Good acting versus good editing

Let me make an analogy. Can a musical performance be edited to sound tighter? Yes. Does it sound better? I doubt it. Why on earth would you want to screw with a talent's performance? I think with modern NLEs and DAWs music and film is over processed, over produced. Editing is an incredible form of art, just like audio engineering, but they're not performance arts. They're functional and lend a lot to posterity, and they can have immense style and nuance. Just understand what the different art forms are and respect them.

Why would you want to hire Miles Davis or someone of that caliber, and then cut him all to hell to make a techno album? If that's the kind of talent you're seeking, don't be an idiot and misuse him. It's an operational inefficiency at the least, and a potential blunder at most. If you were a talented engineer/remixer you could possibly make something interesting, but I would still argue that there's a certain arrogance in using such a talent in that way.

The fact of the matter is, you're not going to make Miles Davis or the like "sound-better-in-post". The entire point to hiring someone like Matthew McConaughy, Meryl Streep, or Gary Oldman is to capture those nuances, their humanity that they bring to the table. It's so arrogant to think that you'll improve their performance somehow. You could make the timing better, and tighten the arrangement, but don't kid yourself that you're performing. Their emotions, licks, subtle human qualities were there. They did that. Taking credit for an actors performance, as an editor, is like an engineer saying he can play guitar like Eric Clapton because he arranged his latest album in Pro Tools. It's like, "No dude, that was Eric Clapton playing.". If you think you are really adding that much to the performance, well, you're over producing or going overboard in post. It's probably pretty damned obnoxious. But with the way movies look nowadays, it's just how things go.

You can't cut a bad actor into a good performance. You could make it ok I suppose. Do you honestly think an actor that has won an Oscar for their role was so helped out by their editor that it's the reason they won?
 
Aaron Marshall said:
Let me make an analogy.
Click to expand...


The problem is just that: Analogies do not work very well in respect of movie-making. It is in the end a special form of an art that merges next to all other forms. Yes: Walter Benjamin's theory, still alive and kicking... and if Benjamin is too much "old school" for your taste just call it an "holistic" view on film-making... ;-)

So an analogy to a soloist in music also does not work very well. Because what he/she does is more or less the end product while acting in a movie is only a part, one element (yes an important even crucial one) of several other elements (including other actors, btw) of the end product.

Maybe you get a bit farther with an analogy to an orchestra with an actor representing an instrument or a group of such and the conductors baton representing the editor.... but: Beware ....
 
Aaron Marshall said:
Let me make an analogy. Can a musical performance be edited to sound tighter? Yes. Does it sound better? I doubt it. Why on earth would you want to screw with a talent's performance? I think with modern NLEs and DAWs music and film is over processed, over produced. Editing is an incredible form of art, just like audio engineering, but they're not performance arts. They're functional and lend a lot to posterity, and they can have immense style and nuance. Just understand what the different art forms are and respect them.

Why would you want to hire Miles Davis or someone of that caliber, and then cut him all to hell to make a techno album? If that's the kind of talent you're seeking, don't be an idiot and misuse him. It's an operational inefficiency at the least, and a potential blunder at most. If you were a talented engineer/remixer you could possibly make something interesting, but I would still argue that there's a certain arrogance in using such a talent in that way.

The fact of the matter is, you're not going to make Miles Davis or the like "sound-better-in-post". The entire point to hiring someone like Matthew McConaughy, Meryl Streep, or Gary Oldman is to capture those nuances, their humanity that they bring to the table. It's so arrogant to think that you'll improve their performance somehow. You could make the timing better, and tighten the arrangement, but don't kid yourself that you're performing. Their emotions, licks, subtle human qualities were there. They did that. Taking credit for an actors performance, as an editor, is like an engineer saying he can play guitar like Eric Clapton because he arranged his latest album in Pro Tools. It's like, "No dude, that was Eric Clapton playing.". If you think you are really adding that much to the performance, well, you're over producing or going overboard in post. It's probably pretty damned obnoxious. But with the way movies look nowadays, it's just how things go.

You can't cut a bad actor into a good performance. You could make it ok I suppose. Do you honestly think an actor that has won an Oscar for their role was so helped out by their editor that it's the reason they won?
Click to expand...

Now, really; who on Earth would ever make the claim that they edited an actor into an Oscar-wining performance?

I said: "You can cut a bad actor into a good performance. Sometimes. But it's always better if they give you a good performance." That's it.

So, Aaron, I think you may have overreacted a tad.

Anyway, songs and music ARE made from multiple takes. It's very rare that what you hear in a recording was entirely done in one take, in real time.
 
As an amateur (though long time) musician, ABSOLUTELY can you make music better in post. DAWs now can allow you to take 50 imperfect takes of a rhythm guitar track/vocal track/guitar solo and edit them into one PERFECT take by taking the best pieces from each of those 50 takes and editing them together with micro-fades. I'm sure everyone doesn't need this (e.g. the Claptons of the world) but the Josh Basses sure as eff do, unless they want to do that guitar solo for a week straight trying to get a perfect take. Futhermore, EQing etc. can hide some of the slop in one's musicianship (extra unintentional notes ringing out on guitar can be suppressed in the mix for example).
 
Really pleased to follow this discussion, i d like to read some
similar on french forum but i can t find one ! i sware, i tryed.


For me, Acting is one of the writing layer that are when
you make a film. Editing is an other one. It works like an onion
where the first common layer is the scenario ( in fact it could not
be the first one ).


the action is the platform where the talent play. The talent can change
is performance from a take to an other but never the action. never.
So, for me the main objective of editing is to reveal and magnify the
action ( = the story at the scale of the entire film ).
for exemple : Adding some silence between two lines will often
reinforce the performance of the talent, accentuate the attention of
the audience and bring tension into the action the way it was writen.
( it s just one exemple not a demonstration )


But what you see when you are editing is that you can influence
the audience in a way that was not writed before. This is why
a director take a part in the editing process, some of them
don t, and they probably consider that their job is done, they give
full confidence to the editor. Plenty of director do that, for exemple
Bertrand Tavernier give full control to his wife to edit his film.


