PART 8: Old School Razor Blades
While all this digital NLE (Non-Linear Editing) technology allows us to salvage imperfect footage and sometimes manufacture new shots by piecing together other ones, my experience is that the most powerful tool in the editor's box is a good old razor blade (or the digital equivalent). The oldest and most basic tool is the one that solves most problems best.
Most of a film edit is straight cutting. You take a shot and cut off everything that precedes and follows the bit you want. You splice those one after another and you have a scene. Low-budget and/or amateur shoots typically result in imperfect footage and spotty coverage, so a big part of an editor's job in such circumstances is to figure out how to isolate the good bits and arrange them in a fashion which feels deliberate, where the cuts are “motivated” (as in, you cut to that for a storytelling or pacing reason, etc.), and which tells the story in a dramatic fashion with a good pace and rhythm. It’s not easy.
Act 4 not only posed this problem, but presented a related one: sometimes the only coverage of a bit of action was fundamentally flawed and sometimes those shots were things you really couldn’t cut away from because there was either nothing to cut to or the cutaway was obvious. If you notice the edit it’s a bad edit.
So, here are a few examples of places where judicious use of the razorblade saved a scene.
The Tressaurian escaping the brig was the very first scene I attacked when I started editing. It was one of the worst moments in the act as edited, so I figured “start with the hardest thing”. As shot and originally edited the power dims and the forcefield flickers out, the redshirt draws his phaser and steps in front of the door but the lizard’s hand grabs him by the collar, shakes him around and thrusts him off camera. It sounds okay, but it looked anemic and the amount of force behind the lizard arm’s thrust wasn’t convincing to sell the redshirt flying through the air in the subsequent stunt. Furthermore, the fact that the lizard shook the guy around for a couple of seconds makes the viewer ask why the stupid guard doesn’t fire his damned weapon? The whole problem was the grab-n-shake. The solution was to just excise it. I literally whacked out a couple of dozen frames right in the middle of the shot, all of them between the grab start to the point where the claw let go of the redshirt. The result: it appears the lizard punches the guy in the throat! Not only does it sell the guy flying in the subsequent shot, but it ‘splains why the guy didn’t shoot. He never got the chance. That’s the most basic thing about good editorial: it improves the footage in the simplest way possible.
The frame trimming technique was applied other places to “fix” flawed footage and make it usable. For instance, in the best takes of the line “Hit on starboard warp pod,” Michael Buford hesitated in the middle of the line, so I trimmed out the hesitation. Trouble was the edit there was blatantly obvious, however the ship was under fire during this action, so I introduced some simulated camera shake and jolted the frame as if the ship was hit right at the moment of the snip. The jolts utterly disguise the cut because there’s a reason why Cutty suddenly shifts position.
The final scenes in the transporter room were a big stumbling block. What has been shot during principle photography didn't really work (Richards enters, fires on the Tressaurian, which is knocked back only for a moment and then attacks and knocks her down, but she manages to reset the phaser, vaporize it, activates and then beams the device out, but is zapped by it as it dematerializes). So, they came back later, set up two walls of the room and shot Richards fighting the lizard (she kneed, kicked, and two-handed Kirk-whacked him). But most of that footage looked goofy. Neither character moved fast enough to sell the fight, and a lot of the moves just looked silly. Various edits had been made of this and none worked at all. They all felt choppy and disjointed or just clumsy. My mission: make an acceptable fight out of this mess of mismatched bits.
I went through every shot and isolated every tiny useable bit from every take, and threw them all into an edit timelime. I’m talking individual actions here, not shots. I’d clip out every bit of the lizard turning, of it swiping, of it grabbing her, or her ducking, of her hitting it, of her kneeing it, of her kicking it, of it stabbing her, of her falling on the floor, of her hand going for the phaser, etc. etc. I compared them, figured out which were the best bits, and then I moved those over to a blank space and started shuffling them around to see if I could make a sensible sequence of action in which the cuts would feel motivated and the action would feel cut together deliberately, not to cover our asses. It was one of the toughest things to get to work at all, but no matter what I did what I couldn’t make work was Richards struggling over to the console. Then I got an idea: just as her hand gropes for the phaser do a cut to the bridge to see how dire the situation is, then come back to the lizard at the device in the transporter, hear the transporter activate, and have the lizard turn to see Richards at the console. What this does is make her action a surprise to both the lizard and the audience.
Finally, to polish it, I trimmed out single frames here and there to ramp up the speed so to make the lizard’s blows feel harder and to make Richards’ anemic knee to the lizard’s side look strong enough to make it go “oof!” Sure, it still doesn’t look totally convincing, but if you saw the raw footage you’d be amazed how much better this is. (And what ultimately sells the “oof!” moment is Scott’s dubbing in Richards' grunting with effort as she knees the lizard in the giblets.)
Next Up: Shakes, Sparks and Stabs
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