“What is every good film comprised of? Well, it’s just a series of scenes.” The essence of a compelling film lies in its scenes. Without adept scene editing skills, crafting a captivating film becomes a daunting task. And yet, you might be wondering, “Is he going to delve into the art of documentary again rather than discussing it?” Let’s dive right into it.
Scenes serve as the fundamental building blocks of films, dictating the narrative progression from start to finish. It’s imperative for aspiring video editors to grasp the pivotal role scenes play in shaping cinematic experiences.
While montages hold allure with their fast-paced, music-infused sequences, relying solely on them can undermine character development and emotional depth. Building scenes provides a more nuanced approach to storytelling.
We’ll dissect scenes from both macro and micro viewpoints. Macro analysis focuses on the overarching story arc, while micro analysis delves into the intricacies of individual scenes.
Understanding Scene Intention: Scenario and Emotional Aspects
Each scene serves a distinct purpose, whether in advancing the plot or conveying emotional nuances. Understanding the intention behind each scene is crucial for effective storytelling.
Nearly nine out of ten scenes aim to propel the story forward or provide essential information to the audience. Striking a balance between progression scenes and information scenes is vital to maintain narrative cohesion.
Crafting Scenes with Intention
The key to effective scene-building lies in understanding the intention behind each scene. Whether it’s advancing the plot or evoking emotional resonance, clarity of intention is paramount.
Contrast breeds engagement. Maintaining variety in scene construction ensures audience interest remains piqued throughout the film, preventing narrative stagnation.
The Four Elements of Scene Building: Intro, Setup, Punchline, and Out
Scenes follow a structured formula akin to stand-up comedy, comprising distinct elements such as the intro, setup, punchline, and out. Mastery of these elements is essential for crafting engaging scenes.
Once the scene’s intention is fulfilled, swift exit is imperative. Lingering unnecessarily can dilute the scene’s impact. Precision in execution ensures narrative fluidity.
Even in preliminary editing stages, adherence to scene-building principles is paramount. An example scene from a documentary illustrates the foundational elements essential for narrative coherence.
What is every good film comprised of? Well, it’s just a series of scenes. And so if you don’t know how to edit a scene, you’re probably not going to have a good film. And you’re probably also thinking, Oh, is he going to start talking about art of documentary again rather than talking about it? I’m just going to show you it.
We have a full video today about editing scenes, and this is taken from our new course, the perfect Cut. We have a secret weapon today. Lewis Gordon, he’s created this entire course. It’s 50 videos and he’s talking about how to edit scenes. He does a deep dive into this. Lewis has a special type of humor that he’s introduced into this.
I think anyone who is ever going to edit any sort of video should watch this because scenes are the building blocks of your films. So I’m going to shut up and just let Lewis take this one away. It’s not going to be me today, but enjoy this. This is one of 50 videos from the perfect Cut Our New Course launching on March 13th.
So enjoy having trouble putting that scene together. Sorry, do I. Do I know you? I said, are you having trouble putting that scene together? I mean, yeah, it’s just a bunch of these, like, shots and they’re all jumbled together and just kind of mess with the. You should call that timeline. What should they call this timeline? They should call that timeline a crime scene.
Okay. Let’s talk about scenes here. So in this video and actually this entire chapter, we’re going to be talking about scenes and why do scenes matter? Well, when you think about it, your entire film is just a collection of scenes strung together in a very distinct order that tell your story from beginning to the middle to the end.
I think on a deeper level, though, why it’s important for documentary editors to understand how to build out scenes is that it’s critical that we do aim to build out scenes in our films. I think far too often with documentaries, you see, the instant reflex is to create montages that have some kind of video underneath it that tells the story.
And that’s honestly my gut instinct too. Who doesn’t like to build a montage out? It’s fun. You add some music, fast paced. It’s what you know, editing is all about. The issue with montages is that they hold up for only a very short amount of time. It’s really easy to burn out your audience with too long of a montage or too many montages strung together, and it’s really difficult to dry out things like character development, to dry out the emotional aspects of a story solely through montages strung together.
And unless you are someone like Baz Luhrmann, I would strongly advise you to intend to build as many scenes as you can and only rely on montage at very specific moments. So let’s just assume that you’re not Baz Luhrmann. Let’s assume that Baz Luhrmann is not watching this video. And let’s break down scenes. We’re going to look at scenes from two very distinct points of view in this video.
The first point of view is macro, and the second point of view is micro. By macro, I mean let’s look at scenes from a bird’s eye point of view. How do scenes stack up and create things like story arc? How can we use that to our advantage? By micro, I mean the actual nuts and bolts of a scene.
How should you go about building a scene from the various shots, from the various bits of information you have in front of you in your footage? And that really weird intro that I put on this video actually has a purpose. It’s called Educational Content. I wanted to educate you on what a good dad joke looks like. Just kidding.
We’ll be talking about it a bit later, looking at how that scene was built and why I built it the way that I did. So let’s take a look at the macro point of view of scenes, and we’ve already kind of been through this before when talking about story arc and doing that cue cards exercise. But I think the magic word that we’re going to come back to is the word intention.
