Chapter 55 - Rookie Teaching Rookie

Murphy shot a full thousand minutes of footage, and although the filming followed the sequential development of the story, editing this into a ninety-minute or so movie still required a huge amount of work.

The entire post-production editing work was mainly done by Murphy and editor Griffith, with intern Paul Wilson and Griffith's two assistants acting as helpers.

Griffiths handled the editing, and Murphy was mainly responsible for reviewing and explaining the requirements for the movie.

Any edit will have a main line, and Murphy's was simple; Haley finds the sin that Jeff hid in his room, then punishes accordingly, then finds it again and punishes it again, until the final castration and hanging.

In fact, the reason for this is very simple, by Murphy altered the film, the heroine Haley more ruthless, which is also to increase the attraction with large-scale images, but so there are also problems arise, the viewer is likely to be disgusted with the heroine, which is not what he, the director, would like to see.

If you're turned off by the main character, does the movie still have any appeal?

Therefore, Murphy increases the male lead Jeff's sinfulness, and whenever Haley has tortured, there is always a new sin to be found, making people's disgust for him even deeper, and thus Haley's doings logically turn out to be a great pleasure.

But this kind of means can not be used too much, Murphy prepared three main stages, a binding pepper spray, a castration, a hanging.

Of course, the corresponding verbal and psychological destruction is also essential.

Post-production is more than just editing, Murphy first do or this aspect of the work, he and Griffiths repeatedly watched the black and white opening shot material shot from all angles, and finally finalized the use of oblique overhead shot number seven as the opening scene of the entire film.

This shot was shot to look quite brutal, with a full range of different performances of Emily as the victim and Jeff as the aggressor.

The opening frame is only a few minutes long, a full length shot, and after Murphy and Griffith conferred, Murphy was not going to re-edit it for the time being, and went ahead and used it straight away.

The progress of the editing work is not fast, even now it is only a rough cut, nearly a morning's time, Murphy has just finalized a shot.

He is very cautious, more attentive than when shooting, editing can directly determine the success or failure of a movie.

Nowadays, montage is already a completely cinematic word, in fact, montage is the articulation of different shots and scenes through picture editing and picture compositing to create a unique movie time and space to guide the audience's emotions and psychology.

The most typical role of montage is that it can speed up the pace of the movie, which is also the biggest application in a film with a simple narrative like Fruit Loops.

Later on, Griffiths' editing of Haley and Jeff's first meeting is using montage to speed up the pace. The meeting of two strangers is bound to be wordy, and the length of the movie dictates that it must be concise and clear here, and by editing to keep the scene shifting between Haley and Jeff, these scenes can be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

Griffiths is standing at his workbench, concentrating on his work, and in front of him is an old-fashioned screen with a piece of chalk in front of it, which is the way that some editing veterans used to find something to scale with the screen - like a cigarette or a piece of chalk in front of the screen - and to judge by the reference of something, to judge by the reference of something. -through the reference of something to determine what it feels like to be on the big screen, and that's the process of rough editing.

However, after each cut, Griffiths would really go through it on the big screen.

Finishing this part of the rough cut, Griffith handed over to his assistant to play the edited clip on top of the twenty-seven inch screen.

The screen was filled with just Hayley and Jeff, with the camera always revolving around the two.

"Jody!" Murphy said as he walked up next to Griffith, pointing to the two men on the screen, "Couldn't we add some individual shots of the two men, so that the picture frequently shifts between the gray and red they represent?"

Griffith immediately understood what Murphy meant and lightly clapped his hands, "Good idea."

He greeted his assistant and paused the playback, preparing to redo the editing.

Paul Wilson on the other side had been paying attention to this side, he was from the science class but lacked experience, he couldn't figure out what Murphy and Griffith meant, he couldn't help but walk lightly behind Murphy.

Paul Wilson was willing to be an unpaid intern in order to learn, and naturally asked when he encountered something he didn't understand.

"Director," he asked softly, "I ..."

Murphy turned his head to look at him, and Paul Wilson touched his head in embarrassment, not saying the second half of his sentence.

"What Jody and I meant to do was to make an attempt to compare and contrast between Hayley and Jeff by switching between the montages of images." Murphy, enjoying the diligent and free labor, lowered his voice and said, "Imagine the image constantly shifting between Jeff's gray and Hayley's red, two very different colors, and by editing them, not only introduce what they might represent, but also compare the two and establish possible conflicts."

Paul Wilson immediately thought of the film's hidden thread - Little Red Riding Hood killing the Big Bad Wolf back - and it dawned on him.

When he saw the re-edited footage playing on the screen, he couldn't help but nod his head and say admiringly, "Director, your ideas are truly marvelous."

Murphy just smiled.

There were a lot of things he could think of, but in practice, it was far worse than a veteran like Jody Griffith.

Jody Griffith still didn't seem satisfied and continued to refine the clip as Murphy called Paul Wilson over to his workbench to assist him in editing another clip.

Compared to the ones earlier, this clip was much simpler, and when shooting it Murphy had already carefully considered the final effect that needed to be presented.

It was a clip of Hayley chatting with Jeff online.

Murphy shooting did not let the actors appear in the camera, editing, naturally, only the computer screen, editing of the footage began all close-ups, and then in accordance with the content of the chat from the top to the bottom of the cut, so that the content of the chat is presented in the screen.

"Moving the camera from top to bottom also forces one to quickly skim through the content, giving one a sense of tension right off the bat, while also setting the tense, fast-paced tone of the film."

While completing the task at hand, Murphy did some explaining to a curious Paul Wilson who asked questions, but for the next cut, he stopped using close-ups and switched to panning shots of the content, "Panning allows the depth of field to gradually narrow down from a few sentences at the beginning to a sentence to a word or two, giving the movie a sense of pressure and curiosity that makes one impatient to know exactly what's going to happen afterward."

Though he wasn't exactly at the top of his game, Paul Wilson, a rookie, kept nodding his head in conviction.

Murphy added, "Dubbing is still needed here for the best effect."