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What made me understand the power of editing was the Top Gun Recut trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IK

What made me understand the power of editing was the Top Gun Recut trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA

wmeredith 6y ago
Editing is everything. It literally is what turns footage into cinema. Otherwise you’re just watching a documentary of people playing dress up and pretend. That’s why there was such an outcry recently when the Academy discussed movie the Oscar for Best Editing out of the main broadcast and into the second tier awards they do off the air. It makes sense when you come at it with the mindset that no one cares about editors. But much less so when you actually understand cinematography and movie making.
dredmorbius 6y ago
I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between facts and narrative. This puts a rainbow-coloured bow on it. Facts are events. Narrative is the relationships between those events. Unconnected data vs. an interconnected graph, individual nodes vs. integrated network. It's possible to take the same facts (or a small sample of them, as here) and create an entirely different story. Or at least the appearance of one. A recut trailer might be sustained by recutting the film as a whole, or not. The Maverick-Iceman romance ... probably ... wouldn't be sustained without a fair bit of extra (or previously cut) footage, but there's definitely enough to cast a trailer-length spell. Good narratives address more of the facts, concisely and with few contradictions, loose ends, or holes Something often missing even in officially released films.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  facts vs narrative, from a journalistic POV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477 autogenic narrative via pure juxtaposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect Edit: before deepfakes, we had to make edits like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmLPhx6N8Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmLPhx6N8Vc
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Appreciated. Before make edits we had Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” More generally known as Cardinal Richelieu.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Having been wondering if it were he or Dumas who came up with that line, I found: https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 but a quick perusal of de Motteville's bio suggests she had been exiled from court at Richelieu's behest, so she may not exactly be a disinterested observer, but was probably very aware of court politics in the years before her arrival. For what it's worth, I haven't been able to find (Isaac de?) "Laffemas" via full-text search of any of the scans of her memoires I've turned up. (Two of them I searched for "innocent", a word seemingly rare in court memoirs, but no luck there either.) Gallica has a much longer scan (about 50% more pages) but it doesn't seem to have been OCR'ed, and I'm not going to manually check 630pp.
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        Wikiquote also notes dispute: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu

What made me understand the power of editing was the Top Gun Recut trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA

wmeredith 6y ago

Editing is everything. It literally is what turns footage into cinema. Otherwise you’re just watching a documentary of people playing dress up and pretend. That’s why there was such an outcry recently when the Academy discussed movie the Oscar for Best Editing out of the main broadcast and into the second tier awards they do off the air. It makes sense when you come at it with the mindset that no one cares about editors. But much less so when you actually understand cinematography and movie making.

dredmorbius 6y ago

I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between facts and narrative. This puts a rainbow-coloured bow on it. Facts are events. Narrative is the relationships between those events. Unconnected data vs. an interconnected graph, individual nodes vs. integrated network. It's possible to take the same facts (or a small sample of them, as here) and create an entirely different story. Or at least the appearance of one. A recut trailer might be sustained by recutting the film as a whole, or not. The Maverick-Iceman romance ... probably ... wouldn't be sustained without a fair bit of extra (or previously cut) footage, but there's definitely enough to cast a trailer-length spell. Good narratives address more of the facts, concisely and with few contradictions, loose ends, or holes Something often missing even in officially released films.

082349872349872 6y ago
facts vs narrative, from a journalistic POV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477 autogenic narrative via pure juxtaposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect Edit: before deepfakes, we had to make edits like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmLPhx6N8Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmLPhx6N8Vc
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Appreciated. Before make edits we had Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” More generally known as Cardinal Richelieu.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Having been wondering if it were he or Dumas who came up with that line, I found: https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 but a quick perusal of de Motteville's bio suggests she had been exiled from court at Richelieu's behest, so she may not exactly be a disinterested observer, but was probably very aware of court politics in the years before her arrival. For what it's worth, I haven't been able to find (Isaac de?) "Laffemas" via full-text search of any of the scans of her memoires I've turned up. (Two of them I searched for "innocent", a word seemingly rare in court memoirs, but no luck there either.) Gallica has a much longer scan (about 50% more pages) but it doesn't seem to have been OCR'ed, and I'm not going to manually check 630pp.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Wikiquote also notes dispute: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu