Theory: Pacing

One of the most common theoretical questions we run into as film/video editors is how long we should let a clip play out before applying a cut to another shot. Walter Murch believes the appropriate cutting location occurs in sync with the blinking of the viewers' eyes, because blinking is theoretically representative of the mind's subtle shifting of ideas.

Murch poses that, when watching a single video clip several times over, he could repeatedly mark where the cut should naturally occur -- based entirely on his mental reaction to the material -- and be accurate within a margin of a few frames every time. In an editing theory class I took from Jerry Stayner at the LDS Motion Picture Studio we tried this out with several editors, taking turns to see if we would all feel the cut was at the same place, but I don't think we were quite as precise as Murch would have had us naturally be.

My personal theory in this respect is that frequency should generally reflect the mood you are going for. When I watch a film with very fast editing, I tend to get a sense of chaos or impending danger, or I feel like it's trying to rush through the material. Slower editing allows me to better ponder on what I'm seeing in the frame and better piece together the message of the puzzle. Mind you that this is a general rule -- clever editing will work with the subject matter and footage and can completely pull the wool over the eyes of the audience.

For example, "Batman Begins" is one of the most well-edited movies I can think of in recent pop culture cinema, yet the speed with which the edits occur is mind-blowing. When the film opens with the brief story of young Bruce falling down a shaft into a bat cave, the extremely quick cuts are always jarring to me at first. There is little time to dwell on what's happening -- it just moves and I have to run to keep up. However, after about ten minutes of this, my mind adapts and what was once super-fast to me is now naturally flowing. I think this is a tricky thing to pull off, because it risks sloppiness and losing your viewer, but Nolan & Co. are talented enough to make it work here. I think any of us would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of shots in the entire film that lasts more than 4 seconds -- and when they do occur, think of the effect this has on us. This does wonders for the storytelling and tone-setting. What generally would be seen as an average-length shot, or even a relatively-faster shot, in any other film becomes one that commands pensive consideration.

With the obvious exception of "Batman," my personal preference, generally, is longer shots. I think the move in contemporary filmmaking toward faster storytelling is reflective of society's viewpoint of our generation's inability to sit down and focus on one subject for longer than half a minute. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the prominence of this mindset in our arts forces many of us to lose our attention spans more than we perhaps already had.

Yet classic Hitchcock films such as "North by Northwest" do a fantastic job of building suspense without changing the camera angle every other heartbeat. I refuse to agree that faster cutting is necessarily always better. I know several young filmmakers who think that faster is better no matter what, and I think this mindset is dangerous and, frankly, cliche.

The last major project I edited was "Journey to Temple Hill," a 12-minute documentary on permanent display in the new alumni building on BYU campus. The topic of the piece is the history of BYU in its early years as a struggling academy, with a major emphasis on Karl G. Maeser. In my collaborative efforts with the producer/director, I found that she wanted cuts to be at least every four seconds, if not faster. This was against my natural instinct -- in a piece that focused on getting to know dead personages, I felt it was important to be able to gaze at their images a couple seconds longer and look into their eyes, try to gather a sense of who they were in each shot. We played this seemingly-endless game of tug of war throughout the post production process, but what resulted was a better film based on both of our arguments -- she was able to tell a more complete story because she kept the pace decent enough to move things along, and I was able to include brief pauses (natural "breathing spaces," if you will) so the viewer could have some time to take things in before going to the next scene. While the end product was still a tad too fast for my taste, I admit that our collaboration produced a better film than if either of us had worked on it solo.

In the end, I don't think there is a standard we can set for everything as far as pacing in our works goes. I would warn all of us, however, to steer clear of the common mentality these days that our cuts always have to be faster than not. I think it would be wise to strongly consider what we communicate by cutting too quickly (or slowly, for that matter), and whether we want to devote our attention to moving the story along or allowing a few brief moments more for the viewer to take in the mise-en-scene or to at least have a breathing space here and there to keep up with what's been said by the filmmakers.