Postgraduate Course in Video Editing

1. The editor
- The trade
- Film editing vs audiovisual editing
- The position of the editor in a production

2. Methodology in the editing room. The assistant editor and the editor. Software used: Premiere.

- Analysis of the typology of the projects and possible methodologies.

- Discovering the workflow that best suits our project

- The post-production of a film, documentary, television programme, advert, series, video clip, etc.

- The apprenticeship through Premiere. Basic functions.

- Management of materials (backups and project), the organization in external hard drives, RAIDs, or servers.

- Technical problems before starting: formats, codecs, transfers, shaping, etc.

- Organization of materials, sequencing, synchronization, etc.

- The structure of the timeline for post-production, etc.

- Communication between departments: AAF’s, OMF’s, XML’s, EDL’s, etc. The closing of production and the final shaping.

*This block will be accompanied by practising the editing of fiction.

3. Narrative and continuity editing. Classical writing and structures through editing. The construction of characters, space, time, and rhythm through emotion. Word and dialogues. Action and psychological space. The script and its staging.

4. Discontinuous, expressive editing of relationships and other modern writing. Work on documentaries. The construction of reality.

5. Creative processes in the editing room, reviewing images, detecting their potential, and sculpting. A new rewrite, the editing of relations

Introduction to the creative process, aesthetic reflection, and the practice of editing. Through practical and analytical experimentation, the editing of fiction or narrative continuity is worked on using raw materials from movie sequences.

Each practice is accompanied by views, comments, and corrections. In class, film fragments are also analysed in relation to questions that come up from the practices.

Through editing we work on the narrative writing, the creation of emotions, the construction of characters, the interpretive direction of the actors, the temporal and spatial organization, the rhythm, the ellipsis, the dialogues, the soundscape or the expression of ideas or concepts through images. In parallel, aesthetic issues of editing are studied in relation to visual thinking.

1. The value of viewing and selecting raw materials.

-Compose sequences in editing according to narrative ideas and formal criteria (rhythm, ellipsis, spatial, and sound creation)

2. The creation of emotions through editing. Walter Murch's Rule of Six

3. Continuity editing: narrative writing through editing.

-Point of view.
-Thinking of a sequence from experience and subjectivity.
-Creation of characters.
-Interpretive construction of the actor.
-Possibilities and aesthetic modulations of the plane/counter plane.
-Microstructure and macrostructure
-Associative editing within continuity editing: rhymes
-Character/actor match cuts.
-Rhythm.
-Ellipse.
-Thinking and representation of actions.
-Organization of space.
-Invention and expression of time.
-Parallel editing

Parallel practices: Después también (Carla Simón), Hierro (TV series), Avatar (short), Que Dios nos perdone (Rodrigo Sorogoyen), Júlia Ist (Elena Martín)

In this subject, we will work from the most basic level of After Effects to more advanced aspects of the program. The workshop is designed so that students learn the basic tools of the program and acquire the necessary skills to be able to comfortably carry out exercises in other subjects (such as Animated Collage). It also includes basic notions of Photoshop, which we will use to prepare the material that we will later animate with After Effects.

CONTENTS:

1. PHOTOSHOP (2 hours in the second session)

- Introduction to the program: Interface and tools

- Selection, clipping and cloning tools. Masks. Layers.

2. AFTER EFFECTS (19 hours)

Introduction to the program. Interface and resources

- Basic notions: layers, properties, keyframes

- Masks

- Matching layers

- Processing a project: formats and codecs

Trimming and manipulating video images

- The rotoscopy brush

- Track mattes

- Effects

- Time: time remapping, freeze frame.

2D character animation - Puppet tool. The 3D environment in After Effects

- 3D layers

- Cameras. Typologies. Shallow depth of field

- Light

Advanced After Effects

- Basic expressions

- Null object and adjustment layers

Text

- Basic work with typography.

- Animated text

Painting stills frame by frame - Brush tool and paint panel

PRACTICE AND FINAL PROJECT

In each session, we will carry out a practice that contains the class syllabus. The practices will have to be delivered finished at the end of the class or, if there has not been sufficient time, on Monday of the following week.

Each student will carry out a final project that will be presented finished in the last session. It will consist of making a short clip (maximum 30 seconds) of a topic to be specified.

• Basic parameters: Elementary notions of acoustics. Electro-acoustics and physics of sound.
• What is sound?
• The sound wave: how it behaves and how to manipulate it
• Amplitude, frequency, height, and timbre
• Direct sound, reflected sound.
• Absorption, reflection, and reverberation.
• Creating sounds in Pro Tools 10
• Parameters
• Creating tracks, naming them, deleting them.
• Saving sessions, locating them and opening them.
• Importing files
• Entrances and exits, peripherals.
• Sample rate, audio formats, and time codes.
• Basic editing techniques
• Handling editing modes
• Cut, paste, drag, fade, crossfades, zoom, pencil.
• Sound editing
• Dialogue editing
• Noise reducers
• The Room Tone
• The effects of shooting
• Creating atmospheres
• International band - M&E
• Music
• Mix
• Binaurality, panning, envelopment.
• Levels.
• Plug-in management. Audiosuite, in real-time.
• Equalization, dynamics, modulations, effects.

