In the Blink of an Eye, 2nd Edition: A PerspectIve on Film Editing

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Removing Redundancy: Cutting out repetitive scenes, dialogue, or descriptions that don't add to the story. Redundancies can slow down the pace and bore the audience. Originally published in 1992, a decent portion of the In the Blink of An Eye text is devoted to Murch’s opinion on film vs digital and his literal process for working on different film cutting machines.

In 1985 he directed his only feature film, Return to Oz, which he co-wrote with Gill Dennis. After the film failed at the box office and displeased many critics with its dark tone and themes, he never directed another film. It’s just one of those books that touches on timeless topics that will never grow old. It’s a series of short essays, and it’s a fun read even for people who prefer audiobooks.

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Murch married Muriel Ann "Aggie" Slater at Riverside Church, New York City on August 6, 1965. Directly after marrying, the couple took a motorcycle trip across the United States. Since 1972, they have lived in Bolinas, California and have four children: Walter Slater Murch, Beatrice Louise Murch, Carrie Angland and Connie Angland. [13] [30] Filmography [ edit ] Feature films [ edit ] Year In 2007 the documentary Murch premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival, which centered on Murch and his thoughts on filmmaking. [22]

Karen Baker Landers, Per Hallberg, Steve Cantamessa, Scott Millan, Greg Orloff and Bob Beemer (2004) We are told to bear in mind that seeing a film on a big screen is more immersive than seeing it on a two foot wide screen, and more detail will be seen in a big picture; at the same time, readily available screen time means that people can watch a film over and again, seeing new nuances and character aspects. Murch’s theory on why humans accept the cut of a movie so naturally is that it mimics our dreams. In the dream state, random combinations of images are juxtaposed next to each other and we are conditioned to accept this form of information transferral. Therefore, editing a movie is essentially finding the rhythm of thought. Why do cuts work? The instantaneous displacement achieved by the cut is not anything that we experience in ordinary life. The images in dreams are much more fragmented, intersecting in much stranger and more abrupt ways than the images of waking reality. We accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams. There may be a part of our walking reality where we actually do experience something like cuts, the blinking of our eyes. The blink interrupts the apparent visual continuity of our perceptions. People don't blink in continuous intervals, depending on the grip of a thought. People blink to segregate thoughts if multiple tend to be happening at the same time. The blink is more geared to the emotional state, nature, and frequency of our thoughts, than to the atmospheric environment. A blink could happen in real life, where a cut could happen in a film. An idea, or a linked sequence of ideas. We blink to separate and punctuate the ideas. Similarly, in films, a cut is made where we want to bring an idea to end and start something new. The cut by itself does not create the blink moment, but if the cut is well-placed, the more the effect of the punctuation will be. Nominated — Academy Award for Best Film Editing with Gerald B. Greenberg, Lisa Fruchtman and Richard MarksAnd when you make a film, you are trying to learn a foreign language—it just happens to be a unique language that is only spoken by this one film. If you have to articulate everything, as you do with a ran-dom-access system like video/computer or Moviola/ assistant, you are limited by what and how much you can articulate and how good your original notes were. Whereas the advantage of the KEM’s linear system is that I do not always have to be speaking to it—there are times when it speaks to me. The system is constantly presenting things for consideration, and a sort of dialogue takes place. I might say, “I want to see that close-up of Teresa, number 317, in roll 45.” But I’ll put that roll on the machine, and as I spool down to number 317 (which may be hundreds of feet from the start), the machine shows me everything at high speed down to that point, saying in effect: “How about this instead? Or this?” And I find, more often than not, long before I get down to shot 317, that I’ve had three other ideas triggered by the material that I have seen flashing by me.” The first edition was published in 1995. The second edition, which accommodates for developments in digital editing, was published in 2001. Due to this, their opinion is powerful and useful as for examples, the director, will often remember it differently. They ‘see’ what they saw on the day. The mountain vista. The sunset in the distance. But in reality this wasn’t all captured. This gives the editor freedom as they are don’t feel that certain shots must go into due to the difficulty or cost of the image, merely what is creatively useful and interesting. 🔮 Scenes Create Themselves In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. [31] p. 55 So, instead of fixing the scene itself, you might clarify some exposition that happens five minutes earlier. Don’t necessarily operate on the elbow: instead, discover if nerves are being pinched somewhere else. But the audience will never tell you that directly. They will simply tell you where the pain is, not the source of the pain.