jmtorres: TOS Spock leans face on hand, has mild eyebrow raise. Text: seeking internally consistent logic since 1966 (fanhistory)
I want to shove this chapter of my textbook on Soviet montage at every vidder I've ever met. While I was watching Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) I kept being struck but by how vid-like the editing was, how he kept using metaphors, matching images like sewing and film editing or the human eye, the camera lens, and window shades opening and closing. But I had no idea how much early Soviet editing WAS vidding.

See, immediately post-Revolution Russia had an epic shortage of raw film stock to shoot new material on, and they were actually frequently using the tail ends of reels from films shot in the era of the czar. But the Kuleshov Workshop didn't have film to be wasting on student projects at all--they were learning and experimenting with editing entirely with clips from pre-existing works. IE, vidding.

(Ugh, [personal profile] traykor, I finally found the exact thing I was looking for the other night--the Mozhukhin Experiment. *facepalm*)

I was about to say, vidders, do yourselves a favor, if you don't know about Soviet Montage and Kuleshov and Eisenstein and Vertov and Pudovkin, look them up, but I just came up with a terrible idea--if I were to go to Vividcon this year, would anyone be interested in a panel on the subject? which has already been done.

sabotage

Jun. 30th, 2010 09:04 pm
jmtorres: Fight Club: animated with porn insert. Inches on the reel-to-reel. (vid)
So we were reading Ebert's review of The Last Airbender, about how it's unrelenting bad, like, all aspects of it are bad, cinematographically speaking, and there's a line in the review about "The laws of chance suggest something should have gone right. Not here." It made me start wondering if someone had sabotaged the thing. And I was thinking, maybe the editor. Because you can sabotage a fucking lot in post. You can make the plot meanderingly arcless and awful with editing. You can make the actors look shitty by choosing mediocre to awful takes. You can fuck the effects. You can fuck the 3D. You can fuck a lot as the editor.

So we imdb'd and the editor of The Last Airbender is... the editor who did Spaceballs, Species, The Abyss, Titanic ETA: WHICH WON THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR EDITING /ETA, Terminator 2, King Arthur, and before he was master editor he got started through visual effects work, on Empire Strikes Back, on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET (which I don't know if you remember this, but those effects were awesome shit at the time).

This guy knows how to edit and knows how to work with special effect heavy stuff. So yeah. This is my theory. The Last Airbender was deliberately sabotaged by its editor, Conrad Buff. Possibly by just by letting M. Night Shyamalan have whatever he asked for.

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