Activity

For instance, by cutting away from a certain character before he finishes speaking, I might encourage the audience to think only about the face value of what he said. On the other hand, if I linger on the character after he finishes speaking, I allow the audience to see, from the expression in …

Wherever he goes, he should try to think, as much as possible, about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the film. It is difficult, but it is necessary to create a barrier, a cellular wall between shooting and editing. Fred Zinnemann would go climbing in the Alps after the end of shootin…

An overactive editor, who changes shots too frequently, is like a tour guide who can’t stop pointing things out: “And up there we have the Sistine Ceiling, and over here we have the Mona Lisa, and, by the way, look at these floor tiles . . .’’If you are on a tour, you do want the guide to point thi…

You can never judge the quality of a sound mix simply by counting the number of tracks it took to produce it. Terrible mixes have been produced from a hundred tracks. By the same token, wonderful mixes have been made from only three tracks. It depends on the initial choices that were made, the qual…

Igor Stravinsky loved expressing himself and wrote a good deal on interpretation. As he bore a volcano within him, he urged restraint. Those without even the vestige of a volcano within them nodded in agreement, raised their baton, and observed restraint, while Stravinsky himself conducted his ow…