11 ms·

Why “Whiplash” Won an Oscar for Best Editing

130 points by soneca 11y ago

azhenley 11y ago
Cached: http://goo.gl/6AYpQd http://goo.gl/6AYpQd
miles932 11y ago
I loved this movie, and immediately commented to a few movie-buff friends of mine that I was certain that they'd get an oscar for the sound editing. The actual movie edit was artful and amazing, but the sound edit.. talk about meticulous.. every single drum hit?! Called it! http://www.nabshow.com/thought-gallery/oscar-winner-ben-wilkins-whiplash%E2%80%99s-audio-mix-edit http://www.nabshow.com/thought-gallery/oscar-winner-ben-wilk...
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Sorry to be pedantic, but Whiplash won the Academy award for best sound mixing; the award for best sound editing went to American Sniper. Mixing involves the spatial and tonal quality of the sound; editing the temporal and semantic quality. But either way yes, it is very meticulous, and I think you'd be even more shocked to look at the project files, because each individual sound you hear in a film often involves multiple layers of sound or multiple treatments of a single source sound through different mix busses. As a rule of thumb there are bout 10 edits on the sound track for every cut you see on screen. Thankfully there are some tools available to partially automate the process, but in the it requires a huge amount of work and near-endless reserves of patience. Source: movie sound is what I (mostly) do for a living, though I haven't won an Acamdemy award for it.
  - superdude 11y ago
    "Mixing involves the spatial and tonal quality of the sound; editing the temporal and semantic quality." What does that even mean? I thought sound editing was the creation of all the sounds and sound effects, and mixing was the mixing.
    - superuser2 11y ago
      Sound editors are responsible what to include in the track and when, sometimes much more or less than what the mics on set picked up. Sound mixers are like sound engineers in the rest of the business, crafting relative levels, dynamics, tonal transformations like EQ, and spatial transformations like reverb.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      The same thing you said, though in a more abstract way. By temporal I mean where they go on the timeline, and by semantic I mean the content of the sound. Much of the time what you hear simply matches what you see on the screen, either from production sound or from a sound effects library or by a foley artist, eg if you see a glass bottle smash on the floor you will probably just use a natural sound for that. But then you have to look at what it means in the context of the story - suppose the bottle is being smashed on the floor by an alcoholic who has finally decided to fight his addiction? You migh choose to emphasize that with music, or you might emphasize it by layering in other sounds from elsewhere in the soundtrack or some purely expressionistic sound like a heavy lock opening. Also, you'll frequently use sound to speed up or slow down the action by transitioning into the next scene before or after the camera cut. Mixing involves setting the levels of the different sounds, but it also includes some decisions about how the sound moves, what sort of reverb and coloration are used (spatial) and how it's balanced against the music, how it's EQed (tonal). Hope that helps.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Have there been blinded tests done to gauge audience impact? I hobbied a bit with sound and when I see, for instance, the result of "professional mastering" side by side, I've often thought the pre-mastering version was better. No doubt this isn't always the case, but it makes me wonder. Especially given how much myth and superstition seems to happen in audio, even coming from pros. Not to come across as rude - I'm just ignorant and curious.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      Not really. There are some loudness measuring standards and conventions about the 'right' level for dialog vs peak volume, but really it's down to the combined tastes of the mixing engineers, the director, and the producer, with the latter having priority. Thus there are fads about particular sounds (eg notice how every big exposion in a sci-fi film now is announced with the same falling sub bass sound...) and pressure to push the volume envelope on action pictures (Michael Bay is notorious for this sensory overload approach to both picture and sound).
  - miles932 11y ago
    Wow! I was instantly sure that this came down to someone at some DAW making a few million little tweaks on individual drum hits... Thanks for the correction and the detail!
