Daniels Kite - Rough Cut

As I worked with the film quite heavily in the pre-production stage it was hard to keep an open mind when thinking of what to change and what to cut all together when progressing the edit, so I attempted to look at the film through fresh eyes. “As a film editor, you’re looking at the picture totally objectively, not subjectively, and you’re trying very hard to pretend you’re the audience so that if something is not working, you are the first one to know and can fix it.” ^{[1a; Pg 19]} To do this I watched the film back on a different computer in a different location to the one I normally edit on to try and distance myself from the background knowledge I had on the film. After I did this I made notes on what I thought didn’t make sense or what didn’t come across effectively which heavily mimicked the tutor’s feedback.

My main goal to progress Daniel's Kite from the assembly to rough cut stage involved looking carefully at the pacing of the narrative and if the audience would understand and engage with the themes we were trying to portray. To do this I mainly used tutors feedback to guide me in selecting the areas that didn’t work so I could look at them and figure out what was wrong.

Written feedback from Chris Cooke

The assembly cut was very bare and had a lot of key shots missing so it was very easy to start addressing the major issue of pacing by simply adding in the pick-up shots we had filmed. These contained a mix of stop motion sequences, dream sequences and general pick-ups that contained some key narrative points that weren’t present in the previous cut. This helped clear up a lot of the ambiguity surrounding the narrative and helped me address of the feedback straight away.

The stop motion was the biggest factor in filling the gaps in the narrative and worked very effectively at drawing the audience into the fantasy world that Daniel creates by allowing them to see it through his eyes. As two of the sequences weren’t originally stop motion in the script, I had to improvise with effects to make them still work with the narrative. In the script Daniel cannot tell if he sees his Dad or not in the first dream sequence, so I keyframed a green screen shot of him and his Dad using a blur effect to keep an enigma around the shot as we originally intended.

Using Avid's blur effect

Some of the feedback involved the cinematography and lighting which we couldn’t do anything about as reshoots were out of the question. However I did try and nullify these issues by using certain shots less frequently, or even cutting them out all together in certain scenes. In the living room scene for example, I cut out a lot of the close ups showing the dad and focused more on the wides and close ups of Daniel. This not only solved the problem of the composition, but also centred the scene more on Daniel whist building on the theme of distance between him and his dad.

Replacing shots with wides

Tightening the edit was another major task as it affected the flow and immersive nature of the narrative by being too slow and drawn out. I watched through each scene a number of times and trimmed each shot down to the optimal length, keeping in mind where the audience’s eye would be drawn to from one cut to the next. “After each cut it takes a few milliseconds for the audience to discover where they should now be looking. If you don’t carry their focus of interest across the cut points, if you make them search at every cut, they become disoriented and annoyed, without knowing why.” ^{[2; Pg 41]}

All of these changes help draw the audience’s attention away from the fact that they are watching a fantasy film and instead submerge them in the films narrative so they almost believe what they are seeing is real.“H: Editing I think is a part of the film you don’t see.”^{[1b; Pg 96]}

Here is the finished rough cut. (Last accessed: 14/05/2015, 13:37)

 Bibliography

1. Gabriella Oldham (1992); First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors; USA: University of California Press
           1a. Chapter 1: Being an Editor – Sheldon Kahn

           1b. Chapter 5: Flashback, Flashforward – Harold F. Kress and Carl Kress

2. Michael Ondaatje (2002); The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film; London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.