Tumblr Meta (Adjacent) Archiving: What was chance in the production becomes choice in the final edit

[justanotheridijiton]

Lots of things in our everyday world are there by accident. If I trip over a stone that causes me to bump into someone, that jostling encounter is probably not part of a higher design. It’s just a random occurrence of the sort that happens all the time, with no enormous significance in the real world. There is a temptation to treat film and television in a similar manner, as if spontaneous things occur by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Hollywood films and network television shows are some of the most highly scrutinized, carefully constructed, least random works imaginable. Of course, we know this, having read Entertainment Weekly. We all know that it takes thousands of people to create mainstream media: directors and actors, grips and gaffers. We know that producing film and television is a highly coordinated effort by dedicated professionals, but to most people it’s a bit of a mystery what all these people do. When we watch film and television, we are encouraged to forget about all that mysterious collective labor. A movie usually asks us to get caught up in the story being told, in the world that has been created for us, not to be aware of the behind-the-scenes effort that brought us this story and this world. We tend to forget the thousands of minute decisions that consciously construct this artificial world.

When I put on a shirt in the morning, I do so with very little thought (as my students will tell you). A movie character’s shirt is chosen by a professional whose sole job is to think about what kind of shirt this character would wear. Similar decisions are made for props, sound, cutting, and so on. Most mediamakers work hard to exclude the random from their fictional worlds. Sets are built so that the mediamaker can have absolute control over the environment. The crew spends a great deal of time and expense between shots adjusting the lighting so that each shot will look as polished as possible. When mediamakers want something to seem to be random, they carefully choreograph this random-appearing behavior. For instance, extras who are merely walking by the main characters are told where to go and what to do to appear “natural.” Even seemingly random events and minute details in a film/television program are chosen and staged.

But what about directors who don’t sanitize the set, who try to let bits of the real world into their work (from the Italian neorealists to Kevin Smith’s Clerks)? What about actors, such as Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams, who like to improvise? What about documentary mediamakers who don’t script what happens in front of the camera? What about reality TV? Don’t these let a little bit of chance creep into the film? Not really. One could say that these strategies let some chance occurrences make it onto the raw footage. However, the mediamaker and the editor watch the collected footage over and over, deciding which portions of which takes they will assemble into the final cut. They do so with the same scrutiny that was applied to the actual shooting. Even if they recorded something unplanned, they make a conscious choice to use that chance occurrence. What was chance in the production becomes choice in the final editing.

Source: Smith, Greg M. What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss. Routledge, 2010: 1-2.