So, good editing is more than restoring the action. You bring things
to life, you plays with all the nuances you can create with the material
you have... but most of it must exist before. ex: you can t invent tension in
talent s eyes if it was not present in the performance but you can create
a landscape that was not there at the shooting step...


But hey, wait a minute it was not there ? O i think it was, yes !
In talent s eyes, in his thought, in his play. Good actors
have a presentiment of the editing, and this is the second part, the actors :


I d like to add something that i can observ with most of french actors,
this is something that complicate the storytelling and, by the way, the job of
the editor :


They often play emotion. Not action. This is for me a total misunderstanding
of what is a story and a total conptemt for the audience.
Prestigious Cours Florent here in france, actually train the actors this way
( i want to say, it was not the case when Francois Florent created it in the 70s )
This make catastrophic results when you bring this actors to screen, this is
something that can even fool a director into bad direction, and de-focus the
attention of the audience, since the center of the story is not the action anymore
but the talent <<performance>>. But there is a man or a woman that have to compose
with this problematic stuff : the editor. and it s a pain.
Good acting = actors who play action, are rarely betrayed by editing.


Thank you for reading. This is my personnal thought and it could change by the time...
 
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inefab, your post reminded me of The Kuleshov Effect. A Soviet filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov, intercut the same face with three images: a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a beautiful woman. The audience "raved about the acting . . . the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."

 
Aaron Marshall said:
. The entire point to hiring someone like Matthew McConaughy, Meryl Streep, or Gary Oldman is to capture those nuances, their humanity that they bring to the table. It's so arrogant to think that you'll improve their performance somehow.
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Once I get to have Meryl Streep in my film, I'll keep that in mind. ;) But even then, you inevitably alter the performance unless you're shooting two cameras and match takes. I remember Lonngergan swung for two cameras for the restaurant scene for You can Count on Me with Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo so that he could have the actual reactions. This is quite common now and does a lot to maintain the fidelity of great performances. But if you're shooting single camera and covering reverses, OTS's or whatever on a single camera, you make that scene in the edit, no matter what. That's why I'm excited about the resurgence of classical camera moves, landing in frames ala House of Cards, or Better Call Saul in letting a scene play out in a well blocked two shot, basically capturing a single performance with two actors with blocking, moving the camera and good framing.

In any case it's only one take and every good actor will give you a different take. That's the medium. It is decided in the edit.
 
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combatentropy said:
inefab, your post reminded me of The Kuleshov Effect. A Soviet filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov, intercut the same face with three images: a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a beautiful woman. The audience "raved about the acting . . . the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."

Click to expand...

Brilliant.
 
combatentropy said:
Wish there were more of this.
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Oh YEAH - I've seen this breakdown before. Great great stuff by ALL parties involved in the shot.

This would be an example of the long shots I mentioned early on in this thread.
Giants in their respective fields kicking so much arse that the editor got to sit this one out.

Doesn't happen often, but when it does - kaPOW!
 
Poor, old Kuleshov. Has been getting a bit overstretched the last 87 years. His experiment was to show the basic concept of juxtaposition in telling stories. It was extremely reductionist to show this effect - like you would reduce all brain activities to the function of only two nerve cells developing a synaptic connection. While the basic concept works under the rules of this experiment it's a bit overblown to transfer this rule into the real world of movies to make statements that one craft rules the other.

Apart from that we now live in different times with a much more trained and sophisticated audience and - not to forget - we normally have "talkies" now where actors may say one or two important things, we should make a different experiment: What if the actor would not have a neutral face but play different emotions to the same object?

This way we could establish the - seemingly - opposite theory, that the acting will have changed the audience's interpretation while seeing the same subject, say, the half naked lady: laughing, crying, looking angry, snoring .... different reaction ..... so ... acting rules, no?! Yes and no.

We would have learned that juxtaposition is a mighty tool in telling a story, but that in the latter case the actor would have provided the emotionally determining factor. So, before the equation is:

A) Neutral face - food - neutral face - dead kid - neutral face - sexy lady = hunger, sorrow, lust.

an now:

B) Angry face - sexy lady - lusting face - sexy lady - sleepy face - sexy lady = it's my wife and I don't like it - oh my, have to get my hands on her - not again those garter belts.....

Three different reactions to the same object, definitely more complex ... and Kuleshov would still be right while the actor would have set the emotion. There is no craft to rule them all in film-making.... apart from film-making.

My 0,02 rubles of wisdom... ;-)
 
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combatentropy said:
Wish there were more of this.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's the stuff. That's such a great shot. Spielberg's genius at these; Fincher too. I like the anamatics also, thanks for posting that. It takes shot listing and planning. I'll use Hollywood Camerworks shot designer. It's great for planning this type of shot. I get tired of getting on narratives where it's all "coverage" and figuring it out in the edit. I was listening to some podcast with the DP of House of Cards and they always do these "moving masters." What's great is that you can get these, let them play or, if you feel you need to emphasize something not there in that master, you can pick and choose a place to pop in a reverse or two then pick up this shot again. I just love this type of shooting.
 
combatentropy said:
Bear in mind that the one who posted the Kuleshov Effect also made two posts in favor of the long take. :-)
Click to expand...

No problem with the long take. Whatever tells the story right is right. And if the long take would then lead to a sequence of staccato editing, it would just be another juxtaposition of rhythmic elements on a big scale.... :-)
 
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