The second day of FICCI Frames 2012 started with an interesting Film-Editing workshop conducted by Academy Award-winning Editor Mark Goldblatt. Mark has edited around 30 motion pictures like Terminator Series, True Lies, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Pearl Harbour, Armageddon and lot more and has been awarded an Academy Award for Terminator 2.
Mark spoke in length about the Art of Editing which according to him should be invisible in the picture. He firmly believes that the cuts the editor makes in the film shouldn’t be recognized by the viewers. “Action-adventure film has snappy editing, as there is so much happening at the same time that the cuts happen real quick and viewers are lost in the visual appeal of the movie”, Mark said.
Mark showed the clip from Terminator to explain the editing done in it. He showed the scene where Terminator (Arnold) has come to kill Sarah Connors and kills her friend thinking she is Sarah and then after realizing the identity of real Sarah goes after her. In the scene Mark explained, “We wanted to add something more than just moving the scene between Arnold and Sarah’s friend so we decided to focus on the hand of the girl while she is dying. But the footage was shot already so then we shot the hand in our office and added that in the scene. And nobody can see the difference”.
So according to Mark, you may not necessarily have all the material that you need to show in the film. Hence, it’s very important for the editors to go through the footage the very next day as to be able to get more material if needed and that saves the director’s money.
“Film is all about the character’s personality and the drama that they make. So if I’m editing an intense car chase I treat it as the Greek Mask fight where the cars are the mask of the character which has a personality. And for me it’s very important to show the actors in the car and not just 2 cars doing amazing movements”, Mark asserted.
When the film has major part of VFX involved techniques change a little bit. In films with VFX editors involve themselves with the storyboards and pre-visualization as that will decide the number of shots to be done by the VFX vendors. And it is essential in VFX laden films to know what the actors are supposed to do standing in front of a green screen. The time is the key.
Apart from talking about his films Mark also spoke and showed clips from the very earliest films that were made at the turn of 20th century; films like The Unseen Enemy, Orphans of the Storm (1921), October (1927), Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Mark switches off the sound when editing a scene as he believes that expressions like frowning, smiling, tense, etc tell a story in their own way. He also showed clips from Starship Troopers (1997) and Rise of the Planet of the Apes to explain the editing involved in each.
When asked whether an Editor can make good films with a bad Director Mark replied, “Well Editor and Director has well defined roles but they tend to overlap but you have got a job to do and it’s your responsibility to give it your best. And if the editor has been given bad/ mediocre material he can make it, if not good, then at least more palatable or little less bad and you never know he can make it good also.”
