During my video editing studies, the following quote solidified and became a tool in my arsenal :
Video Editing is about creating Ideas!
Use Eisenstein's core principle, distilled from his work on film theory, to 'liberate' yourself from a 'sterile' video editing consisting of a simple segmentation of an event, into multiple camera angles.
Let's make a thought experiment.
We will visualize three versions of an edit.
Version 1:
In our timeline, we have a close-up shot of a steaming hot bowl of chicken soup. It looks delicious!
We then use a 'hard' cut to transition to a second shot of a young, well-dressed, rosy-cheeked, Western-raised, happy kid playing in the garden and suddenly turning his head and sniffing into the air.
[ We press 'play' and watch the edit ]
The viewer, almost instantly 'connects' the two shots and 'creates' a third shot in their mind, where the kid is eating that delicious bowl of chicken soup with pleasure and deep satisfaction. That 'imaginary' shot, that construct of the Mind, evokes feelings of warmth, peacefulness, and bliss.
Version 2:
What if the second shot was a kid from a so-called third-world country? The kid is malnourished, dirty, half-naked, with a swollen belly and a miserable expression across his face!
Just watching this shot alone, I am sure you can imagine the kid's hunger! When we hit 'play', and because of the previous shot of the chicken soup bowl, now you start having feelings of pity, sorrow, sadness, or hopelessness, to name a few, filling up your heart.
Completely different than .v1, right?
A simple thought experiment was enough to crystallize Eisenstein's theory:
An Idea could be derived from the juxtaposition of two independent shots.
Now let's have a look at Bonus Version 3:
The first shot shows a bowl of chicken soup, the second shows a well-fed, Western-raised kid, and the third shows a malnourished Ethiopian kid.
[ One more time we hit 'play' ]
Perhaps your feelings are the same as in .v2 but what about the intensity of these feelings?
They are more intense, right?
Also, the combination of the 3 shots gives birth to other feelings, different than in the previous two versions.
You may feel anger and rage because of the unjust and cruel inequality between the kids of this world.
Somebody could feel the urgency to fight against this inequality.
Another one may feel the obligation to donate some money to this cause.
A third one could feel relieved that this is not happening to his kids.
Exactly as Eisenstein believed:
The "collision" of shots could create film metaphors and manipulate the audience's emotions.
In the viewer's mind, we can implant any Idea we want, by using film metaphors and, of course, the 'right' shots.
To do that, we have to go back and study the fundamentals like the Definition No2 of Video Editing!
-Yannis
