Computer Editing: The Language of Editing

It's Saturday night, and you just rented a movie. The movie's opening credits appear over a shot of a snow-covered forest in the Appalachians. The title fades up on the screen: Forever Lost. As the title fades, you see a long shot of a vacant mountain cabin, then a medium shot of a grizzled man approaching the building. In close-up, the man's hand smashes the cabin window. Now inside, the starving man ransacks cupboards and drawers. Suddenly a low growl startles the man. The film cuts to a pack of wolves, standing in the cabin doorway.

Many people were involved in creating this scene, but ultimately the film's editor shaped it into its final form. After hours of reviewing footage, it was the editor who assembled this one-minute segment. Although it appears to take place in the Appalachians during a winter afternoon, most of what the audience sees happened over several months, nowhere near those mountains.

The actor playing the starving man was on a Hollywood set sprinkled with fake snow. The establishing shot was recorded months earlier in northern California, not the Appalachians. The pack of wolves were actually trained pets, shot separately on a closed set. However, when you see the finished scene, all of the sounds and images work together as though the events took place in the same place at the s…