Cut – The most common editing technique where two pieces of film are spliced together so that the film ‘cuts’ from one image to another.

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Fade – Can begin in darkness and gradually assume full brightness or the image may gradually get darker. A fade often implies that time has passed or may signify the end of the scene.

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Dissolve – Similar to a fade in which one image is slowly replaced by another. It can create a connection between images.

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Wipe – A new image wipes off the previous image. A wipe is more fluid than a cut and quicker than a dissolve.

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Flashback – Cut or dissolve to action that happened in the past.

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Shot-Reverse-Shot – A shot of one subject, then another, then back to the first. It is often used for conversation or reaction shots.

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Cross Cutting – Cuts between actions that are happening simultaneously. This technique is also called parallel editing. It can create tension or suspense and can form a connection between scenes.

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Eye-Line Match – Cut to an object, then to a person. This shows what a person is looking at and can reveal a character’s thoughts.

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Graphic Match – Occurs when the shapes, colours and/or overall movement of two shots match in composition, either within a scene or across a transition between two scenes.

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Match On Action – Refers to film editing techniques where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot’s action.

Wes Anderson – an American director and screenwriter known for the distinctive visual aesthetic of his quirky comedies.

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Edgar Wright – an English director and screenwriter who collaborates with many of the same people he has worked with in the past (specifically Simon Pegg and Nick Frost). He is known for satirical genre films with a unique editing style of rapid, dramatic montages.

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Guillermo Del Toro – a Mexican director and screenwriter known for creating horror/fantasy films that have emotional and thematic complexity.

Auteur – a French word used to describe a film director who influences their films so much that they rank as their author. Auteur directors generally have a certain style from film-to-film and often perform other roles besides directing such as: writing, editing, and acting in their own films.

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Andrew Sarris, a film critic for The New York Times, set out a complete definition for auteurs according to three main criteria:

1. Technical competence: Auteurs have to be at the top of their craft in terms of technical filmmaking abilities and should always have a hand in multiple components of filmmaking.

2. Distinguishable personality: Auteurs are separated from other technically gifted directors with their unmistakable personality and style – you can see shared filming techniques and consistent themes being explored between an auteur’s films.

3. Interior meaning: Auteurs make films that have layers of meaning and have more to say about the human condition. They go beyond the pure entertainment films produced by large studios, to instead reveal the filmmaker’s unique perspectives and thoughts on life.

Role 2:

Editors look through all the raw film footage and use the best clips in order to create one coherent film through the use of well placed cuts and transitions, making sure it aligns with the directors vision. They often manipulate the footage through the use of CGI and colour grading to make the visuals match the story and theme of the film. I’ll be taking inspiration from Paul Machliss, an Australian editor who’s edited ‘Scott Pilgrim vs The World’, ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and many more, often working on films with director Edgar Wright. Machliss has a choppy style which leads to fast paced scenes, and quick transitions which give the films comedic value due to the amount of cuts/transitions he adds. He often adds jump cuts where most wouldn’t deem it necessary, like pouring coffee into a cup, which give his style a unique flare as he doesn’t follow the usual linear pattern that most editors do.

“We didn’t want it to feel like a musical where everything is heavily choreographed. When someone puts a bottle down on the chair, it may happen to be on the beat, but we didn’t want you to think we were waiting for that moment” – Machliss on ‘Baby driver’ [2017]

A cinematographer is the person who translates the director’s vision into the camera. The cinematographer uses the many tools, such as lenses, depth-of-field, camera angles and lighting to achieve this. However, this job is only in production. They usually stay out of pre and post production.

“A cinematographer, also known as a Director of Photography, is in charge of the camera and the lighting crew. They’re the person responsible for creating the look, color, lighting, and for framing of every single shot in a film. The film’s director and cinematographer work closely together, as the main job of a cinematographer is to ensure that their choices support the director’s overall vision for the film.”

 A cinematographer is in charge of the camera and the decision of which camera angles to use such as low angle shot or a high angle shot and the lighting such as side lighting or back lighting. They’re responsible for choosing a style for the film and they choose how each scene is framed. Cinematography is the art of story telling by using camera angles, lighting, zoom, focus and more. They are needed in pre and post production by planning out the scenes, shooting them and then combining them. A cinematographer that inspires me is Bruno Delbonnel who worked on Amelie. His style consists of a dreamlike soft light scenes which rely on having a warm tone and uses lots of yellows and green. His lighting tends to be soft lighting or big lights far away which makes the subject stand out against the background. He tends to light the subject from the side or behind so to add to the dreamlike effect and make the lighting not too harsh, he also positions the camera faced on the front of the character. With the combined tactics Bruno Delbonnel uses in his cinematography he can achieve a dreamlike style.

Job description:

A sound editor is a creative professional responsible for selecting and assembling sound recordings in preparation for the final sound mixing or mastering of a television program, motion picture, video game, or any production involving recorded or synthetic sound.

Inspiration: Erik Aadahl & Ethan Van der Ryn:

Ethan Van der Ryn: The quick definition of what a supervising sound editor does is, we’re basically responsible for being the main sort of translator of the director’s vision of what the soundscape of the film should be. We are responsible for creating and executing that vision and directing the team of editors and sound designers and foley artists and foley supervisors, ADR, dialogue supervisors—the whole team of people who work with us, we’re responsible for directing them to execute the soundscape of the film.

