Writing, Arts & Entertainment
Editing: Principles
Lesson time 10:23 min
Ken teaches you the guiding principles he’s developed over the course of four decades in the edit bay.
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Topics include: Kill the Little Darlings to Sjgjnerve the Story Arc • Feel the Edit Musically • Unify Picture and Audio to Create a Singular Sensory Experience • Find the Right Pace for the Scene • Every Addition or Subtraction of a Frame Counts • Let This Imperfect Thing Go
Preview
Editing is at its essential core the distillation of the material you've collected into a coherent story. So you can go back to human life. How is your day, someone ask you? And you immediately begin to edit that into a coherent narrative of what took place. You do not spend 24 hours telling that person what your day was like. But you want to-- you hopefully have collected 24 hours worth of material in order to be able to answer the question, how is your day. That's all that editing is. It's taking the seemingly random chaos of events and ordering it into a story. You can look at our cutting room floor. The proverbial cutting room floor isn't filled with bad stuff. It's filled with great stuff that you would look and go, wow, you're an idiot. Why isn't that in the final film? But if I could put it back into the final film, I'd show you the way that wonderful scene de-stabilized the arc of something better. Part of what I am is in some ways a traffic cop, ultimately deciding what's going to get into the film and what's not going to get into the film. And that makes it an incredible burden. Nothing in the hunter gathering portion compares to what takes place in the triage, in the merciless triage that everyone who wants to be a filmmaker will come to have to face, that you will have to kill, as they say in journalism, all your little darlings. All those sentences that you think are perfectly read, all that shot that you think as you're taking it, oh, it's going to be in the final film. And be willing to sacrifice them in the service of something else that has gone places that you couldn't even imagine. And I think it's in some ways having a kind of courage to make sure that you permit yourself to let it go in a direction that you didn't think it was going to go. There is a huge amount of humility at the end of the day that you begin to realize this whole thing is about. It isn't about imposing what you know. It's about acknowledging what you don't know and asking of the material what it might need. It doesn't mean that you don't impose yourself. You do. But you've got to have an equal ingredient of humility that permits that material to speak to you and tell us what it needs to make it better. We use all the time in the editing room musical analogies. Hold that a beat longer. Hold that sentence go beat beat. We have adopted without really know what we're talking about musical ideas. Because if you think about it, Wynton Marsalis says that music is the art of the invisible. You can hear one note and then a second note, and something more has happened. And that happens with words. It happens with images. Music is the fastest way to your heart. And so I think, as we begin to edit, I find it helpful-- I think you would find it helpful-- to think about what these things represent in kind of almost musical notations. I don't know anything about music in that way. But I know enough-- and you know enough-- to be able to employ t...
About the Instructor
Since its 2017 debut, Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War has enthralled over 39 million viewers by painting an intimate and revealing portrait of history. In this online film class, learn how Ken captivates audiences with his ability to distill vast research and complex truths into compelling narratives. From first treatment to final edit, Ken teaches his documentary filmmaking techniques that “wake the dead” to bring their stories to life.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Ken Burns
The 5-time Emmy Award winner teaches how he navigates research and uses audio and visual storytelling methods to bring history to life.
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