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10/24/2019 Transcript: Putting Together A Music Montage (Editing As Storytelling)

Transcript: Putting Together A Music Montage (Editing As Storytelling)

BYU-Idaho Online Learning


Video Transcript

Putting Together A Music Montage (Editing As Storytelling)

This is an excerpt of a recent power up webinar taking a look at editing as storytelling the craft of editing Hi, my name is Larry
Jordan in this excerpt I'll show you how to put together a montage, a video that tells the story to music. Now to prevent st ghts I
want to be clear there's no one perfect way to edit anything. My goal today is not to show you the perfect way to edit, but it's to
show you instead how I think during an edit session. If my way of thinking works for you great, if not use my way of thinking as a
springboard to develop your own techniques. When editing a series of nondramatic images, for example a montage of beauty
shots, I edit the music to the timeline rst and then I pay very close attention to matching the beat of the music with the timing of
my edits, but when I'm editing a series of dramatic images that tell a story I edit the images to tell the story rst then I add the
music later. In this second example, I am far less concerned about matching the beat of the music than telling the story. Keep in
mind that when we're doing montages the video provides the details; the music provides the emotion. You want to pick the right
transition and this is the new piece of thinking that occurred this morning. Dissolves are better when you are editing standalone
images, Beauty shots of nature, there's no relationship between shot number 1 & 2 & 3, but cuts are better when you're telling a
story. Where the shots relate to each other, in general, you want to cut to the beat of the music, however, if you've got a clearly
established beat people start to expect the edits are going to occur on the beat. So what I will often do, just to play games with
their heads, is that I'll take a shot and I'll extend it across the beat because extending the shot across the beat calls more attention
to that shot. You'll see that as the rst example in the video we're about to put together. For example, here I have series of images,
created by Jim Walker, of lobsters gone wild productions of undersea footage set to music. Let me show you what I've got so far.
Now the rst thing that I did is decide what music I wanted to cut these two and then I set markers in that indicate where each of
the major beats are. The downbeat for each measure and it works out that the beats are exactly three seconds apart. So when I
created my rst clips I set them all to be three seconds and that way I know they would match the beat, but let's look at this rst
shot. Also notice that I've put the audio inside the primary storyline and I'm dealing with all of my V role as a connected storyline.
The bene t here is I get all the bene ts of trimming the clips inside the connected storyline. First thing I'm going to do is change
the duration of this rst shot from three seconds to six seconds. I want to have it hold for just a minute and the reason is if we get
too literal, following the beat of the music suddenly the audience starts to anticipate our edit and are watching for the Edit as
opposed to watching the shots. I'm going to change this a little bit. Watch these sh. Notice when they change direction, right
there. So what I'm going to do is grab the trim tool, click right on top of that frame, and drag it so that it's on top of the marker. So
the sh change direction on the beat, but the shot doesn't change on the beat. This isn't a bad shot. I've got a better shot so; I'm
going to do a replace. Let's just see if we can nd where it is, all right, here is the Fishes are swimming past. It gets us this feeling of
a close-up of the sh swimming. So I'm going to grab this clip and drag it and replace that edit. We'll just swap one from the other
and now let's take a look at it. Now kill the sound. In fact, I'll add some additional underwater sound under here to give us a little
bit more life right about there. Razor blade tool, cut that o , disappear, pull that sound down just a bit so we get some general
presence.
Now notice that we've switched direction. Here the sh are all going from the left to the right, here they're going from the left to
the right, but in the middle of the shot they're now changing direction to go from right to left, which means that the next shot of
the sh also going from right to left starts to make sense. We're maintaining the screen direction. Now here we've got two, I don't
know what they are but they're not sh, at the bottom of the water, on the oor of the ocean and we see a little movement coming
o each one of those. We've got a couple of options here. As I look at my other shots, I have a shot of the two of them. I have a
shot where this one's got its foot out doing whatever it's doing, I've got another shot where we're looking at the other side over
here. I think we could set up a quick dialogue between the two of them, so let's nd the spot, right there. As it's moving forward
nd that shot right there. Set an in control D. Set a duration of three seconds nd our mollusk shot or whatever that is and do an
insert. Do an insert at it by selecting the connected storyline type, the letter.  We go pull our sound down okay and then let's just
get a response over here from this guy and turn skimming back on, nd our number two mollusk right there. Set an in control-d
three seconds, put our playhead where we want the insert to be, do another insert edit by selecting the storyline. Turn the sound
o , get rid of that ash frame. Try it again.  Now starting to move so we'll back that up just a bit because I didn't want to have him
start to walking there and then let's pick up something di erent.
 We've got another really cool shot, which is a sea turtle oating around in here and we'll set this up. If we notice over at this spot
he oats o into the distance, this is a great ending shot. So I see the ending shot coming and notice also we've got a dialog. We
see rst our two-shot we set it up, then we cut to the person on the right facing to the left, cut to the person on the Left facing to
the right, so we've got this nice dialogue between the two of them as they start to crawl together. Then let's see, we could drop in a
shark shot. Sort of cut away from that dialogue. Will nd our sea turtle. Let's nd a point where it pivots around, right there. So it's
changing direction. Again, I like having the fact that that object, let's see control D three seconds and we'll set that here there we
go. Notice that our mollusk is looking to the right then we cut to our shark that's looking to the left. Again we're keeping that sense
of overall dialogue between the di erent elements. This is rst kill the sound, second turn on trimming and slip this. I want to get
more of the turn complete, so we'll pick it up right before that right about there and let's see. Go to a sh that's keeping an eye on
what's going on and edit that down to our sequence and then we'll build a dialogue here. Let's go back to our sea turtle and again,
carry the story theme through and go back to our shark and I'm just setting in durations and set that to trim.
So here's how the nal dialogue ends up. Mollusk moving, scene change, turtle does not want to be eaten, sh sort of hides in the
rocks, turtles going away so far away in fact, that we missed the shark. In fact, the sh doesn't belong there at all. We'll take that

