Editing

In this post I am gong to be talking about the editing process of an opening scene. I will compare two film clips and look at how they are edited and the pace of the edit and discuss how I would apply these techniques in my opening scene. The first scene I am going to study is from  the hit 2005 film 'Mr And Mrs Smith'.

In the first 2 minutes we see a couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in marriage counselling. The audience can see from the mis en scene that they are a couple on the verge of breaking up by the framing of the shot. Its almost as if they want to keep as far away from each other as possible by sitting right on the edge of there seat and stuffing pillows next to them to as if they are trying to block each other out of their mind. Seeing as they are struggling with the relationship they have cleverly edited the scene making it very slow as if its dragging, reflecting their relationship. Whenever they have nothing too say it cuts to black and the titles come in to place and even makes the audience feel awkward. So overall the way they have edited is in a slow way.

    The next scene I will discuss is the scene from 'The Break Up'. I previously analysed this particular scene in another post a post on this particular scene. In this scene we see a couple breaking up and in comparison to the scene from 'Mr And Mrs Smith' the edit is much faster and less awkward, but more tense for the audience. For my opening scene I would like our pace of editing to be in the middle of the style of these two clips so that it will create an awkward and tense for the audience instead of just being one of the two.