EDITING - film/video/moving image
The specific ways in which we combine cinematic elements, such as scene duration, the audio (or lack of), camera angles, lighting, symbols, visual effects, titles, etc. play an incredibly important and powerful role with delivering a specific message, conveying emotion and drawing a response from the audience. Film editors obviously take all of these minor details into account in the final stages of production, especially when piecing together frames, as minor changes in imagery can generate vastly different ideas. This was demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s, who believed viewers would derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than one single shot in isolation.Â
The Kuleshov Effect:
Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of a man was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on the manâs face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was âlooking atâ the plate of soup, the girl in the coffin, or the woman on the divan, showing an expression of hunger, grief or desire⊠however the footage of the man was the same expression/shot each time.Â
Excellent editing research.
