Editor’s note: Welcome to the eleventh of a 33-part series dissecting the 83rd Academy Awards, brought to you by the Large Association of Movie Blogs and its assorted members. Every day leading up to the Oscars, a new post written by a different LAMB will be published, each covering a different category of the Oscars. To read any other posts regarding this event, please click the tag following the post. Thank you, and enjoy!

by The Mad Hatter from The Dark of the Matinee

This year I got to ask an Oscar winning editor “Exactly, what is editing?”. This is what he told me…

Editing is constructing the film from the ground up out of bits that have been planned and shot by the director. Now we’re taking them, and like a mosaic, we’re figuring out exactly the best placement for them given exactly how they turned out.

It’s all about constructing a mural…out of little pieces of film. It’s looking at the whole and trying to keep everything balanced within the overall structure of the story – but it’s also about trying to take advantage of things that turned out better than expected.

What I think he’s saying is that editing is about sculpting from nuance. It can take messy execution and elevate it to greatness. In short, as my favorite editor likes to say “Editing is storytelling”

Where Oscar is concerned, editing uses a broad palette. Oscar winners have thrilled us with action (BLACK HAWK DOWN, THE MATRIX, RETURN OF THE KING), they have moved us with subtlety (JFK, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, SCHINDLER’S LIST), and they have taken a multifaceted story and told it to us in an unexpected way (TRAFFIC, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE). Over the last several years, it’s actually become a rather interesting touchstone as to how Oscar night will go. Fun fact: The last time a film won Best Picture without even being nominated for Best Editing? 30 years ago with ORDINARY PEOPLE. (That can’t bode well for TRUE GRIT’s slim chances, can it?)

This year’s crop of nominees run the gamut, with a little less action in the mix but a whole lot of structure.

THE FIGHTER is an interesting case. As a boxing film, it’s not cut especially well – which is odd because it’s a subject that is usually cut with a mathematic precision that echoes the sport itself. However, the editing does succeed in making us feel very much a part of the ringside audience. It builds that final fight in a way that makes us want to get to our feet…and while it doesn’t put us in the ring, it certainly makes us feel like we’re sitting in the front row.

THE KING’S SPEECH is primarily about subtlety. It’s less about the montages of speech therapy between Loag and Bertie, and more about the conversations that surround these moments. Whether it’s The future Queen Mother asking the would-be therapist about a hypothetical client, the King-in-Waiting trying to stand up to his older brother and virtually getting shoved on his ass, or a commoner and a monarch speaking as equals…the film is permeated by this slow, deliberate march towards something life-changing. It’s in the mix, but more for substance than style.

BLACK SWAN is all about the editing. It’s unhinged melodrama borders on sensory overload at times, but never goes that step too far. The audience stays off-kilter by never completely being able to trust what we are watching, almost as if we are looking into one of the many broken mirrors. At the centre is the production of a ballet where the editing puts us on the stage and gives us a sense of precisely how much these dancers are giving of themselves for their art. Scene after scene in this film is intricately built from solid editing, and it stands every chance of winning the award.

As many of you will likely know, I am biased where 127 HOURS is concerned. I’ve been praising it to high heavens ever since getting an early look at it back in September, and its editing is no small part of what I believe makes it work. It finds an interesting balance of both claustrophobia and vast scope. Then of course there’s “The Scene”, which when closely watched isn’t that gory…but is presented with such intense editing that our minds start to fill in every painful blank. I’m a little bit biased, but if Oscar decides to go a little off-book and honour one of the lesser contenders, 127 HOURS could be where it goes in this category.

Surprisingly though, what seems to be the leader in this category is THE SOCIAL NETWORK. I mentioned off the top that editing is about sculpting with nuance, and few films this year had as much nuance as what Aaron Sorkin’s script inspired from the cast of this film. David Fincher captured take after take after take…all of them with varying inflections, gestures, looks and reactions. Swap out just the smallest thing, and the scene goes through a seismic tonal shift. An example can be found in the bonus features of the blu-ray where a feature on the film’s editing shows us Eduardo’s final statement of the film played a few different ways. In that deposition room, he breaks down his relationship to Zuckerberg face-to-face in no uncertain terms. We watch it three different ways, each time poignant…but ever so slightly “off”. Then we see the take that the editors chose, and we know that it’s right. Multiply that one bit of dialogue by the infinite amount this film contains, and you understand what makes it such an impressive feat.

