Editing the Wide Shots First and Why

If you read my last blog, you know that to get through a long shoot day with limited time, I like to shoot the close-ups first. You can read about that here if you missed it and then come back to this blog if you'd like.

Lay your foundation:

If you followed the first method, hopefully by the time you got to your wide shot the blocking, lines and everything else were spot on.  Hopes are fleeting though and more likely, something still went wrong and you didn't get one long, perfect take.  Someone may have missed a line, a car may have passed or a plane flew overhead or the camera got jostled by a rogue P.A.  Or maybe the pace is just a bit off and needs to be tightened.

Whatever the case, that wide shot is still a great way to establish  your scene and it may be how you open, or at least you want to show it somewhere near the beginning of things.  Drop the best take of  your wide shot and the subsequent "pick  ups" into your timeline.  See how they flow.

Clear up mistakes first: 

As much as you may have planned in your head, your notes or your story boards to have a particular line said as a wide shot, maybe you didn't catch it.  Maybe 2 minutes into a three minute scene somebody flubbed a line or sneezed.  Whatever the reason, you need to cut away to an appropriate close up in order to bridge the clips without a jump cut.  ( A really fast paced scene can sometimes benefit from jump cuts, but for general dialogue I avoid them).

You don't want constant cutting back and forth to ruin your pace, so it's best to get in and clean up your wide shot with the close ups you'll absolutely have to use first.  This way you know the cuts that HAVE to made are taken care of and you won't waste time setting a pace only to have it ruined by a compulsory edit later.

A Wide Shot from Lumber vs Jack which was interrupted 

when I forgot my lines...again.

Enhancing a performance:

You've used the greatest actors  you can afford an some who you can't.  Every moment they're in front of the camera is sheer theatrical perfection!  But, some moments are more perfect than others.  Now that you know you have  your scene, go back through and check your talent's close up performances against their wide shots.  You may find that they gave a better moment during their close up.  I have experienced this with a few actors who seem to put a bit more into it when they know "they're on".  This is often true of reaction shots.  So, if you want your actors to love you, make as many of their best moments hit the screen as possible.

Set Your Pace:

Once you have all of your necessary clean up cuts in place and you know your actors look their best, you can start trimming your scene down to make the conversation flow more naturally.  You may need some dramatic pauses or  you may need to overlap some audio in order to make  characters seem to be responding to each other in a rapid fire argument.  Whatever the case, with your wide shot foundation set, you can now concentrate on setting the proper mood.  You've edited out your mistakes and have all of the lines in place.  If you need to tighten up some lines using the wide angle footage's audio you can avoid a visual jump cut by dropping a reaction shot into the mix.  Clip out the extra wide footage and cut back to it in a moment where things are working.  Lay the existing useable audio under your reaction footage. If you shot everyone's close ups all the way through, you should have plenty of footage to use for this purpose.

Check for continuity:

Things get a bit more complicated  here.  Changing the pacing or just a bit of forgetfulness during shooting can cause differences between the staging in  your wide shots from your close ups.  Often you won't have a dedicated continuity person on set, but making edits seamless relies on the small details matching between the wide and close shots.  Someone's eye line may be different from one shot to the next, or their arms are folded and then suddenly outstretched.  Maybe they're holding a coffee cup in some shots and not holding it others or it changes hands.  Whatever the small continuity errors are, the less of them that you let slip by (and some will ), the more you'll draw people into the story.  

This is a handy time to have a "cat". (Check the video on that.)  

You can also cut away to a close up of any character who happens to match between shots.  If all of  your characters are "out of whack" at this point, consider cutting to whoever is not speaking.  They're less likely to be the focus of the moment and their idiosyncrasy may be less noticeable.

Watch it again: 

When you're finished, watch it all again.  You'll probably find something that you wish to tighten up. I find things like that at the movie's screening, two years later and whenever I watch the movies I've made, but I like to catch most of them before I commit it to DVD, BluRay or streaming, when I can still do something about it.  Watch the scene a few more times before calling it "done".

The long and short of it:

Much like the shooting close ups first process, this isn't suggesting you rush things, but if you have a client who hired you on short notice or you're entered into a 24 hour film festival, these kinds of mechanics will speed things along.

I find having "steps" helps me immensely with the process.  Do I always follow them?  Of course not.  Artistic endeavors rarely benefit from being "step by step", but when you're looking at hundreds of hours of footage and trying to cut it into a 90 minute story, it sure helps to have a place to start.

Talk to you soon, gang.