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      Oh I think it amounts to the same thing. Automation can help but it's fundamentally painstaking stuff. As a general example, imagine someone walking down the street, but you don't like the original recording for some reason and decide to replace it. All the footsteps have to be matched up and that's tedious. There are plugins that will match the peak sounds of one recording to another to save you aligning every footstep (or word if you're replacing dialog) but you often end up having to do things by hand. Then if it's one person alone the footsteps may sound too simple so you need to add some fabric swish for their clothes. Or if it's two people, you need to have two different sets of footsteps which is really really annoying. Three people walking is fine because nobody can keep up with that so you can completely fudge the timing and nobody will notice. The big challenge in movie sound is not to distract from what's going on in the story, which often means throwing away sounds that are present in the real environment but with are excluded by the picture frame, and whose presence thus becomes confusing to the audience because they don't know where the sound is coming from. I hate shooting in restaurants for example, because most restaurants have very loud refrigerators and of course most of them can't be switched off for food safety reasons. When you eat dinner don't notice this because there's music, other diners, maybe the person(s) you went to have dinner with, and the sound of your own body chewing and swallowing - so your brain just filters all the background noise away and lets you focus on the conversation or whatever. But when you watch the same thing on a screen, your brain is like 'what's that big machine noise? why does the lead actress sound like a farm animal? why is it all so echoey?' Total nightmare :-) I haven't seen Whiplash yet but I'm looking forward to it.
sharkweek 11y ago
Interesting article - I am always curious how the psychology behind the edits subconsciously plays into my understanding of, and feelings toward, character dynamics. For those who haven't seen it, Whiplash is my favorite movie of the past several years. The "third act" is probably the most intense finale I've seen in quite some time as well. Highly recommended to anyone, musical background or not.
- bedhead 11y ago
  I am generally a movie curmudgeon with a high bar. I got it as an iTunes rental for a long flight. iTunes only gives you 24 hours once you press play. I watched it three times before expiring.
  - ectoplasm 11y ago
    What else do you like you as much as this?
    - bedhead 11y ago
      Spinal Tap. Point Break. Sneakers. Primer.
      - ectoplasm 11y ago
        Cool, agree on the first two, will have to rewatch Sneakers, haven't seen Primer. Here are some of my favorites: Kramer vs. Kramer, High Noon, Groundhog Day, Leon: The Professional. High Noon in particular is told in real time so it has this intense feeling like Whiplash.
        bedhead 11y ago
        Sneakers is wildly entertaining on many levels. Plus it was an early hacker movie which was cool. Primer is trippy, one of those rare movies where you will instantly watch it again after the first viewing. Then you'll google the plot and read for an hour and watch it a third time in the same day. It works though.
flashman 11y ago
Site is down, here's an Internet Archive mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20150520140301/http://williamdickersonfilmmaker.com/why-whiplash-won-an-oscar-for-best-editing/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150520140301/http://williamdick...
swagv 11y ago
Well there's a false headline. Oscar winning is the story of people, not of objective criteria.
- sp332 11y ago
  The article is a story.
reagency 11y ago
That article illustrates the maxim that writing about music is like dancing about architecture
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
knucklesandwich 11y ago
I really enjoyed this movie, but I also feel like it was a Rorschach test for sociopathy. What you come away with at the end of this movie kind of says a lot about you as a person.
- ojbyrne 11y ago
  I felt like it was more of an attempt at justifying sociopathy, or at least exploring the impulse towards it. The movie essentially argues that greatness comes from external pressure, from being pushed beyond your limits.
dreamcompiler 11y ago
I thoroughly despised this movie. To me it felt like a celebration of a sadistic abuser mind-raping a kid, and never being punished for it. No music teacher I know would have gotten away with what Fletcher did without going to jail. This is not how you teach jazz. This is not how you teach anything.
- deadlysyntax 11y ago
  A film about sadistic behaviour isn't necessarily a celebration of it.
  - sofal 11y ago
    It set up a false dichotomy between being abusive to students in order to achieve excellence and softballing them with praise so they'll never work hard. Most people I've talked to bought into this dichotomy after watching this movie, thinking that there is some kind of tradeoff between greatness and abusiveness. The movie legitimizes this false dichotomy, not by condoning the abuse, but by implying that it is the unfortunate price of greatness. Whether or not this was the intended message, it seems to have been the message that most people I've talked to have internalized from it.