Erik Aadahl: First we collect the sonic ingredients. We’ll go out into the field and record things—all the sort of flavors of the atmosphere, wind or trees, creatures and animals. Then we bring those back into the studio and start manipulating them. Some of that might be sound design like taking animal vocals and then manipulating them to create the creatures from “A Quiet Place,” and then we start building the tracks over many months. In the final mix, everything comes together. All of our edited dialogue and ADR, all of our foley details, footsteps, hand-taps and touches; the music then comes into it and all of that gets put together [to become] what audiences hear in the theater.

We’re totally pulling the rug out from under the audience by really stripping away. Our goal on the first film was to make audiences hold their breath and be afraid to make a sound in the movie theater as if they were the actual characters in the film, and it was this grand experiment to really put the audiences into the characters’ shoes. We didn’t really know if we were going to be able to pull it off. And even going beyond quiet but going to complete silence, which we did, is something we’ve never done before. But only a film like “Quiet Place” gives us that kind of creative latitude and it was thrilling. The first time we did it, it was a total experiment and we just got goosebumps. We choked up. We were like, “Oh my god, this is so unique. This is amazing.”

Role two: Sound:

Sound is an important element in film. It immerses the audience into a unique world, fills in any gaps and can create emotion to easily story tell in the film. I’ve taken inspiration from Erik Aadahl & Ethan Van der Ryn. Both Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryan are known for his work on ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’, ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’, these films being action packed, fast paced and loud with short cuts.

An inspirational sound designer is Mark Mangini, born in Boston 1956 he grew up as a musician, specifically a guitarist. In 1976  he started his career in the industry “intended on becoming an interpreter at the U.N. until he could no longer ignore his love of film and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film.”

His first job in entertainment was a sound editor for a cartoon from Hanna Barbera Studios. soon after he had a twenty-five year run as owner and operator of post-production sound company, Weddington Productions Inc. Now as a Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer, and Re-recording mixer at Formosa Features, a Musician and Lecturer, Mangini continues to make his life’s work creating unimagined aural worlds and fabricated sonic realities for theatrical motion pictures.

And its one of his recent works that I would like to focus on: Dune (2021, Denis Villeneuve) has brilliant sound design. “Whereas many productions bring in sound designers after many of the visuals have already been finalized, supervising sound editor Mark Mangini (who worked with Villeneuve on Blade Runner 2049) began building the audioscape of Dune from its early days of production. As a result, the sound actually informs all sorts of things we see on-screen, and even fills in some of the conceptual gaps of the Dune series. (How can a giant worm actually burrow through so much sand? It vibrates with a low frequency to displace particles.) Mangini’s team set up in a hotel on the edge of Death Valley, and quickly learned that one of the tropes of the desert we know—the omnipresent howl of dry wind—was an invention of film, repeated by film. In fact, dunes are often still, silent places, and when they aren’t, they actually sing and groan much like an ominous soundtrack. The team sourced sounds from nature, dragging microphones through the sand to simulate a worm, hammering the earth with a rubber mallet to capture the sound of a “thumper” gadget that the citizens of Arrakis use to summon the beasts. While these sounds are post-processed by cutting-edge audio software to enhance various characteristics, the core is organic, and thereby believable.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90697830/deconstructing-the-psychedelic-sounds-of-dune

TMS Profile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mangini

A director determines the creative vision of a feature film, has complete artistic control of a project, should have a strong grasp of technical knowledge taught in directing classes, and/or a personal or emotional connection to the material. Pre-production duties may entail: assembling a team, creating a vision for the film and communicating it to the crew, discussing your vision with each of the key crew members individually and making casting choices. Duties during production include: guiding actors through scenes, ensuring every department is doing its job, communicating with everyone as much as possible and keeping your own artistic vision alive. Final duties carried out after production could consist of: giving notes to the editor, checking in with post-production teams and giving final ‘signoff’.

Wesley Wales Anderson’s (or ‘Wes Anderson’s’) films are known for their sharp and identifiable visual and narrative styles. Three of Anderson’s films – The Royal Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Grand Budapest Hotel– appeared in BBC Culture’s 2016 poll of the greatest films since 2000.

Stating ‘There’s no story if there isn’t some conflict’, Anderson makes clear that he uses seemingly surface level techniques such as symmetrical Mis-En-Scene to display deeper or darker themes subtly. It could be said that the careful arrangements of the sets and costumes involved in his films suggest a suppressed chaos which is imaginatively presented through unique direction.

SOURCES (in order):

masterclass.com

wikipedia.org

inspiringquotes.us

vanityfair.com

A cinematographer is in charge of the camera and the lighting crew, responsible for creating the look, colour, lighting, and framing of every single shot. Usually, the director and cinematographer work closely together as the main job of the cinematographer is to ensure that they can work to support the director’s overall vision for the film.

Additionally, they may also act as the camera operator on more low-budget productions.

Some duties which might be expected of a cinematographer could be to choose a visual style for the film, to establish the camera setup for every shot, to determine the lighting for scenes, explore locations and to elevate the main vision of the director.

As inspiration for cinematography, I would probably choose to focus on Robert Bridge Richardson, winner of the Academy Award for Best Cinematographer three times, for his work on JFK, The Aviator and Hugo.

One of the most identifiable techniques is his famous ‘halo’ look. It can be seen in some of the most famous films the cinematographer has worked on, notably Scorsese’s Casino and The Aviator, and Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds. The unique approach with which Richardson attempts to reinvent film is fascinating and arguably an efficient example to follow, stating: ‘On The Aviator, we did not attempt to re-create the choreography of period-style camera moves.’

SOURCES (in order):

masterclass.com

wikipedia.org

premiumbeat.com

theasc.com