Oscar nights tend to get a bit streaky, and some years one film can get on a bit of a roll…for better or for worse. If that happens later this month, look for THE KING’S SPEECH to step up and nab this award. If not, look for either 127 HOURS or THE SOCIAL NETWORK to take the prize.

Editor’s note: Welcome to the fourth of a 33-part series dissecting the 82st Academy Awards, brought to you by the Large Association of Movie Blogs and its assorted members. Every day leading up to the Oscars, a new post written by a different LAMB will be published, each covering a different category of the Oscars. To read any other posts regarding this event, please click the tag following the post. Thank you, and enjoy!

By D.J. Heinlein of Matte Havoc.

Film editing is a visual art form in which the artist intentionally goes unnoticed in order to tell a story. In addition, the editor can be a lifeline for the success of the film and its crew. As noted in an interview for a documentary on film editing, Sean Penn has been quoted as saying, “I think great editing skill will protect a director from suicide.” Good to know, I guess. With a certain amount of ingenuity and skill, Edwin S. Porter can be credited with the initial appearance of film editing as we know it today. When he started releasing his edited films in 1903, the editing style was rather basic with the technique of a cuts only form of transitioning between parallel sequences. Two notable movies from Porter’s collection of films released in 1903 that have utilized the rudimentary techniques of editing include Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery.

For the last eighty-two years, the film industry, prominently centered in Los Angeles, California, has been honoring the contributions made by numerous film artists. Particularly, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have nominated several names of editors and associate filmmakers for their work that has been released during the year of 2009. The nominees are considered leading contributors for the art form over the course of the year. According to Rule 13 of the Academy Awards of Merit for Achievements During 2009, all editing nominees are appointed, confirmed, and finally selected with a single winner by means of the following procedural list. . .

1. A Reminder List of all eligible motion pictures shall be sent with a nominations ballot to all members of the Film Editors Branch, who shall vote in the order of their preference for not more than five productions.
2. The five productions receiving the highest number of votes shall become the nominations for final voting for the Film Editing award.
3. In accordance with Rule Two Paragraph 5, only film editors who hold principal position credit(s) shall be considered eligible for the Film Editing award.
4. Final voting for the Film Editing award shall be restricted to active and life Academy members.

In rule number three there is a reference to “Rule Two, Paragraph 5″ as the legal definition of properly receiving a film credit. Here is that defining paragraph in its entirety. . .

If all that has been previously stated was perceived by the reader as nothing more than incoherent gibberish, then here is a brief summary that I can offer in non-technical language. To nominate a person or group of people for a specific category, such as film editing, you must be an active member within the sub-branch of the Academy for which you are voting. You are allowed to nominate up to five recipients from a list of eligible contestants who has been legally credited for their work on a film by having their name listed in the screen credits and by the records of the production company who produced the film. Of course, the Academy has the final say on the approval of the credits for each candidate, thus allowing them to produce a list of eligible names from which each voting member can officially nominate another member for an achievement award.

In paragraph four of rule thirteen there is a simplified acknowledgment that all eligible members of the Academy, regardless of their sub-branch, are allowed to vote for one nominee out of the five most popular nominations in order to award a single candidate or team of candidates for their work completed on a film.

This has been a very long-winded way of announcing the following nominees for Best Achievement in Editing for the 82nd annual Academy Awards; also known as the Oscar Awards.

Editor’s note: Welcome to the sixteenth of a 24-part series dissecting the 81st Academy Awards, brought to you by the Large Association of Movie Blogs and its assorted members. Every day leading up to the Oscars, a new post written by a different LAMB will be published, each covering a different category of the Oscars. To read any other posts regarding this event, please click the tag following the post. Thank you, and enjoy!

By DJ of Matte Havoc.

