In this week’s lecture the topic was editing, and since the technique in the lecture room failed we couldn’t watch a movie this time so we were asked to just write about editing.
The most popular editing technique is the conventional editing, and it is this type of editing we see in the traditional Hollywood movies. The most essential characteristic of this editing technique is that it takes out all the non essential elements in the content without destroying the flow, which means that it compromises time, uses the smallest amount of takes. Another editing element is to connect multiple storylines together through parallel editing. A movie can have several sub stories within the film where the movie switches between these stories and they make progress in the main story, and through the different sub stories we also get to learn more about the other story.
As the stories are tied more and more closely together, the swopping between the stories gets faster and faster, which means that the pace of the movie speeds up as the movie closes up to the climax. An example of a movie that uses several sub stories that gets bound together towards the end through the speed of the pace is “Smokin’ Aces”.


Like the big scene at the end of the movie where Alicia Keyes and partner are preparing to shoot from a building and the police closes up to them, the several very different sub stories suddenly gets connected to each other and the movie ends up making sense in the end and because of the clever editing in the movie you get surprised over how it ends up, and impressed by the story.
I’ve noticed that there are several directors that like to use certain editing techniques in their movies.
Baz Luhrman for example often uses a lot of fast editing in his movies to keep the intensity, together with a lot of montages, especially in Moulin Rouge, but also in Romeo+Juliet, when Romeo and his friends come to a party and takes some drugs.
Quentin Tarantino likes to use different and unusual editing in his movies, in Reservoir Dogs he uses retro perspective editing, in Pulp Fiction he uses non linear editing where the stories jumps back and forth in time, in Jackie Brown he also uses non linear editing in some parts of the movie, in Kill Bill he uses chapters to edit and separate the movie parts and in Death Proof he has two different sequels in the movie, two parts that even though they have a lot of similarities they have few connections to the previous story.

Editing allows the director to shoot parts of the movie out of plot order and to shoot scenes at different places and return to them for example. When there is a change of location in the movie, the editor usually uses an establishing shot showing where the scene takes place, either in a bank building, a mountain or in Paris, to illustrate to the audience where the scene takes place.
Another example of a movie that uses sub stories that first in the movie does not seem to have any connection to each other but later is tied together is the Cohen Brother’s “No Country for Old Men”. The movie starts very slowly with very long takes and little action, but through the use of faster pace and shorter takes the movie eventually becomes filled with action and excitement.