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10/24/2019 Transcript: Putting Together A Music Montage (Editing As Storytelling)
out, put our playhead back here. Okay so we've got the turtle turning, shark coming closer and we'll do the shark again. Okay so
now we've got our dialogue the mollusks are hiding, we see a shark cruising, turtle turns around, shark gets closer.
Now here's another cool trick. We'll just take all of that stu go to the inspector audio set the volume to zero and they're all done.
So what we did is we tried not to get completely rhythmic on the beats of the music. We took our rst shot and stretched it and
had action change on the beat, we continued screen direction and when we switch screen direction, we switch direction in the
middle of the shot. We built dialogues between di erent characters, we broke the one dialog and went to a second dialogue. Turtle
escaping from shark, shark getting closer, turtle getting farther away. Notice they're both going in the same direction. So we've got
the turtle, shark, turtle, shark. We got too many turtles here. Let's get rid of this one. Stretch this down. Okay, so now let's play it
shark, turtle, switch screen direction, shark sees the turtle, turtle gets away, shark getting closer, and the turtle escapes o into the
distance.
 Even though we were editing just images to music we could still build a story and build a sense of relationship between the shots
by considering screen direction, by repeating shots. In our mind we'll build a story of ongoing challenge and life under the water
just by looking at these shots go through. This is our rst example of editing a music montage. This is what I just learned as I was
putting this together because you remember I said that dissolves allow us to amplify the emotion. Well I decided let's take a look at
this again and look at both versions. A version where it's just cuts and a version where it's just dissolves. Here's the piece we just
completed where everything is a cut. Now compare the di erence where we do the exact same piece and this time we add
dissolves. The thing that impresses me is the content is the same, but the dissolves change it emotionally. What I was especially
struck by is the fact that the dissolve seemed to disconnect the story. The images became standalone as opposed to the dialogue
that we had between the shark and the sea turtle or that the two creatures on the ocean oor is that the dissolves sort of broke
that dialogue up in a way that I wasn't expecting.
This has been an excerpt of a recent power up webinar taking a look at editing as storytelling. For the complete version of this
online training please visit our store at larryjordan.biz/store and look for webinar 134. Membership is a great value especially when
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