In The Blink Of An Eye

I have recently finished reading the book In The Blink Of An Eye written by Walter Murch. The book is a revised transcription of a lecture on film editing that Walter Murch gave in a mixing theatre in Sydney Australia in 1988. The book was revised in 2001 to reflect on the changes in the digital editing.

The book goes talks through various sections such as why do cuts work, the rule of six see around the edges and the decisive moment. Whilst reading the book, one of the sections that stood out to me was in the 'Methods and Machines: Marble and Clay' chapter of the book.


"When you look at the dailies for the first time, you have a relatively fixed idea - based on the script - of what you are looking for. Later on, though, you review some of your original notes, and they will say, for instance: "212-4 NG." What does that mean? It meant that at the time you thought take four of Slate 212 was No Good, and you didn't bother to make a note of why you thought so. Well, many times in the re-editing, what you thought was originally unusable may come to be your salvation."


The quote above made me think about when I had been editing and I had decided that there was a shot that was unusable. I labelled it with the colour red on Final Cut Pro to show that is was a bad take and I wasn't going to use it. After cutting the film I was working on together, I showed it to my group and they asked if there were any other shots of a certain type, one of them being the shot that I had originally labelled as a bad take. I looked back at the take and then decided in the end that I could use the shot. Through my own actions and also reading this book, I think it is a very good idea when you are going through footage for the first time, to write down any comments that you have about a shot that you think at the time is a bad take just incase in the future you need to know why you originally thought the shot was bad without having to find it and watch it back.

A couple of pages later in the book, I noticed another statement that stood out to me.


"When you look at rushes the second time, you will have evolved and the film has evolved. You will see different things than you saw the first time, because you may have assembled scenes that hadn't been shot the first time you saw the material, and strengths or problems may be emerging with characters and events as they unfold"

The quote above again made me think back to another situation I had when editing another film. I had been given the footage that had been shot however; there were still several scenes that needed to be filmed. I got straight on with the assembly of the scenes that I had been given and they didn’t feel strong at all. Once I had the rest of the footage a few days later, I assembled the rest of the scenes and then looking back at the original scenes that I had edited, I noticed that several of the shots that I decided not to use were now usable because the meaning of the scene had changed.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the book and I feel as though I have now learnt a lot more about editing, taking what I had learnt by reading the book into my own practice and improving my work using the knowledge I had gained from the book.