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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

I regularly read the Knowing and Doing [uni.edu] blog of Eugene Wallingford [uni.edu] who is Associate Professor and Head, Department of Computer Science [uni.edu] at the University of Northern Iowa [uni.edu]. In a sequence of blog posts, he artfully raises some concepts of film editing to a much wider application than just films.

We start with a blog post 95:1 [uni.edu] that introduces a book he is currently reading:

This morning, I read the first few pages of In the Blink of an Eye [wikipedia.org], an essay on film editing by Walter Murch. He starts by talking about his work on Apocalypse Now, which took well over a year in large part because of the massive amount of film Coppola shot: 1,250,000 linear feet, enough for 230 hours of running time. The movie ended up being about two hours and twenty-five minutes, so Murch and his colleagues culled 95 minutes of footage for every minute that made it into the final product. A more typical project, Murch says, has a ratio of 20:1.

He continues this thread with a later entry The Cut [uni.edu]:

===== EXTENDED COPY =====

Walter Murch, in In the Blink of an Eye:

A vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive act: the cut -- the moment of transition from one shot to the next -- something that, appropriately enough, should look almost self-evidently simple and effortless, if it is even noticed at all.

[...] Reading Murch has given me a new vocabulary for thinking about transitions visually. In particular, I've been thinking about two basic types of transition:

• one that signals motion within a context
• one that signals a change of context

These are a natural part of any writer's job, but I've found it helpful to think about them more explicitly as I worked on class this week.

And, more recently, Footnotes [uni.edu], expands on that concept and by noting:

While discussing the effective use of discontinuities in film, both motion within a context versus change of context, Walter Murch tells a story about... bees:

A beehive can apparently be moved two inches each night without disorienting the bees the next morning. Surprisingly, if it is moved two miles, the bees also have no problem: They are forced by the total displacement of their environment to re-orient their sense of direction, which they can do easily enough. But if the hive is moved two yards, the bees become fatally confused. The environment does not seem different to them, so they do not re-orient themselves, and as a result, they will not recognize their own hive when they return from foraging, hovering instead in the empty space where the hive used to be, while the hive itself sits just two yards away.

This is fascinating, as well being a really cool analogy for the choices movies editors face when telling a story on film. Either change so little that viewers recognize the motion as natural, or change enough that they re-orient their perspective. Don't stop in the middle.

I am still digesting this, but it leads me to wonder if the applications with which I've had the most difficulty might be guilty of failing to properly handle these transitions. In some cases the "language" is verb, noun (e.g. Open, File...) and in other cases it is Noun, Verb (e.g. Select text, Italicize). Have you run into this? What are the best/worst examples you have encountered?

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