Final Thoughts/“In the Blink of an Eye,” by Walter Murch

Final Thoughts/“In the Blink of an Eye,” by Walter Murch

From a young age, I’ve always been intrigued by film. I always found myself sifting through VHS tapes and cassettes trying to figure out which movies to watch. I can even remember my first drive-in movie experience at the age of five and the first time I watched a film in an old fashioned movie theater, The Pitt in Bedford, Pa., which was built in 1939. As I sat down in the old fashioned theater for the first time, my eyes widened and filled with awe as the projector turned on and the red velvet curtains cleared from the movie screen. The feeling was like being a kid in a candy shop. I still get that same feeling after I see a great film, but that would not be possible if it weren’t for people like Walter Murch.

Walter Murch, Academy Award Winner, editor and sound mixer, basically the father of modern editing, wrote a book called, “In the Blink of an Eye” (Revised 2^nd Edition, 2001). Since he is basically the father of the modern editing world, everyone in the editing/film world looks up to him. If Walter Murch is doing it, than everyone is doing it. Per se, when he started editing on Avid, nearly everyone was using Avid, and when he started using Final Cut Pro, nearly everyone made their way to using Final Cut Pro. Now Murch is back to using Avid, his preferred digital editing source.  So, people are using which editing source is more comfortable for them.  

When I started reading “In the Blink of an Eye,” by Walter Murch, I didn’t know what to expect.  The deeper I got in to the book, the more I didn’t want to put it down. Everything Murch was talking about made sense, and deepened my understanding of all the editing techniques and theories we were taught in class.  

In the first portion of the book, Walter Murch tells us about the time he travelled to England for his first anniversary with his wife. When he got there, one of his wife’s friends asked him, “Well, what is it that you do?” Murch replied that he was studying film editing, and his wife’s friend responded, “That’s where you cut out the bad bits.” But editing is much more than that. “Editing is structure, color, dynamics, manipulation of time, all of these other things, etc., etc.” (10) This is definitely true. Sure you are editing out the “bad bits,” the actors performance, off-lighting, etc., but you are also crafting the entire story and developing characters during the process.

On page 13, Murch discusses, if different editors were given the same dailies, there would be different ways each editors cut would be structured. Once again, Murch is correct. For our final project, we all had to edit our crew members’ footage and come up with how we pictured the scene. Not a single one had the same interpretation. A good example could be found with Mike’s cut of Joe’s dailies. The way he structured his cut created a different focus on a different character, making it seem if that he was the main character rather than the original main character.

I could write a whole dissertation on Murch and editing and its plethora of theories, like; why cuts work, the blinking theory, sound mixing, digital editing, etc., but I don’t think anyone would want to read a 10 page paper about all that on a blog. I leave my final part of my blog entry with this. Emotion. You sacrifice certain cuts to preserve the emotion. When you are editing, you consider everything in the following order;  1) Emotion – 51%, 2) Story – 23%, 3) Rhythm – 10%, 4) Eye-trace – 7%, 5) Two-dimensional plane of screen – 5%, and 6) Three-dimensional space of action – 4%. When watching film now, I analyze EVERYTHING, thanks Alex. But, what gets me to un-focus from the minuet details that are not right in the film is the emotion. Emotion can make or break a film. If you make cuts just to obey one of the rules of editing and the acting is bad and there is no emotion, then that takes away from the sentiment of the scene/film and you, as an audience, cannot connect to it. But, a good editor can preserve both emotion and the rules of editing. That's what makes them so great, as well as their films.