Good article in the Daily Variety this week: “Editors cover tracks with digital tricks”.

When Jean-Luc Godard pronounced, “Cinema is truth at 24 frames a second, and every cut is a lie,” he couldn’t possibly have imagined the tools 21st-century editors would have for bending reality. Thanks to relatively new digital tricks, editors now have more control than ever in altering what the camera captures.

Audiences recognize a fair amount of it, such as greenscreen effects that place actors in imaginary environments. But the degree to which editors can — and do — manipulate the footage might surprise them. Even without making a traditional splice between clips, tech-savvy Avid experts can connect separate pieces of footage, fabricate entire shots and digitally replace body parts from other takes.

Digital editing may seem like a simple matter of conjuring ‘tricks’:

For example, in a back-and-forth office scene between Tom Wilkinson and Tom Cruise from “Valyrie,” Wilkinson’s hand was all over the place — waving a cigarette in the air, on the desk, out of frame entirely. Rather than cutting around it, Ottman simply asked the vfx team to erase the offending arm and superimpose it on the desk, lifting the replacement limb from another shot. “It completely frees the editor to use a take where the performance is terrific but it would have been dumped because of an egregious continuity problem,” he says.

But the possibilities of what editors can do today is exponentially different than their predecessors, capable of changing the mood of an already shot scene in unheard of ways:

Timing is another consideration. In the past, if editors wanted to tighten a dialogue scene, they could remove pauses or entire lines by cutting between the two characters. Now, they can do it within the shot itself — a technique David Fincher‘s editing duo, Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, perfected on “Zodiac.” The film was running long, but it had been shot on digital. “There’s no film scanning, so to split a performance for the right side of the frame against a performance on the left side is a very easy and practical thing to do,” Baxter says.

As long as the camera is locked down, the editors can create an entirely new take, combining the best performance from each actor. Or, as Baxter and Wall discovered on the “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” they can change the dynamic entirely.

During the latenight tea scenes between Brad Pitt and Tilda Swinton, they used split screens in virtually every shot. “In normal life, there’s this natural pace of a second or two for a pause between sentences,” Wall explains. “When those gaps were there, Benjamin became more of a ‘touched’ character, but when you tighten him up, you saw how eager and alive he was.”

Instead of being forced to cut away from the two-shot to over-the-shoulder coverage, the “Button” duo could simply speed up the footage slightly between lines — a process that literally involves accelerating the frame rate.

Have you ever thought about how you ‘edit’ your screenplay when you write it? You choose when, how, and where to enter and exit scenes. When you use Secondary Slugs (Shots), you’re not only ‘directing’ the camera, you’re making a ‘cut’ in the action, from this shot to that. That’s the equivalent of editing.

In fact, one of the best screenwriting books I’ve read is about editing. It’s called “In the Blink of an Eye”, written by one of the great movie editors and sound men in contemporary filmmaking Walter Murch. While it’s interesting and informative to read about Murch’s experiences editing such movies as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Part II, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, what I found most engaging was how Murch grappled with the very concept of an editorial cut, asking why viewers are willing to make the hundreds of ‘jumps’ from one shot to the next when watching a movie. The question baffled him for a long while until he finally zeroed in on a mechanism in the human experience that essentially ‘trains’ people to be comfortable with editorial cuts: Dreams. When we dream, what we often experience is not one dream, but a series of dreams or layers of dreams that we cut together in our mind, give them coherence (or at least try to). Making those jumps from one dream sequence to another prepares us for movies and their myriad of editorial cuts. As screenwriters, we can apply that understanding to our writing as we ‘cut together’ the movie we see in our head and translate that onto the printed page.

For more on Walter Murch, Google has a lecture by Murch at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Those lectures are here and here.

For more on editing, here are some clips from the documentary “The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing.”