Reddit Reddit reviews The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

We found 6 Reddit comments about The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
Alfred A Knopf
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6 Reddit comments about The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film:

u/[deleted] · 10 pointsr/VideoEditing

Never been a better time to learn! There are tons of great, free resources available to you.

You can find basic technical tutorials for most any NLE you want simply by typing "[name of software] tutorial" into Google. This is where I started with iMovie back in 2009, digging through the web, looking for patterns and ways to piece together information from content that was sometimes only tangentially related.

My biggest piece of advice would be to start today, right now, and dive right in with whatever you've got. For someone with limited experience, technological constraints are often beneficial: you can focus on basic edits and storytelling techniques while not worrying about all the bells and whistles available to you. Not knowing what you don't know can be of the utmost benefit, especially considering that when the need for some more advanced tools does roll around, it forces you to think creatively to find a fix - it gets you thinking like an editor, like a filmmaker!

My second piece of advice would be to get some literature and start working your way through it. My two favorite books on editing are When The Shooting Stops ... The Cutting Begins and The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Some of the language might seem tough initially but you'll pick it up quickly and be able to reverse engineer much of what is discussed so that it is applicable to you.

In terms of software, you can find free trials of almost everything on manufacturer's sites, but if you've already got Windows Movie Maker/iMovie, I would learn that first. They really are good for teaching the conceptual basics and editing terminology, and although the feature sets certainly aren't that of a high end NLE, they are absolutely capable of putting together a film. Use what you have!

Most important thing though is to do it often. If you're interested in shooting, shoot a lot, then bring it in to your NLE and make a bunch of different stuff out of the same footage. Try to assemble a narrative, even if it's just a portrait of the city you live in. Work on different types of cuts: L cuts, J cuts, match cuts that weren't shot with the edit in mind. Have fun with it!

Best of luck to you, mate!

u/Moggio · 9 pointsr/WeAreTheFilmMakers

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje, is a nice addition to that one.



Here is a paragraph that i found interesting:

"O: Was Apocalypse Now a project the two of them thought up?" (Coppola and John Millius)

"M: No. Originally George Lucas was going to direct, so it was a project that George and John developed for Zoetrope. That was back in 1969. Then when Warner Bros. cancelled the financing for Zoetrope, the project was abandoned for a while. After the success of American Graffiti in 1973, George wanted to revive it, but it was still too hot a topic, the war was still on, and nobody wanted to finance something like that. So George considered his options: What did he really want to say in Apocalypse Now? The message boiled down to the ability of a small group of people to defeat a gigantic power simply by the force of their convictions. And he decided, All right, if it's politically too hot as a contemporary subject, I'll put the essence of the story in outer space and make it happen in a galaxy long ago and far away. The rebel group were the North Vietnamese, and the Empire was the United States. And if you have the force, no matter how small you are, you can defeat the overwhelmingly big power. Star Wars is George's transubstantiated version of Apocalypse Now."

u/snickelbag · 5 pointsr/editors

In the Blink of an Eye

The Conervasations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

Audio-Vision

I'll add more later if I can think of others I've read but do not own.

u/thisismynsfwuser · 4 pointsr/editors

I haven't started this one but a few friends in the biz highly recommend it

u/WuzzupMeng · 3 pointsr/TrueFilm

I found this one (http://www.amazon.com/The-Conversations-Walter-Murch-Editing/dp/0375709827) really eye-opening and engaging—a long form interview between the author of The English Patient and Walter Murch, the editor of The Conversation, the Godfathers, Apocalypse Now Redux, The English Patient, and others, a good friend of Coppola and Lucas, and an interesting guy.

I never put much though into editing before, but he brings up techniques I would never though of. Easy to read but dense with ideas. Highly recommend.

u/deverde_greene · 2 pointsr/booksuggestions

my fav book about movies, creativity and the editing process is "the conversations": https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Walter-Murch-Editing-Film/dp/0375709827. it's comprised of interviews between editor/director walter murch and novelist michael ondaatje. murch is a master of the form and a fountain of wisdom. i reread this book like once a year.