Editing: It's the Pace, Ace! (page 2)

So how do you determine what type of pacing is best for your project? Generally speaking, the younger the audience, the faster the pace they can comfortably tolerate. But that's a generalization and like all generalizations, it's as false as it is true.

The movie Titanic was a huge hit with adolescent girls. While it was an action move on it's surface, the scenes that attracted that particular audience were the love scenes between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and not the fast pace action sequences. The lesson is that if you give an audience content it wants to see, they'll stay happy when you linger a bit on scenes. If the core material is less intrinsically interesting, it's often wise to keep the video pace moving, so you don't risk putting your audience to sleep.

The overall pace of information that people in our society are used to consuming continues to accelerate. We're a nation of remote control channel changers, radio station button bashers and Web-clicking multi-taskers.

So when we sit down to watch a video, our brains are ready to receive data at a heavy pace. That doesn't mean that the only right pace for presenting visual information is with an MTV pace.

Like that shot of the baby in the cradle mentioned earlier in this article, sometimes the material on the screen will make all the connection with the audience that you need. When that happens, it's no error to linger over your shots and give your audience the time they need to not just look at, but to think about the material being presented.

Each scene you shoot has its own internal clock. A shot of speeding freeway traffic clearly has a quicker clock than a shot of a horse and buggy meandering down a country lane. You have the power to quicken or slow your shots simply by virtue of your camera work. If you're shooting a landscape scene with a bridge on the right and a lighthouse on the left, you have an abundance of choices about how to shoot those elements, each with it's own pacing.

You can go wide and do a static shot showing both. You can do static shots of each individual scene and cut between them. You can also elect to start on one and pan to the other. That pan can be anything from slow and stately, to a whip-pan where the scenery between the two is blurred. The choice you make will go a long way to determining the overall pace of your presentation of the images to your audience. Or why not shoot it each way and decide later? That's good coverage. And good coverage makes for good programs.

Most people are reluctant to criticize the work of others. We're polite to a fault. Sometimes you have to dig comments out of people, particularly about subtle things like your work's pacing. If your goal is to really discover if your work is really "on target" you have to learn to risk criticism and find out what others really think.

So the next time you're sitting at your edit system and you suspect that a piece of your timeline isn't paced just right, find someone who hasn't been staring at the material for a week, show them the piece in question, and ask them what they really think.

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