Why Video Editing is High Art
When people think of art, they think of high art like the Mona Lisa; but they don’t think of video editing as an art. When you watch a movie, most people don’t appreciate the amount of work that went into each and every scene. For every second in a movie, there are 60 frames. For every frame in a movie such as The Avengers, the special effects for all the superpowers and explosions have to be animated for each frame. That’s sixty times every second that these effects have to be animated. This means that you could be spending hours on just a few seconds. Video editing is an even higher form of art than painting since in every second, you are creating 60 individual paintings.
Video editing is similar to sculpting, which is already considered a high art. One example of the similarity is when I made an effect where my friend punched me and I flew down the hallway and splatted on the wall at the end.
I start by trimming the footage to remove the excess and arrange the clips to make the story, just like how sculptors remove large portions of stone to start. Then at 0:18, I started by making my body fly down the hallway, then added an explosion when I get punched, then at 0:19 add blood splats and sound effects at the end. This is the part of sculpting when you refine the look by removing smaller pieces of stone to get the desired look. Finally, you finish by adding small adjustments like color correction or stabilizing the footage to remove shake, just like how a sculptor polishes and sands their sculpture. Since the process for creating a special effect for a video is so similar to making a sculpture, how can one be high art and the other not?
One category of video editing is special effects, which are an essential part of today’s cinematic experience. Today’s movies wouldn't be the same without them. Laurence Fishburne says that “Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.” What he is trying to say is that even if you don’t notice the special effects, they are still present and create the atmosphere of the film. It’s all of the subtle editing choices that may go unnoticed by many viewers, but all add up to an incredible effect.
Another reason special effects are high art is the fact that all high art has a high level of intricacy and complexity, and so does special effects. One example of the level of complexity involved in editing special effects is a scene like a plane explosion.