Exploiting Hollywood 1980

   Chapter 176 In the blink of an eye

   "Pfft." Ronald rolled off the bed. He sat on the ground and scratched his head.

After getting the good news that the script was sold, Ronald felt that he should be able to dream of the film being finished. The project has been approved. He not only participated in the production of the film, but also knew the heroine of the film. Did he dream of the film? The necessary and sufficient conditions have been met?

  I went to bed excitedly, but I was so excited that I slept a few times without falling asleep. Thinking of the last two times that I dreamed of a movie, I fell off the bed and simply slept next to the bed, so the probability of dreaming should be higher.

   Who knows, apart from falling out of bed in the morning, I haven't dreamed of any movies.

   It was really impossible to dream of making a film, Ronald simply came to the Sentinel Building early and entered the diorama company early to continue watching the film.

   "Why did you come to the company so early? I don't recommend working for a long time. Editing is not a profession where you can produce masterpieces just by grinding time. It requires inspiration and accumulation of experience."

  Walter Murkey saw Ronald come so early and thought he was going to work overtime, nine hours a day, seven days a week, and he stopped it immediately.

   "Ah, no. I was so excited that I couldn't sleep, so I came here. My agent told me that someone was interested in the script I wrote." Ronald replied.

   "Aha, congratulations." Walter Murkey hugged him, "This is a good start. I know your ambition is to be a director, and the screenwriter is actually very suitable for young people who want to be a director."

  Mercie thought that Ronald might have written a low-budget movie script, which was favored by small producers, and did not go into it.

   "So you've been watching the original film of Apocalypse Now these days, have you learned?"

   It turned out that I was not taught to edit these days, and I was allowed to watch the original footage by myself, which was really a test for me, Ronald thought.

   "Some progress, I can't stop at the same grid every time, but the success rate is higher than before."

   "Come with me." Walter Murkey opened his editing room and let Ronald follow.

   Ronald was very excited, Merzy was finally going to teach himself secrets.

  Walter had Ronald take two previous "Apocalypse Now" films and put them on a KEM editor made in West Germany.

   The film and tape of this horizontal editing machine are placed flat on the editing table. Not vertically like the old Moviola editor. Put the film and tape on the film reel, pull the film through various guide posts, and finally fix it on another film reel.

  Turn on the machine, Ronald stood and pressed a handle in the middle of the editing table and twisted it left and right to play, stop, and fast forward and rewind.

   One of the advantages of the KEM horizontal editing machine is that it has less noise. The Moviola vertical machine operates like a sewing machine. The noise of the KEM is similar to that of a tape recorder, only a very low rustling sound.

  Clap, Walter Murkey pressed the stop button.

   "Here is the cut point I chose, did you find anything?"

   Ronald stepped forward, stared at the display for a long time, and shook his head, "I didn't find anything."

   "Watch his eyes," says Walter Murkey, pointing to Martin Sheen's character on screen.

  “Eyes?” Ronald picked up the control wheel, rewinded a segment of footage, and played at normal speed to the cut point.

   This time he kept staring at the actor's eyes, and the scene on the screen had just passed the cut point Walter pointed out, as if Martin Sheen had blinked.

  Ronald moved in his heart and went back to read it again.

   "Have you found it yet? Good." Walter Murkey looked delighted.

   "Is that here? It seems like he blinked once past your chosen cut point." Ronald yelled.

   "That's what I discovered while editing Coppola's film "The Big Plot." Walter Murkey taught Ronald his "secrets."

   "My editing points are all selected at the moment before the characters are about to blink. That morning, I just finished editing the film after working overtime, and I discovered this pattern when sorting out the film in the morning.

   I was walking down the streets of San Francisco, excited, thinking I had discovered a great secret. Coincidentally, I bought a newspaper on the street and read an interview with the director of John Huston that attracted me.

  Houston shared my view in the interview, he believed that the blink of an eye is the end of the human mind. A person blinks when a thought in his head reaches the end. "

   Ronald is confused? "In middle school textbooks, doesn't it say that blinking is because the eyes are dry and need to be moistened?"

   "This is not right. If we record a video of a person in a desert environment, we will find that their blink rate is the same as that in a humid environment, such as the seaside."

   Ronald got his first taste of Walter Mersey's scientific thinking. This man did not believe in any textbooks or ready-made conclusions of others, but thought independently and used scientific experiments to verify his views.

   "Then how do I prove your point that the blink of an eye is the end of the mind?" Ronald asked. According to Walter Murkey, his notion that the blink of an eye is the end of a thought has to be scientifically tested to be believed.

   "It's easy. You look at me," Walter Murkey said to Ronald, "then look back at the window across the room."

   Ronald turned his head and glanced at the window.

   "Did you notice? You blinked when you were shaking your head a lot."

   "What?" Ronald began to shake his head from side to side. He could feel his eyes, as if the middle part had no memory during the turning process. If you had a camera filming yourself, you should be able to see that you did blink.

   During the 180-degree head turn from left to right, the memory picture is clear when the left starts and the picture stops on the right, but in the middle part, Ronald's eyes are closed and his brain has no memory.

   "Look at me, and look at this machine." Walter again directed Ronald to the nearer display of the editing machine.

