesn't quite match.
Maybe it's not quite the right piece of music.
Let's see what else we've got.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
All right.
Let's just go ahead, and I'm going to add a new audio track here.
I'm going to just mute the first one and drop this one in.
That takes me to the end, so I'm just going to back up in time.
Make this a little bit bigger.
Hopefully you'll have a little more screen real estate
when you're working on your projects than I do here on my small screen.
All right.
So I've got the first track muted now, so we're not
going to hear that one at all.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
Now what I can do is start to--
let's say that this is the piece of music that I like.
What I can do is start to line up the critical moments.
So at the beginning, starting with the thumbs up.
That lines up OK.
But maybe-- I'll even take this gap out, so that the first time--
or linger on the previous night longer, so
that the first time we see these guys, there's this beat of music
to add some tension to the whole thing.
I'm actually going to take this other audio clip right out, move this one up,
just to keep it easier to see on my screen.
And so, because I want to extend the first clip,
I have to move all these over.
Again, this is just an unfortunate thing in Shotcut
that you can do in most other editors.
And so, I'm going to extend this clip.
And I have a nice visual representation of the wave form here.
Extend this out.
Can't quite get where I want to get.
So I'm going to go ahead and just make a little split, a cut here, and a cut
here.
We'll see if this destroys the feeling.
Remember, you can right click and say Remove, as well.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
And so, maybe I want to actually cut on the second--
whatever.
What's the instrument, Ian?
IAN SEXTON: The horn section?
I don't know.
DAN COFFEY: The horn section.
IAN SEXTON: I'm very bad at music, these things.
DAN COFFEY: Is this going to force me to do a transition,
or is this going to work?
That's going to shorten this clip.
I can see where the horn section comes in.
Drag this one back.
See how we're doing here.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
OK.
So you can see how we're progressing here.
And we're almost out of time.
But that's OK, because we only have one more music sample to take a look at
and see the difference.
But you can see just how quickly just swapping out-- we'll
drop the last one in.
Why not?
We're here.
How quickly and easily you can manipulate your audience's
emotions and feelings by choosing which shot to start with.
Another shortcut for you is hold the Option key and arrow keys,
it'll jump between your edits, so you can quickly navigate your timeline.
Let's hear this one.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[PEACEFUL MUSIC]
[END PLAYBACK]
It doesn't really fit.
Depending on the story you're telling, choosing the right piece of music
can have a really big impact.
So there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can use.
There's no worries in this course, as far as copyright.
We're going to use everything in the context of this class.
So use whatever you like.
And most of our demos will probably be from the public domain.
But I think that is a good place to leave it.
Do you have any--
IAN SEXTON: Yeah, there was one question that
came from online that was asking about how
you might think about telling a story that was nontraditional
in its beginning, middle, and end.
And I think one of the ways that you can think
about doing that is maybe you're inner cutting between two parallel stories.
Parallel editing.
You have two people converging at a central point,
and you're cross cutting between someone traveling there
and another person traveling there.
Or you can use flashbacks, where we start at a position in time
and we flashback to a time previously before that.
Like in Saving Private Ryan.
It's the old man in the cemetery, and we flashback--
and the actual story is about something that happened long before.
And maybe that has a linear component to it.
So there are a variety of different ways that you can approach storytelling
in less this, there's the beginning, the middle, and the end.
You can begin to get creative and rearrange them as you go through.
So just something to add into there.
DAN COFFEY: Great.
IAN SEXTON: Any other questions?
DAN COFFEY: Well, we hope you have fun diving into the first homework
assignment.
We're going to be recording after this lecture a little walk-through on how
to get started, so that'll be posted either tonight or tomorrow morning.
But email us with any questions.
And we'll see you in Zoom next week.