    - __P 11y ago
      While you are right it is a false dichotomy. It isn't completely made up either. Greatness can (often) be achieved through abusively pushing someone to their limits... Like most elite sports athletes... Am I way off base thinking this?
      - AceJohnny2 11y ago
        You would like Frank Herbert's books: Dune, Dosadi... It's weird how most of his books have as a common element exactly that: suffering leads to greatness (the Fremen, Sardaukar in Dune, as well as the introductory Gom Jabar, the Dosadi people in Dosadi, etc...) And for what it's worth, I personally think you are way off. Most of the time, abuse/suffering leads to stunted growth and/or trauma. Very few transcend that. I think you've got confirmation bias (as I once had).
BuildTheRobots 11y ago
fyi: Whiplash was originally shot as a 20min short (different lead actor) which then got it's budget expanded so they could re-shoot and go for a full length movie. Annoyingly don't have details to hand. Personally I was absolutely blown away by it...
brunorsini 11y ago
I just recently decided to study film editing a bit deeper. Here are two classic reads that I highly recommend: On Film Editing Kindle Edition by Edward Dmytryk (http://www.amazon.com/Film-Editing-Edward-Dmytryk-ebook/dp/B00AC1TAHQ http://www.amazon.com/Film-Editing-Edward-Dmytryk-ebook/dp/B...) In the Blink of an Eye Revised 2nd Edition by Walter Murch (http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Revised-2nd/dp/1879505622 http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Revised-2nd/dp/1879505622) (sadly no Kindle version exists for this one yet)
paublyrne 11y ago
Most years the big films which are up for Best Picture and Best Director, are often nominated for other more niche awards. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nominated for Best Sound Mixing. And you have to wonder if it really had far and away better sound editing than hundreds of other films that year.
column 11y ago
This is really trying to find meaning where there is none. "Andrew's life didn't need editing", wtf. It's just a way to introduce the main character and his nemesis, that's all there is to it. The reason it is oscar-worthy is : drums are by definition repetitive, a character playing drums is mostly static, there are no real dialogs possible while drums are being played, and the movie overcame all these obstacles.
- morley 11y ago
  One of the problems is that the article ascribes a lot of decisions to the editor that were actually made by the writer or the director. Which is weird, because something can't be an editing decision if it had to be shot a certain way, because editing comes all the way at the end after everything's been shot. Of course, writing about film is hard, because it's such a collaborative medium. It's hard to attribute a decision to a single person, when in actuality it was probably hinted at in the script, then improved from the director talking to the actor, or the DP suggesting an experimental camera angle, or the editor finding an accidental shot that just happens to work for the scene. So let's look at whether some of these decisions were born in "writer," "director", or "editor" land. I'll pretend that Whiplash wasn't written and directed by the same guy. However, after rushing to get to the studio, he realizes that he is early — by 3 hours. He was manipulated, leading him, and us, to question: should he trust Fletcher’s version of “time?” This series of cause-and-effect events is the story, which is the purview of the writer. Andrew re-enters the rehearsal space in slow-motion. He gets behind the drums, also shot in slow-motion, until Fletcher re-enters the room, which resets the film into normal motion. Again, if you had to shoot it in slomo, it wasn't the editor's decision. It's hard to say if this would come from writing or directing. The script could say "he approaches the bench in slow motion," or it could say "he approaches the bench" and the director intuits that the film should ratchet up the tension. It’s interesting to note that while his drumming is off, the editor chooses to place cuts of Andrew placing band-aids on his hand that are in perfect rhythm with the timing of the ride cymbal –- This does sound like an editing decision. But again, the script could easily say "He band-aids his hand in rhythm with the cymbals." If you want to read more about some actual decisions an editor goes through, I highly recomment In The Blink Of An Eye, written by sound and film editor Walter Murch. Tony Zhou's Vimeo series Every Frame A Painting is great too, although it focuses more on directing and cinematography.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

