The Editing Room

By: Keith Mitchell w/Chestpoundfilms

Most casual movie goers can name a bunch of actors, or directors, and even a few producers. But the names of people like Walter Murch, Thelma Schoonmaker, or Michael Kahn, aren’t very familiar. That’s because the world of film editing is an invisible one.

Editing has a powerful impact on the movie making process. After all a story is told three times, in the script, during the filming, and finally in the editing room. A change in sound, music and color or a cut in the scene can dramatically change the mood and tone of an entire movie. In the words of Spielberg, “"The difference between a few frames was a scary shark and a big floating turd," referring to his movie Jaws.

And that’s what editing comes down to. Every single frame. Editors keep track of all the footage, taking it and making sense of it everything. It’s a time consuming process, usually taking months to complete.

Here is a trailer for the movie Frozen, recut. In other words, this is what Disney’s Frozen, would look like if it were a horror film:

How about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining? What if it were a cut to look like a comedy?

…And just to further prove things, what if Breaking Bad were a romantic Comedy?

For this week’s blog post, we came across a documentary that shed some serious light on the influence editors have on the movies we love today. Big Directors like Spielberg and Tarantino talk about their experience working with their favorite editors. We also get to see how even an actor’s performance is affected by the editor. Below is a link to the YouTube video for the documentary, The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing.

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing