The comics / video editing connection

Back when I was editing the first episode of Creating Fashion with Laurel, I ran into a problem.

Edited together and neatly trimmed, the episode ran forty-five minutes. I had to get it down to a half-hour before turning it over to PhillyCAM, but every moment in it looked necessary to me. I was at a loss until I remembered something I'd seen in a book.

I'd read the premiere book on film editing, Walter Murch's In The Blink of An Eye, but the passage I was thinking of is from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

This comic strip is my own, but the concept is from McCloud's book.

Here's a story:

Here's a story:

Here's a story:

Applied to Creating Fashion with Laurel, it looks like this...

Here's a story:

Here's a story:

We don't need to see Laurel cut the fabric, because when we see it's been cut, we know what happened. Our minds have a way of subconsciously filling in the gaps between panels, or clips.

In his book, McCloud writes about closure, how our minds are continuously filling in blanks all around us:

Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.¹

Murch points out that the abrupt replacement of one image with another conflicts with how we experience our daily lives. He offers this possible explanation for why cuts work:

[...] the images in dreams are much more fragmented, intersecting in much stranger and more abrupt ways then the images of waking reality—ways that approximate, at least, the interaction produced by cutting.
Perhaps the explanation is as simple as that: We accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams.²

Murch goes on to suggest that we may even be editing what we see during our waking lives, making cuts with quick turns of our heads (something he heard John Huston say in an interview³) and blinks.

How we process information makes it possible to reduce a video sequence to the point where it's nearly nonsensical and still not lose the viewer. The mind will even draw connections between random thoughts: 'The Venusians have returned; there's a hamster in my oatmeal.'


Whatever the medium (drawing comics, animating, editing video, etc.) storytellers all face the same pacing-related challenges. Learning how storytelling works and what can be done with it is fascinating.

---

¹McCloud, S. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton, Massachusetts: Kitchen Sink Press), p. 67. Second printing.
²Murch, W. 1995. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, 2nd Ed. (Los Angeles, California: Silman James Press), p. 58.
³Christian Science Monitor, August 11, 1973. John Houston interviewed by Louise Sweeney.