When I first started college I was very well entertained by the desire to become a successful film editor who would be hired to work on an Oscar award winning film. Now here I am sitting at my computer ten years later wondering why I have never finished that dream. At least I have the opportunity at this very moment to write about the top Oscar nominations for the category of best achievement in editing. Every single one of the nominated movies for the 2008 film season has been an achievement in the entertainment industry for their work. The editors who have been selected as the recipients for the nominations this year have a wide range of professional credits listed to their names. What makes their craft intriguing to me is that their work is expected to be unnoticed by the audience, yet their contribution is what defines the entire framework of the final cut of the story. If the editor’s work is flawed in some way then the viewer will notice that something is wrong with the movie, even if the person is unable to pinpoint exactly what it could be. For the year of 2008 there were several entertaining films that have been worked on by skilled editors, but for this year’s nominees there were a couple of difficult issues for them to face as they are piecing together their work.

Decades ago there was a company that started manufacturing a giant film workstation that was an ideal tool for film editors to slice together film strips that were developed after they were shot by a movie director and his crew. The Moviola workstation is seen in the photograph above and it allows an editor to watch a film strip being projected on to a small screen while comfortably handling and processing the materials as they were being moved through the workstation. Today’s movie editors do not have to worry about handling such bulky machinery since the invention of digital editing workstations such as Avid and Final Cut Pro. Although the computer age has ushered in a convenience of space and organization for the editor’s work room, it has allowed just about anyone with access to a computer to edit a movie right in their own home office. Because of the vast changes in editing technology, the gap between the skillfully, creative editor and the amateur computer user has quickly shrunk. The following nominees have proven themselves to be more than just a YouTube phenomenon.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Edited by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall

This film is the lengthiest story of all the nominated movies for this category. Could you imagine the amount of work that the movie’s two editors had to handle in order to complete such a hefty task? The final running time has been clocked at three hours and six minutes from the start of the film to the last name that rolls across the screen in the end credits. Cutting together a three hour epic requires a lot of time to be spent in the editing room bringing together an endless amount of footage that was shot during the production stage. I could not even imagine what the film’s shooting ration must have looked like. A shooting ratio is a figure of how much film was actually shot during the production stage of the movie in comparison with how much of that footage has actually made it into its final cut. Some of the most outrageous figures that have been reported for production shoots include a heavy shooting ratio of 60:1 for Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain (that is sixty minutes of raw material for every one minute of screen time) and an incredibly huge ratio of 100:1 for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Whether the editors of Benjamin Button are worthy or not of receiving an Oscar award for their work on the film will be determined by the Academy voters. In my personal opinion there is an opportunity that Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall deserve a fair amount of recognition for the large amount of time they must have spent in post production to bring together the massive story into one seamless film. If they would have failed or stumbled in their work then this film could have easily turned into a horrendously boring story that would feel like it could just go on forever.

The Dark Knight
Edited by Lee Smith

Working on a movie that includes a lot of action sequences, special visual effects, and a primary actor who has passed away before the post-production stage had been completed would mean that there would be no room available for a second chance. The editor, Lee Smith, must rely upon what is already available to him as he sits in his editing room piecing together all of the material. If there is a missing link in the story that was not discovered until the post-production stage it is possible for the crew to head back for the process of secondary shooting to add to the editing material. But secondary shoots costs a lot of money when it involves expensive sets, special effects, crew payroll, equipment, and the question of how to handle work around the problem of a dead actor if any of the missing material would involve reshooting a portion of the scenes he has appeared in. The Dark Knight was a perfect collection of action sequences and enough suspense to keep the viewer on the edge of the theater chair. When attempting to produce a successful moment of suspense that leaves everyone biting their nails tensely requires a tremendous amount of skill and collaboration between the director and the editor. For this movie it was successfully edited together in the sequence involving two separate river barges filled with people who are facing their untimely end. The perspective of the viewer jumps between four separate locations during the sequence, and the tension builds even more with each visit to any of the four locations. Will the people who are stuck in the first boat be willing to murder the lives of those who are in the other river boat by blowing it up with explosives? The entire situation is intended to be a very serious and intense, and the audience shares that tense feeling. If it was not edited correctly with the right amount of pacing and tempo then the audience would not experience the first hand feeling of tension that the characters in the story would be feeling. That is the power of excellent movie editing, I believe, and it proves the high quality of the skills of the movie’s editor.