130 points by soneca 11y ago

Cached: http://goo.gl/6AYpQd http://goo.gl/6AYpQd

I loved this movie, and immediately commented to a few movie-buff friends of mine that I was certain that they'd get an oscar for the sound editing. The actual movie edit was artful and amazing, but the sound edit.. talk about meticulous.. every single drum hit?! Called it! http://www.nabshow.com/thought-gallery/oscar-winner-ben-wilkins-whiplash%E2%80%99s-audio-mix-edit http://www.nabshow.com/thought-gallery/oscar-winner-ben-wilk...

anigbrowl 11y ago
Sorry to be pedantic, but Whiplash won the Academy award for best sound mixing; the award for best sound editing went to American Sniper. Mixing involves the spatial and tonal quality of the sound; editing the temporal and semantic quality. But either way yes, it is very meticulous, and I think you'd be even more shocked to look at the project files, because each individual sound you hear in a film often involves multiple layers of sound or multiple treatments of a single source sound through different mix busses. As a rule of thumb there are bout 10 edits on the sound track for every cut you see on screen. Thankfully there are some tools available to partially automate the process, but in the it requires a huge amount of work and near-endless reserves of patience. Source: movie sound is what I (mostly) do for a living, though I haven't won an Acamdemy award for it.
- superdude 11y ago
  "Mixing involves the spatial and tonal quality of the sound; editing the temporal and semantic quality." What does that even mean? I thought sound editing was the creation of all the sounds and sound effects, and mixing was the mixing.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    Sound editors are responsible what to include in the track and when, sometimes much more or less than what the mics on set picked up. Sound mixers are like sound engineers in the rest of the business, crafting relative levels, dynamics, tonal transformations like EQ, and spatial transformations like reverb.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    The same thing you said, though in a more abstract way. By temporal I mean where they go on the timeline, and by semantic I mean the content of the sound. Much of the time what you hear simply matches what you see on the screen, either from production sound or from a sound effects library or by a foley artist, eg if you see a glass bottle smash on the floor you will probably just use a natural sound for that. But then you have to look at what it means in the context of the story - suppose the bottle is being smashed on the floor by an alcoholic who has finally decided to fight his addiction? You migh choose to emphasize that with music, or you might emphasize it by layering in other sounds from elsewhere in the soundtrack or some purely expressionistic sound like a heavy lock opening. Also, you'll frequently use sound to speed up or slow down the action by transitioning into the next scene before or after the camera cut. Mixing involves setting the levels of the different sounds, but it also includes some decisions about how the sound moves, what sort of reverb and coloration are used (spatial) and how it's balanced against the music, how it's EQed (tonal). Hope that helps.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Have there been blinded tests done to gauge audience impact? I hobbied a bit with sound and when I see, for instance, the result of "professional mastering" side by side, I've often thought the pre-mastering version was better. No doubt this isn't always the case, but it makes me wonder. Especially given how much myth and superstition seems to happen in audio, even coming from pros. Not to come across as rude - I'm just ignorant and curious.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    Not really. There are some loudness measuring standards and conventions about the 'right' level for dialog vs peak volume, but really it's down to the combined tastes of the mixing engineers, the director, and the producer, with the latter having priority. Thus there are fads about particular sounds (eg notice how every big exposion in a sci-fi film now is announced with the same falling sub bass sound...) and pressure to push the volume envelope on action pictures (Michael Bay is notorious for this sensory overload approach to both picture and sound).
- miles932 11y ago
  Wow! I was instantly sure that this came down to someone at some DAW making a few million little tweaks on individual drum hits... Thanks for the correction and the detail!
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    Oh I think it amounts to the same thing. Automation can help but it's fundamentally painstaking stuff. As a general example, imagine someone walking down the street, but you don't like the original recording for some reason and decide to replace it. All the footsteps have to be matched up and that's tedious. There are plugins that will match the peak sounds of one recording to another to save you aligning every footstep (or word if you're replacing dialog) but you often end up having to do things by hand. Then if it's one person alone the footsteps may sound too simple so you need to add some fabric swish for their clothes. Or if it's two people, you need to have two different sets of footsteps which is really really annoying. Three people walking is fine because nobody can keep up with that so you can completely fudge the timing and nobody will notice. The big challenge in movie sound is not to distract from what's going on in the story, which often means throwing away sounds that are present in the real environment but with are excluded by the picture frame, and whose presence thus becomes confusing to the audience because they don't know where the sound is coming from. I hate shooting in restaurants for example, because most restaurants have very loud refrigerators and of course most of them can't be switched off for food safety reasons. When you eat dinner don't notice this because there's music, other diners, maybe the person(s) you went to have dinner with, and the sound of your own body chewing and swallowing - so your brain just filters all the background noise away and lets you focus on the conversation or whatever. But when you watch the same thing on a screen, your brain is like 'what's that big machine noise? why does the lead actress sound like a farm animal? why is it all so echoey?' Total nightmare :-) I haven't seen Whiplash yet but I'm looking forward to it.

sharkweek 11y ago

Interesting article - I am always curious how the psychology behind the edits subconsciously plays into my understanding of, and feelings toward, character dynamics. For those who haven't seen it, Whiplash is my favorite movie of the past several years. The "third act" is probably the most intense finale I've seen in quite some time as well. Highly recommended to anyone, musical background or not.

bedhead 11y ago
I am generally a movie curmudgeon with a high bar. I got it as an iTunes rental for a long flight. iTunes only gives you 24 hours once you press play. I watched it three times before expiring.
- ectoplasm 11y ago
  What else do you like you as much as this?
  - bedhead 11y ago
    Spinal Tap. Point Break. Sneakers. Primer.
    - ectoplasm 11y ago
      Cool, agree on the first two, will have to rewatch Sneakers, haven't seen Primer. Here are some of my favorites: Kramer vs. Kramer, High Noon, Groundhog Day, Leon: The Professional. High Noon in particular is told in real time so it has this intense feeling like Whiplash.
      - bedhead 11y ago
        Sneakers is wildly entertaining on many levels. Plus it was an early hacker movie which was cool. Primer is trippy, one of those rare movies where you will instantly watch it again after the first viewing. Then you'll google the plot and read for an hour and watch it a third time in the same day. It works though.

flashman 11y ago

Site is down, here's an Internet Archive mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20150520140301/http://williamdickersonfilmmaker.com/why-whiplash-won-an-oscar-for-best-editing/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150520140301/http://williamdick...

swagv 11y ago

Well there's a false headline. Oscar winning is the story of people, not of objective criteria.

sp332 11y ago
The article is a story.

reagency 11y ago

That article illustrates the maxim that writing about music is like dancing about architecture

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

knucklesandwich 11y ago

I really enjoyed this movie, but I also feel like it was a Rorschach test for sociopathy. What you come away with at the end of this movie kind of says a lot about you as a person.

ojbyrne 11y ago
I felt like it was more of an attempt at justifying sociopathy, or at least exploring the impulse towards it. The movie essentially argues that greatness comes from external pressure, from being pushed beyond your limits.

dreamcompiler 11y ago

I thoroughly despised this movie. To me it felt like a celebration of a sadistic abuser mind-raping a kid, and never being punished for it. No music teacher I know would have gotten away with what Fletcher did without going to jail. This is not how you teach jazz. This is not how you teach anything.