Correctly balance a sequence of images with the DaVinci program using the Vectorscope and the program tools (shaping, offline reference, nodes, key nodes, tracks, resize, render).

• Introduction to colour
• The art of colouring
• DaVinci interface
• Primary correction
• Secondary correction
• Tracking, stabilizer
• Nodes and grades
• Look with visual comparison
• Formats
• Render

• Associative editing: conceptual, lyrical, essayistic.
• The image as a relationship of images. The cinema in the head of the spectator.
• The poetic image. The cinematic vision. The visible and the invisible.
• Creation of metaphors, rhymes, and visual ideas.
• Ideological editing typologies (metric, rhythmic, tonal, harmonic)
• Remote editing.
• Research, documentation, and expression of an idea using images. Visual archives.
• Aesthetics of editing from texts and work by Jean-Luc Godard, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, José Val del Omar Artavazd Pelechian, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker, David Perlov, Peter Watkins, Adam Curtis, Harun Farocki, Frederick Wiseman, and Hito Steyerl among others.
• Practice: associative/essay editing exercises (conceptual, voice/word, musical).

1. Writing in the first person

-A historical approach to writing in the first person

-Possible ethical, aesthetic and epistemological repercussions of the subjective documentary

Me-filmmakers: diaries, autobiographies, self-portraits, filmed letters, correspondence, film essay, travel notebook, family cinema, self-fiction, ...

-First-person montage: ideas and emotions

-The meeting place between reality and the filmmaker's memory

-Distance and time management

-What is "home cinema"?

2. Practice: a documentary piece of domestic cinema based on materials from Yourlostmemories.com and the student's materials. Maximum duration 10 min.

The student will work on the materials provided to create a film in the first person, addressing the domestic environment and the experience of time spent in it. In class we will work:

-The organization of the material according to the creation of the script. How to read and write with pictures.

-Inquire into the formal concept of the project and our mode of expression in a montage (types of montages).

-The story: shaping reality and fiction.

-The subject-object dialogue, the openness to the three times (past, present and future) and their exchange (I, you, him). Identity as an inter-subjective expression.

-Voice off or text.

-The sound, its value and potentialities.

-Structures and macrostructures, is our work alive?
 

• Value the relevance of online narratives and understand what role they play in relation to the audiovisual industry and conventional narratives
• Analyse and understand changes in the audiovisual industry and consumption in the second decade of the 21st century
• Analyse and understand through case studies how public or audience success can be predicted and virality built in an organic and extendible way
• Work individual and group brainstorming techniques to create and screen ideas and empower the student as a potential creator from self-production
   

 

Get to know films and, through their techniques, typologies, and uses, approach the expressive possibilities of appropriation or found-footage and collage editing.

1. Introduction to found-footage and collage cinema.
 - A cinema without a camera. The appropriation and creation of the discourse. The deviation of meaning.
- An inheritance from the avant-garde (collage, ready-made, photomontage, avant-garde cinema, Soviet cinema).
- A crisis of concepts: unique and original work, and authorship.
- The recycling of images within film production.
- From celluloid to the internet.

2. Editing as an artistic principle, a new meaning for images.
- Horizontal editing and vertical editing. A new narrative. Shock editing, interval. The referentiality of the images and the degree of being recognizable. Mimicking the MRI edit. Formal or narrative echoes. Repetition, rhythm, and change of speeds. Composition within the frame, overlays, working with layers.

3. Typologies and uses in found-footage and collage cinema.
- Criticism and subversion. Poetic-oneiric cinema. Amateur or family cinema. Cinema that talks about cinema. The filmic essay.
- Fiction and non-fiction, experimental practice, video clip, advertising, etc.
      4. Image manipulation techniques.
- Frame by frame animation (stop motion): cut-out, painted, live-action.
- Optical compositions from the camera.
- Optical manipulation of the frame: working with the optical printer.
- Physical manipulation of the frame (the importance of the support, the celluloid): torn, painted, frame within the frame. Physico-chemical interventions. Alchemy. The loss of the referent in the image.
- Manipulation within the electronic image (video signal, chroma and its precedents).
- Manipulation on the frame (digital): layers, masks, rotoscopy, effects, composition, data moshing, the inheritance of analogue techniques, etc.

 5. Processes in the realization of a piece with archive material.
- Search for the material: Archives or image banks. The history of cinema (and TV) as an archive. Internet.
- Selection and classification of the material: first the image or first the idea. Unification or diversification of the type of material at a plastic level (origin, format, style, period, texture, etc.)
- Technical processes in celluloid or digital. Unification of formats, degree of manipulation, and final copy.
- The building of discourse.
- Plastic elements and degree of image manipulation. Composition, rhythm, speed, continuity, or fragmentation, (false) transparency or shock, visual rhymes, etc.

6. File sources.

The Postgraduate Final Project deals with a topic related to the program and one or more of its subjects. The student has the support of a tutor to carry out the work and an expert who validates it, if applicable, once it is finished.
This work is individual. In it, you must apply the knowledge acquired and put your editing skills into practice by creating your own piece (free format). The presentation and the final viewing transmit the results of this work to the rest of the students. Likewise, if the author or authors allow it, the Postgraduate Final Project will be part of the TFMs/TFPs digital repository.