Frost/Nixon
Edited by Mike Hill and Dan Hanley

Here is an editing challenge that can be very boring and tedious. You have a pair of talking heads who are sitting in a room together for an hour or so as one asks the other a slew of questions about the other person’s job history. At the face value of this brief synopsis I am sure that the film sounds like nothing more than a boring job interview. But what if one of the two figures sitting in the interview was a former President of the United States who is charged with an illegal crime? Our interest, as the viewer, has been piqued a little bit. However, there is still the opportunity that we could be bored with the interview if it seems to drag on forever. As an editor who is piecing together a very lengthy interview how is it possible to make it intriguing to watch? It can be a tough challenge if the editor does not have the right amount of quality material to utilize. Director Ron Howard was quoted in an interview (found here) that he was thrilled with the job done by the film’s editors. If I were a voting member of the Academy it would be easy to vote for this film. The story’s climactic resolve takes place in an interview. How anticlimactic and physically inactive could that be? It’s an wonderful challenge that was successfully pieced together by Mike Hill and Dan Hanley. Good job, guys!

Milk
Edited by Elliot Graham.

Editing a film about a real life politician such as Harvey Milk is like doing a term paper for a college class. There is a lot of material from the media that is available to the editor Elliot Graham and the director Gus Van Sant that they probably did not know where to begin. While editing together the archive footage alongside the footage that was shot by the production crew can be daunting for Graham, because he had to have all the material transferred to a unified digital format on his editing computer. some of the archive footage from the late 1970s was shot on 16mm film or Super 8 and then transferred to a tape format such as DigiBeta or Beta SP. Combining those materials with the 35mm film that was used to shoot the dramatic retelling of Harvey Milk’s career can leave Graham in a state of discombobulation if he is unable to find a unified way of piecing together the final cut of the film. Although it is amazing that the computer technology has advanced to an amazing level that allows the editor to bring all these materials together conveniently I would still wonder if the tools that are used is what defines the skill of the artist. That is a topic for debate that I will leave to the professional editors, but reviewing the final cut of the film itself will be judged by everyone who watches it. The use of the archive footage in the movie could only enhance the value of telling the story, which I think is a wise and creative decision that benefits the film.

Slumdog Millionaire
Edited by Chris Dickens

So, this film is a touching story that is being hailed as one of the best films of the year. But what makes it so special to receive recognition for its editing? It was a balancing act for Chris Dickens to pull together several different stories from different time periods without having one time period over power the others. Not only is there the issue of domination in the time line, but also the balance of progression in the story. It would be premature to have one portion of the story to progress too far ahead before the other portions have a chance to catch up. It is a matter of telling a story in due time without arriving at the story’s climactic ending too early. If the editor is trying to balance several different viewpoints of the same story he shouldn’t allow one aspect of the story to become a runaway production. This dilemma is comparable to the experience of telling a story to a friend who keeps asking questions about something that happens way down the line in your story. If you allow your friend to set the pace of your narrative then your entire story could be a mess. This can be frustrating for the narrator to even tell the story if someone else is trying to set the pace. Editor Chris Dickens has faced that challenge when he was trying to set the pace of the story without allowing one portion of the film to get too far ahead of everything else. It is an excellent job, to say the least, and it should be interesting to see if the hearts of the Academy voters who were enthralled with the film’s story will influence them to vote for this film’s editor.

Editor’s note: Welcome to the tenth of a multi-part series dissecting the 2008 Academy Awards, brought to you by the Large Association of Movie Blogs and its assorted members. Every weekday leading up to the Oscars, a new post written by a different LAMB will be published, each covering a different category (or more) of the Oscars (there are 24 in all). To read any other posts regarding this event, please just click on the tag following the post. Thank you, and enjoy!

By * (Asterisk) of Movie Reviews (such as they are).

The second edition of The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia (Ephraim Katz, 1994) says that “film editing is a laborious, exacting, multistage process that is both a craft and an art”, and “an editor invests weeks or months of intensive work to achieve the impression that he has done nothing at all”.

Yep, that’s an editor’s lot. He (or she; and Katz reminds us that “editing has been one of the few movie crafts wide open to women […] because it requires manual dexterity”) strives to maintain the “voice” and integrity of the creator of the original work, while at the same time bringing a new perspective and a “distance” from the project that can, hopefully, help create a better end result.