When you’re stacking your scenes on a story arc, it’s very important that you understand what the intention of each scene is supposed to be. And I think there’s different types of intention in a scene. There’s the intention of the scenario. So what physically happens in your scene? And then there’s also the intention of the underlying message or the emotional aspects of your scene and of the story that you’re trying to tell.
And to add to that point, I’m going to throw your way some pseudo mathematics here. This is this is not a verified statistic, but I think nine of ten scenes are trying to progress the story or they’re trying to offer the audience information that is integral to the understanding of the story, of things like character, of things like emotional messaging on something like this.
Kenya Doc I would say those progression scenes are the scenes in which we show Wesley going on all of these different training runs. He wakes up in the morning, we see that it’s a brand new day. He goes on a run. We’re not really seeing anything different in these runs, but what we’re supposed to know is audience members is that there’s been a passage of time and that lets us exploit other things through video.
We can kind of go into his mind, offer a little bit of introspection, but in terms of the scenario that’s unfolding, we are really just aiming to see that progress, that forward motion in the story in terms of information scenes, I would point to those big scenes, the scenes where he comes home and we learn about his emotional reaction to coming home or the scenes where he’s running in the Houston marathon and we’re finding out what happened in that marathon.
And then in the ensuing scenes, we’re finding out how he feels about how the Houston marathon went. And so when we’re doing exercises like writing each scene down on a cue card and putting it on a Bristol board and trying to figure out what that forward momentum is, it’s really important that we know the intention of the scene.
Is it progress scene or an information scene? Because then we can separate them and make sure that there’s not too many information scenes coming in a row or not too many progress scenes coming in a row. I’ve said this before, that contrast creates focus. You don’t want all of your scenes to have similar intention because that’s how a story gets stale or monotonous.
You need to keep that variety in there so that the audience is learning and witnessing different things, but also that they don’t know what’s coming around the corner. It keeps them guessing, it keeps them interested in the story that’s unfolding. And to use a very tired cliche, but I think it applies to this variety is the spice of life.
If you want to keep your life spicy, offer some variety in your stories right? So now let’s try to take a look at scenes from a micro point of view. Let’s see what’s actually happening on the ground level in each one of these isolated scenes in filmmaking scenes kind of sort of have a formula. There’s at least a formula to your standard scene.
And part of the fun of scene building is understanding that standard formula and then playing with it over time. And I think that was key to my understand ing of scenes and how scenes develop is not through film, but it was actually by learning about stand up comedy and sketch comedy. I think Big Foot is blurry. That’s the problem.
It’s not the photographer’s fault. Big Foot is blurry. And that’s extra scary to me because there’s a large, out-of-focus monster. I think that stand up comedians are among the best writers in terms of storytellers. They have to know how to transmit information to an audience in a really entertaining way. But then there needs to be that joke at the end.
They need to build to something and it needs to hit. And so let’s look at the elements of scenes from the perspective of a comedy writer, and there’s four elements to every scene. There’s the intro, there’s the set up, there’s the punch line, or what they sometimes call the button, and then there’s the out. And now to use an example of what these four elements look like in a scene of a film, let’s take a look at one of the worst jokes around.
Let’s break open the intro to this video and take a look at how I developed this scene, thinking about the elements of a standup comedians. CRAFT So in case you’ve maybe forgotten about this scene, you might have done it on purpose, which I don’t blame you. If that’s the case, here’s how the scene played out. We have editor I don’t know who that could be.
Clearly struggling with their edit random hunk shows up at the door. He’s got kind of a joke in his head to stupid joke though he finally hits that joke, he hits the punchline and then we get our out. And the out here is also a bit tied to the punchline, but that’s the end of the scene. So these purple clips right here, I would suggest are part of the establishing most scenes in film.
Start with what’s called an establishing shot. That’s your wide shot. It’s very quickly supposed to give you all of the information on the setting that this scene takes place. Very clearly in this establishing shot, we see our editor, we see the edit that he’s working on. We know that he’s a video editor. We also have that information ahead of time that he’s probably a video editor because he looks a lot like a video editor.
You may know, we can clearly see it’s his office. It’s his editing suite. And then we also see very clearly on the left here an open door. And that open door is key because that’s where a lot of the action happens. Some of this action wouldn’t really make sense if we didn’t see that door very clearly from the first shot.
Side note, let’s also keep in mind that this this was made with education in mind framing, shot selection, maybe not the best. I did this all myself, but anyway, yeah, let’s just look at this for educational purposes. So another key part of the establishing is really making sure that the audience sees that this is an edit in progress and can hint at the fact that this person is struggling.
You can hear all the clicks when you’re editing and you’re trying to build out a scene that might not have been shot as intentionally as this. You’re looking through the footage and you see a nice wide shot, or you look at a shot that explains very quickly all the information you need to know to select that footage, put it into your sequence and start building around it.
That’s a good hint for you that you may be able to use this as some kind of an establishing. It might bring us into this story. Now, these blue clips that you see here are all a part of the setup and they’re all medium shots. The content of it doesn’t really matter that much. There are some lines that I took out.