deadlysyntax 11y ago
A film about sadistic behaviour isn't necessarily a celebration of it.
- sofal 11y ago
  It set up a false dichotomy between being abusive to students in order to achieve excellence and softballing them with praise so they'll never work hard. Most people I've talked to bought into this dichotomy after watching this movie, thinking that there is some kind of tradeoff between greatness and abusiveness. The movie legitimizes this false dichotomy, not by condoning the abuse, but by implying that it is the unfortunate price of greatness. Whether or not this was the intended message, it seems to have been the message that most people I've talked to have internalized from it.
  - __P 11y ago
    While you are right it is a false dichotomy. It isn't completely made up either. Greatness can (often) be achieved through abusively pushing someone to their limits... Like most elite sports athletes... Am I way off base thinking this?
    - AceJohnny2 11y ago
      You would like Frank Herbert's books: Dune, Dosadi... It's weird how most of his books have as a common element exactly that: suffering leads to greatness (the Fremen, Sardaukar in Dune, as well as the introductory Gom Jabar, the Dosadi people in Dosadi, etc...) And for what it's worth, I personally think you are way off. Most of the time, abuse/suffering leads to stunted growth and/or trauma. Very few transcend that. I think you've got confirmation bias (as I once had).

BuildTheRobots 11y ago

fyi: Whiplash was originally shot as a 20min short (different lead actor) which then got it's budget expanded so they could re-shoot and go for a full length movie. Annoyingly don't have details to hand. Personally I was absolutely blown away by it...

brunorsini 11y ago

I just recently decided to study film editing a bit deeper. Here are two classic reads that I highly recommend: On Film Editing Kindle Edition by Edward Dmytryk (http://www.amazon.com/Film-Editing-Edward-Dmytryk-ebook/dp/B00AC1TAHQ http://www.amazon.com/Film-Editing-Edward-Dmytryk-ebook/dp/B...) In the Blink of an Eye Revised 2nd Edition by Walter Murch (http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Revised-2nd/dp/1879505622 http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Revised-2nd/dp/1879505622) (sadly no Kindle version exists for this one yet)

paublyrne 11y ago

Most years the big films which are up for Best Picture and Best Director, are often nominated for other more niche awards. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nominated for Best Sound Mixing. And you have to wonder if it really had far and away better sound editing than hundreds of other films that year.

column 11y ago

This is really trying to find meaning where there is none. "Andrew's life didn't need editing", wtf. It's just a way to introduce the main character and his nemesis, that's all there is to it. The reason it is oscar-worthy is : drums are by definition repetitive, a character playing drums is mostly static, there are no real dialogs possible while drums are being played, and the movie overcame all these obstacles.

morley 11y ago
One of the problems is that the article ascribes a lot of decisions to the editor that were actually made by the writer or the director. Which is weird, because something can't be an editing decision if it had to be shot a certain way, because editing comes all the way at the end after everything's been shot. Of course, writing about film is hard, because it's such a collaborative medium. It's hard to attribute a decision to a single person, when in actuality it was probably hinted at in the script, then improved from the director talking to the actor, or the DP suggesting an experimental camera angle, or the editor finding an accidental shot that just happens to work for the scene. So let's look at whether some of these decisions were born in "writer," "director", or "editor" land. I'll pretend that Whiplash wasn't written and directed by the same guy. However, after rushing to get to the studio, he realizes that he is early — by 3 hours. He was manipulated, leading him, and us, to question: should he trust Fletcher’s version of “time?” This series of cause-and-effect events is the story, which is the purview of the writer. Andrew re-enters the rehearsal space in slow-motion. He gets behind the drums, also shot in slow-motion, until Fletcher re-enters the room, which resets the film into normal motion. Again, if you had to shoot it in slomo, it wasn't the editor's decision. It's hard to say if this would come from writing or directing. The script could say "he approaches the bench in slow motion," or it could say "he approaches the bench" and the director intuits that the film should ratchet up the tension. It’s interesting to note that while his drumming is off, the editor chooses to place cuts of Andrew placing band-aids on his hand that are in perfect rhythm with the timing of the ride cymbal –- This does sound like an editing decision. But again, the script could easily say "He band-aids his hand in rhythm with the cymbals." If you want to read more about some actual decisions an editor goes through, I highly recomment In The Blink Of An Eye, written by sound and film editor Walter Murch. Tony Zhou's Vimeo series Every Frame A Painting is great too, although it focuses more on directing and cinematography.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]