sequencing

OK, this is really the last time, for awhile, that I will talk about film.

As I was putting the finishing touches on the 'fight' sequence at the end of Gym Dreams, I remembered an interview on NPR with Thelma Schoonmaker who was Martin Scorsese's favorite editor and won an Oscar for her editing work on Raging Bull.

At one point in the interview she talks about how she put a frame or a short sequence of frames in upside down in their fight sequence. Her answer to the question ‘Why’ was simply that it worked.

When I was working on my own sequence, I found that occasionally things worked in order, but more often than not, mixing up the images independent of how they were captured ‘worked better.’

In general, this is something I see in many people’s early narratives in their audio slide shows. They arrange things in order they took them, the flow of a day, to match the audio. What I don’t see, more often than not, is that they don’t order the images together in a way that flows together visually.

Just food for thought.