I know a bit about editing, albeit a different type of editing. For a day job, I edit books and magazines. So I understand perfectly well the notion of trying to cram X amount of information into Y amount of space (or, in the case of a film, time).

There are some commentators who would suggest that editing one’s own film is a fool’s errand. That closeness to the work is a hurdle to overcome, and the director/editor may be reluctant to rid his film of elements that others would have no qualms about losing. And while I think this idea is valid in the realms of literary editing, I think it is not a fair parallel to make. After all, literary editing is about correcting grammar, spelling, and syntax mistakes at least as much as making something read better and fit a predefined space.

In film, there is less mistake-correcting to do (in an ideal world!). In his book Digital Film-Making, director Mike Figgis writes: “It’s good to have an editor to work with in post-production [but] it’s vitally important that you don’t lose the plot […]. You can’t just abdicate your responsibility.” And this, surely, is tacit endorsement of the role of director/editor, which Figgis tell us, is “much more common now” than it used to be. That, of course, is largely as a result of the boom in digital and low-budget film-making.

And the mention of digital brings us to the name of this award. There have long been discussions over the nouns “film” and “movie” to mean what we see projected on a cinema screen. Oliver Stone once claimed that he makes movies while Quentin Tarantino makes films. There’s a sense of “a film” being smaller, and so a less impressive cinema-going, visual extravaganza, than “a movie”. Jules et Jim is a film, but Independence Day is a movie.

The difference between film and movie, of course, has a different bent when talking about editing. The term “film editing”, as used by the Academy for this award, has an implication of physically handling and splicing film, but as time goes by, fewer and fewer people are editing their work this way. Directors such as Robert Rodriguez have been prime exponents of this do-it-yourself ethic. “Some people say that cutting on film […] gives the filmmaker a much closer relationship to the film,” Rodriguez writes in Rebel Without a Crew. “If you like the sound of that, do yourself a favor and take some film home at night and fondle it all you want. But when it comes time to cut your movie use a video or computer system. Cutting on film is the slowest, most absurd way to cut a film in my opinion. It takes forever to do anything.”

Given the move towards digital editing across the board these days, maybe the Academy should consider renaming this award the Movie Editing award. This trend away from cutting celluloid is great for those who wish to be involved all the way through the process without necessarily wanting to learn a whole new discipline. You can teach yourself the basics on a computer in your home. This is one prime reason why the aforementioned director/editor tag is becoming more commonplace, but some people just want to be involved at every stage — from Orson Welles to the Coen brothers, the director/editor actually has a long pedigree.

And on the subject of the Coen brothers, they are, of course, among the nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Film Editing, for No Country for Old Men under their pseudonym Roderick Jaynes.

Of the five movies nominated, this is the only one I have seen as yet. Personally, I thought the editing was strong throughout… until the last 20 minutes or so. Shorten that coda, boys, and maybe clarify what the hell is going on it that hotel room between Ed Tom and Anton, then maybe we’ll talk about you getting that Oscar.

The other four films are:

The Bourne Ultimatum, Christopher Rouse.
If Rouse’s work on this is as good as on the same director’s United 93, this should be a hot contender.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juliette Welfling
First-time nomination for Welfling on this critically acclaimed feature. Going by her work on the very good Read My Lips and the somewhat disappointing but interesting The Beat That My Heart Skipped, I’d say she can’t be counted out.

Into the Wild, Jay Cassidy
Another first-time nominee. Good for them. Does that mean they’re patsies, though? Hmm… We’ll see.

There Will Be Blood, Dylan Tichenor
And yet another first-time nominee… But, whoa, look at this guy’s pedigree: Boogie Nights and Magnolia alone should secure this guy a lifetime-achievement award some day. He also edited Brokeback Mountain and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He should be commended for his work ethic alone: There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Jesse James…, and Brokeback, back to back! That’s some feat.

So, I know it wasn’t part of the brief, but if I were a gambling man and I had to bet my shirt on someone in this category, I’d be putting it on Dylan Tichenor. I’ll be seeing this as soon as it opens over here in the UK, so if I change my mind you’ll be the first to know!

I’m done here now. Guess I’ll put on my editor’s hat and go through it all again.