I would say that all popularised 3D film technologies would be more accurately described as two and a half D. It’ll be a while before we’ll be editing “film in the round.” However, until then, my friend Jean has sent me an interesting document from IMAX on what to bear in mind when editing IMAX 3D (the IMAX format is known as ’15/70′):

Some editors screen all the footage in 35mm, sitting very close to the screen and concentrating hard — a demanding method, as the two formats look radically different. If something looks questionable, they order a 70mm print of that footage. Some print and screen their rough cut in 15/70. But, as Andy Gellis has observed, “If the film is working well on the Avid, then it will work like gangbusters on the big screen, as long as you calculate or calibrate the shot durations correctly. The brain can’t absorb the overload of information on the IMAX screen as readily as it can on the video monitor.”

Video will not give you an adequate impression of how the footage will look on the giant screen. For instance, if the eye has to move too far across the scene, a cut won’t work as well. Or in 3D, if the depth cues in successive shots aren’t similar then the brain will have difficulty fusing the left eye and right eye images. You may not recognize a spectacular 15/70 shot when seen in video. For these reasons, some video editors will rely more heavily on their 35mm printdowns, and selective contact printing of 70mm footage.

Occasionally, the reverse may be true. Stephen Low finds that “when you need to bamboozle the audience for a second to make a cut work and there’s something distracting on the edge, sometimes 15/70 is more forgiving than small formats, because (in 2D) you’re not as aware of the edges. A bad cut in 35mm or on video may be all right for the giant screen because peripheral vision is nowhere near as important, and the audience is more focused on the centre. And in IMAX Dome theatres, you’re not at all aware of the edge of the screen.”

Notes editor Barb Kerr: “You have to be even kinder to the audience in 3D, because their eyes are really focused deeply inside the picture. If you change the focal plane to something essentially above the head of the person in front of them in the theatre, you have to set them up to make that shift or it can be completely baffling or hurt them.”

From The 15/70 Filmmaker’s Manual from the IMAX site

I see in Gizmodo that Japanese researchers have found a way of heating the oxygen and nitrogen in the air to create plasma balls in mid-air. This may be the first baby-step towards true 3-D projection.

I wonder what cuts will feel like in 3D films. What would editing conversations be like? How would you direct a person’s attention from one person to another? What if your films will need to be presented in the round? Would would a car chase be like? Or a space battle?

We know where people will be looking when we have a 2D canvas to work with. How long before we learn where people will look at 3D films? I imagine that we will have longer shots. We’ll need time for people’s eyes to move to the new point of focus. Editors thought the same when widescreen formats were introduced in the 50s. How long before audiences will become ‘literate’ in this new visual language?

The first to know the answer wins a prize!

One of the things I used to look forward to be about being an editor was knowing the art of being an ambassador. You start as a translator, but as you get to know the other worlds with which you must interact, experience makes you an ambassador. I had this romantic notion that the editor sits mid-way between the worlds of ‘Story’ and ‘Commerce’ in the land of ‘Technology.’

Sometimes the ways of Commerce need to be explained to the world of Story. Sometimes the truth about Technology needs to be understood by Commerce. I thought that the editor should be prepared to think like the director when debating with the producer and vice versa. I now see that there’s no time for this sort of debate. The editor is there to implement the director’s vision using technology in order for the producer to reach the audience they want.

Editors need to understand the way directors see the film, producers see the film and what is possible to implement with the given technology.

I’m still interested in the combination of story, commerce and technology. I suppose all descisions made on a film will be influenced by at least one of these ingredients…

So having switched my reel to one with examples from drama productions, I gave a copy to my mother. When I next talked to my father, he mentioned my new reel. He was a little unsure about how his opinion would be received. “I’m not sure what this is. It’s some scenes from films. What did you do?”

A real compliment! All my parents saw was a scene from a mainstream comedy, a couple of indie movies and a documentary short. They couldn’t tell what I’d done. From their point of view, the reel scenes look ‘real.’ That’s what I was hoping for – that they were smoothly-edited enough that they didn’t notice an edit that was out of place.

For someone who isn’t in the business of hiring an editor, my demo reel is a little boring. I’ve shown it to a few people already. Once they finish watching, I like to explain a little about what I added to the process: “The first scene was originally six minutes long – made up of takes selected from eight different setups. I cut out the jokes that didn’t work. I added one… The third scene was made up of a single ten minute improvised shot of three people around a table – I cut the shot up to make it seem as if there were multiple takes of more than one setup… etc.”

My friend Donna suggested adding a short doc featuring me saying this accompanied by footage explaining my points. Even if people don’t need to know the background behind the work, they would be introduced to me as a person. My voice (and possibly my picture) might give people an idea of what it might be like to work with me – an important element of choosing who to work with. I haven’t decided yet whether this is a good idea yet.

Another idea would be to make a short montage that combines a much larger range of my work into a minute – accompanied to a piece of jaunty music…

…for now, I’m proud of my boring reel.

A couple of years ago, my good friend Laura gave me a birthday present. A present she thought might inspire me, but she wasn’t sure. It was Movie Mistakes by Jon Sandys. It is the book version of moviemistakes.com.

I think that this sort of site/book is a back-handed compliment to the art of editing. The kinds of mistake listed here are the ones you can guess: continuity (cigarettes jumping from hand to hand, getting longer and shorter between shots, food vanishing), anachronisms (visible edges of sets, visible crew) and many more.

I think that most contributors to the site and readers of the book think that the film makers managed to make these films without knowing the mistakes they were making, and that they would have fixed them if they knew. I guess that over 90% of the ‘mistakes’ found were well known to the people on set and to the editorial team.

The trick is to know what people are going to notice. There’s no point spending extra time and money fixing things that will only be spotted my the 0.1% of your audience who will be stepping through your film a frame at a time. As long as you know where people will be looking, you can have almost anything elsewhere in the frame – people aren’t going to see it. Also, if the emotion created by the writers, director and actors is compelling enough, the audience will forgive anything.

There are many elements that help make the edit between two shots invisible: consistency of emotion, the story advancing with the next piece of information, the rhythmic timing of the edit (the edit at that point feels ‘right’), knowing that if something vanishes that the eyes of the audience need time to find the next point of interest in the scene, that the composition of the shot on the screen doesn’t cause a jump cut (cutting to a shot that is too similar to the previous one), that people or objects in a scene don’t jump to a different position in the 3D space of the scene (continuity problems).

In In the Blink of An Eye by Walter Murch, he lists these elements in the same order as elements to consider when choosing when to cut and what to cut to. He gives (slightly arbitrary) percentage priorities to each element to show their relative importance: Emotion (51%), Story (23%), Rhythm (10%), Eye trace (7%), shot composition (5%) and 3D continuity (4%).

This shows that the emotions engendered by performance is worth more than all the other elements combined. That means, preserve the emotional line above all else. Neophyte editors take most pleasure in finding elements in each take that let them do continuity matches. According to experienced editors, continuity is the element that will be least noticed by an audience.

Cut for performance, not continuity.