"Cut Out the Bad Bits"

  • Editing is:

    • Structure
    • Color
    • Dynamics
    • Manipulation of time

  • Because, in a certain sense, editing is cutting out the bad bits, the tough question is, What makes a bad bit?:

    • When you are shooting a home movie and the camera wanders, that’s obviously a bad bit, and it’s clear that you want to cut it out
    • The goal of a home movie is usually pretty simple: an unrestructured record of events in continuous time
    • The goal of narrative films is much more complicated because of the fragmented time structure and the need to indicate internal states of being, so it becomes proportionately more complicated to identify what is a “bad bit”
    • What is bad in one film may be good in another
    • One way of looking at the process of making a film is to think of it as the search to identify what—for the particular film you are working on—is a uniquely “bad bit”
    • The editor embarks on the search to identify the “bad bits” and cut them out, provided that doing so does not disrupt the structure of the “good bits” that are left

  • About forty years ago, after the double-helix structure of DNA was discovered, biologists hoped that they now had a kind of map of the genetic architecture of each organism. Of course, they didn’t expect the structure of the DNA to look like the organism they were studying, but rather that each point in the organism would somehow correspond to an equivalent point in the DNA. When they began to compare them closely, they were surprised to discover that the DNA of the human and the chimpanzee were surprisingly similar. So much so—ninety-nine percent identical—as to be inadequate to explain all of the obvious differences between us. So where do the differences come from?:

    • Biologists were eventually forced to realize that there must be something else—still under much discussion—that controlled the order in which the various pieces of information stored in the DNA would be activated and the rates at which that information would be activated as the organism grew
    • In the early stages of fetal development, it is difficult to tell the difference between human and chimp embryos. And yet, as they grow, they reach a point where differences become apparent, and from that point on, the differences become more and more obvious:
    • In human beings, the priority is the brain first, and the skull next, because the emphasis is on maximizing the size of the brain
    • With chimpanzees, the priority is reversed: skull first, then brain—probably for reasons that have to do with the harsher environment into which the chimp is born. The command from the chimp’s sequence is, “Fill up this empty space with as much brain as you can.” At any rate, it seems to be more important for a chimp to be born with a hard head than a big brain

  • There’s a similar interplay between an endless list of things:

    • The thumb and the fingers
    • Skeletal posture
    • Certain bones are fully formed before certain muscular developments

{{The information in the DNA can be seen as uncut film and the mysterious sequencing code as the editor. You could sit in one room with a pile of dailies and another editor could sit in the next room with exactly the same footage and both of you would make different films out of the same material. Each is going to make different choices about how to structure it, which is to say when and in what order to release those various pieces of information{{