What matters is that they’re building on this establishing and the important thing is that we feel like it is progressing to something. It’s progressing to the punchline in this case. And the punchline is another word for the intention. The intention of the scene, the intention of any joke is to bring you to that punchline and smack you on the side of the head and say, this was the point of the joke, this was the point of the scene.
And so in this case, the green clip is to signify where that punch line is, where that button is. In this one clip, it becomes pretty obvious what the point of the scene is, is to deliver this sort of dad joke, but also doing it in a very David Caruso CSI Miami way. So the question becomes, Alex, was the mob sent to draw us to the crime scene was sent to destroy it.
When you see me put the sunglasses on. I mean, when you see this, honk at the door, put the sunglasses on. It’s kind of a key to aha, That’s that’s what it is. This reminds me of Caruso from CSI and then this pink clip is really an extension. It’s it’s reaffirming that intention, the punchline. You get it now.
And as soon as you get it, we are out. That’s the really important thing I find when you’re building a scene. We do all of these tricks to understand what the intention of your scene as you’re building the scene, you finally get to that point where the scenes intention is hit. And then I see in a lot of scenes we kind of linger there.
You kind of stick around. For some reason, the character keeps on talking. The conversation continues. I suggest that once you get to that point of intention, get out of the scene as fast as possible. There are some pacing moments that might be necessary, you know, in Clear Sky, for example, there were a lot of scenes where he would say something or something would register that was really impactful and we would put a shot of him just thinking how to end the scene.
But as soon as that thinking shot sunk in with the audience, we were out and on to the next scene. It’s a lot like a joke. There’s nothing worse than that person who hits the punch line of their joke. And then they keep going, They keep going, keep going. They try to build on that joke more and it just doesn’t hit.
I should know best because I am the king of doing that. I never know when a joke is over, but when I’m editing, luckily I know when the intention of a scene has been hit and I know when to move on from there. It took me some time, but now I know, baby, now I know. And so to just build on that a little bit, let’s take a look at an isolated scene from an early assembly of the Wesley CAPTA Short doc that I’ve been working on.
And keep in mind, this is just an assembly. This is very early on in the editing process, but even at this early stage in a scene, I’m going to have those four elements set up for me and over time I’m going to shape them a little bit more and work around them. But even from an early stage, those are the foundations that I’m looking to have visually in any scene.
That’s what I’m trying to build out. So right here we’re picking up this is a new setting that we’re introducing. We’re meeting Wesley at his home in Flagstaff, Arizona. This is a very brief scene. Let me just play it back for you and then we can go over the elements.
When I was still back home, I was seeing friends while I was at the country and they were like, you know, life is different out there. And I was just imagining if I would be in the same situation one day. But and now I can’t believe like, I’m like I’m a professional. I’m it wasn’t hard to find Wesley.
Wesley was very good at the NCAA level, winning a national title indoors, being runner up at NCAA Cross Country, the kind of things you’re looking for when you’re building a pro team and see. So as we can see here, we’re picking up with Wesley in Flagstaff, Arizona. We have a text card right up here that just shows us at Flagstaff.
We came from the future, actually. We were in the Houston marathon two months later. That’s where we were previously. And now we’re just picking up. We have our nice wide establishing shot. We’re showing Wesley’s house. It’s reasonably small house. We can see everything. We can see all of these running shoes on the right here, huh? I wonder what his profession is.
And then we’re going to come in, continue from this shot, and show that he is making chai. And Chai is like basically the morning drink of Kenya. It is there. They’re coffee or at least for Wesley, it is reminding him of home. You can actually see this wristband that he has on that has the Kenyan colors on it.
It has Wesley’s name on it as well. So that’s like another little bit of information that we’re giving the audience. Who knows? He’s going to pick up on that. But it is nice to have that there. And now obviously underneath we’re hearing his video he’s talking about now I’m here, you know, never in the past where I think that I would be here in America now I’m finally here.
I can’t believe it. And so we feel like the scene is progressing. The action is progressing. We’re we’re progressing to something. The setup is continuing. We’re about to hit that final intention soon, and we’re about to hear it right here. I’m a professional. I’m he can’t believe it. He’s finally a professional runner. And with that, with these two shots, we are now out of the scene.
We’re presuming he’s putting his shoes on to leave the house. He’s gone. We’re getting a little bit more information. We haven’t introduced his little baby yet, but we’ll come back to that later. You get you’re picking up a little bit of information on the way out the door. And then this video here from his coach. You might think that that was the scene progressing.
But really what we’re doing is we’re just tying that into the out. It’s helping us transition from scene to scene. We’re leaving out the door with this little shot of all of his awards. And then by the time we hit this shot of his coach, we are completely out of the scene. But that transition has done a nice job of tricking us in a way, making it feel a bit more smooth.
And then when he picks up outside here, we are fully out of the scene. We’re in something right brand new. We’ll be talking about transitions. Those are key. But even in this little short scene, we have all four of those elements that we just discussed.
