Robin Pilcher's Blog › Soopa Doopa glitches…

Soopa Doopa glitches are unwanted

Published 1 year ago

In my dim and distant past, I once worked for a small documentary film company in London, and still keep in touch with a couple of my work colleagues from those days. One of them was, and still is, a film editor who went on to work in feature films, and this happened to include Abba – The Movie. Now you would be right in thinking that this wasn’t the greatest production in cinematographic history, but nevertheless the reason he was chosen for this job was because of his skill at working with music. The way he cut that film certainly added to its value.

The making of any film relies on the expertise of many people – the director, the director of photography, the camera operator, the film editor. It is an impossibility for a film to be made without input from each. And sometimes one view on what’s good and what should be used may be completely different to  another. As a young cameraman , I was always told to keep out of the cutting room because sure as hell if you went in, you’d find an unwanted piece of film wrapped around your foot that was inevitably the sunrise shot that you’d struggled out of your bed for at 4am one cold winter’s morning. So the making of a film can result in some hard decisions in its process of continuous improvement. And it is continuous, unlike a static piece of art like a painting that displays every quirk and flaw of its creator, taken as being his individual style.

So, being continuous, the process of writing, whether it be in text book, historical analysis, motivation in business or fiction form, is more attuned to film-making. They all have to go through the process of being edited, to make them better books. No author has the expertise to be the film director, director of photography, camera operator and film editor. No book or short story is perfectly written and will never, or should never be published with all the ‘outtakes’, be they faults in dialogue, grammatical mistakes or quite simply bad punctuation. A film director realizes that his perfect vision of a film will not end up totally as he imagined, but it will end up a much more polished version thereof.

 Editing is part of the writing process. Editors are there to exercise their skill in making any story read as best it possibly can, not to damage it or stamp their own mark on its creation. They work for the benefit of the writer, not for themselves. Therefore, for writers, it is a question of learning to value the input of the editor and realize that they are an essential in this process of continuous improvement.

If you'd like to discuss the art of editing, or this blog in general please go to this forum thread.

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