   "Strange, I didn't seem to blink in the middle of turning my head this time." Ronald found a subtle difference between the two turns of his head. If the turning angle was smaller, he would not blink.

   "Do you know the 30 degree angle rule in movie editing?"

"Yes, I learned it in a college editing class, which was discovered by film pioneer Mérieux, that if we shoot the same subject, the angle of the camera rotation before and after editing must be greater than 30 degrees, otherwise there will be screen jumps and the audience will find it strange .If it exceeds 30 degrees, our brains can understand the picture jump without feeling strange..."

   "I see!" Ronald yelled.

"When our brain turns violently, we close our eyes and blink, so when the angle of rotation in the clip is greater than 30 degrees, our brain is very adaptable, because when we usually turn our heads, we close our eyes in the middle, and the brain will Helping us with editing."

  Walter Murkey is glad that young people understand his editing theory,

"If it's less than 30 degrees, we don't close our eyes, and we don't do natural editing in our brains, we see all the objects in the middle, and when we edit the rotating shots within a 30-degree angle on the screen, it doesn't match our usual experience. , the brain will feel strange."

   "So it is."

   "This is our usual experience and the impact on film editing. But there is a time when our brains can switch and imagine pictures freely without following the laws of physics, so we are very accepting of the existence of editing without feeling strange."

   "When?" Ronald touched his head.

   "There are times every day."

   "Dreaming?" Ronald suddenly realized.

   "Yes, dreaming is illogical. You can switch between story screens at will without paying attention to continuity. Isn't this just jump-cutting?"

  Ronald kept nodding in agreement, such an obvious truth, but no one had told him before, not even the professor of editing courses at New York University.

   "Dreaming is not bound by the laws of physics. We can dream that we are running on the flat ground and suddenly fly like a bird, looking at ourselves on the ground. Isn't this the flying shot in the movie?"

   "Yes." Ronald felt more and more reasonable.

   "Movies are often compared to daydreams. In fact, there is a very deep physiological connection between the two." Walter Murkey pointed to Ronald's brain and drew a circle:

"Our brain can understand film editing, which is a very strange thing in itself. The editing of the film is completely inconsistent with the experience of daily life. Why switch between the front and back shots, we can understand that this is the role of the character in the Conversation? Have you ever seen someone running around while talking?"

   Ronald shook his head.

   "We can understand film editing because we often dream of similar cuts. Our brains edit every day while we sleep. We are used to dreaming, so it is effortless to understand the plot while watching a movie."

   "And our brains may use the same part when processing language, so after a sentence is finished, our brains seem to understand that the scene needs to be drastically changed, and will blink to adapt to this change."

   "Then when I edit, can't I just watch the character blink and cut?" Ronald asked.

"Alas..." Walter Murkey tapped Ronald on the head impatiently, "Think of your high school logic, Ronald. The brain's massive processing of scene transitions is just one reason for blinking, the other Causes can also cause blinking. This is a sufficient condition, not a necessary condition.

   For example, we blink when we sneeze, blink when we feel dry, and blink when we lie. These are not indicators of editing. "

"And not every actor can get in like this, sometimes they're really just reading their lines." Walter Murkey corrected Ronald's thoughts, "I mean, if the actors are really good, you You can use the method of checking the blink time to verify that you have chosen the correct cut point.”

Ronald nodded, "But is everyone's choice of blink time the same? For example, when watching a movie, is my blink time the same as your blink time? If it is the same, then I can use blinking as a standard to check your own cut point selection.”

"Your idea is very good. My experience says that the vast majority, I mean 95%+, their choices are the same, we don't need to worry about that 5%, just focus on the vast majority of the audience behavior is enough.”

   "Why is that 5% different?"

"Most of the 5% are film practitioners, and they pay attention to their majors. For example, the lighting crew pays attention to the lighting, and the acting teacher pays attention to the actors' performances. There are always some industry insiders and film critics during the trial screening. Always looking for flaws in your films, something they can criticize.

   So their attention is different from that of the general audience, and the content of their thinking is different, so the timing of blinking is also different. "

   "Actually, if we have a magic camera that captures the blinking of the audience in the dark without interfering with the movie. Then we put a magic camera like this behind the screen and capture the audience's reaction while watching the movie.

  In hindsight, when we look at this camera, we will see that if the film editing follows the law, 95% of the audience will blink at the same time.

   If this amazing camera were able to capture the reflection of the viewer's eyes as they blink, we would see that in the dark, each viewer blinks at your clip point, like the stars in the sky, twinkling at the same time. "

  Ronald, struck by the scientific theory and the artistic picture depicted by Walter Murkey, sat down in this office and started watching the "Apocalypse Now" clip from scratch.

   He found that every shot was arranged just right. At the editing point, the audience's brain just arrived at the editing point and was thinking about the next shot.

  Immersed in new knowledge, constantly comparing his thoughts with pictures, Ronald didn't pay attention to the passage of time. Four or five hours later, he was awakened from that state of excitement by the ringing of the phone.

  Ronald rubbed his face and answered the phone, "This is Walter Murkey's office."

   "This is Thomas Wilhite from Disney Pictures, please put Mr. Murzy on the phone."

   (end of this chapter)