Lesson: Murch, Voiceovers, Trailers

In this session we looked at Murch's six which can be found in his book In The Blink Of An Eye 2nd Edition (2001). Murch breaks down and looks at the weighting of what he believes to be important in mainstream editing.

1. Emotion - 51%
2. Story - 23%
3. Rhythm - 10%
4. Eye Trace - 7%
5. Two Dimensional Space of Action - 5%
6. Three Dimensional Space of Action - 4%

When I saw the figures I assumed that Story would have been quite highly percentiled with Emotion, with Rhythm at a near third place leaving the last three to be split between a remaining 10%. The main lesson was that we need to learn and understand the ways of mainstream editing before we can then go and break and manipulate it to our own preferred or engineered styles.

We then continued to look at some more pieces of film that uses voice over to the best effect.
GoodFellas (Scorsese 1990) is the story of the rise of Ray Liotta Henry Hill in the mobster business. Hill is looking back perspectively giving us a running commentary of his days in the business, his narration pulls the story along and sets up the visuals.
For example in this dinner scene Hill talks about the preparation of dinner during their time in the prison, He talks about Paulie slicing the garlic and there is this tight shot of him slicing it to perfection, then he moves on to talk about Vinnie and his tomato sauce and how he thinks he adds to many onion, and that's the only conversation topic for a good 30 seconds until the narration mentions something else. And so is the rhythm with not just this scene but the movie as a whole. It is a perspective tale therefore its like we see as he thinks.




As well as that the placement of the famous long take scene also works really well as it is a break from all the hustle and bustle and narration that has takne place so far, it's almost like a breather for the audience that also lets them see the world that the story takes place in in a different way.



The Third Man (Reed, 1949) [1:30 - 1:46]



This opening dialogue is effective in that the music runs with the script. It's fast paced and up beat and the cuts are methodical with the script, and just very hand to mouth. He mentions the black market, we see trading on the black market etc. It is the same system that Scorsese's GoodFellas uses but they have different effects because of the music, genre and the back story.

Later on in session we got into two groups of five and attempted to make a 30 second trailer based on any production that former students had been a part of. Working in such a group size left 3 people to gather resources, one person to find music and another person to be putting it all together. It was a trying task but we learnt that though its easier to edit alone you do at times need a director/second pair of eyes to help keep the main points in check.