About the award-winning editing of Parasite -- live first edting on set, hidden VFX cuts and FCP 7
[10:56 Sun,26.January 2020 by blip]
The South Korean tragicomedy Parasite was recently nominated for an Oscar in six categories -- for Best Film, but also for an Editing Oscar, among others. A few days ago, the American editing company ACE nominated it for Best Edited Feature Film (Drama), the first foreign-language film. Anyone who has seen the film will understand the praise. For example, we found the largely quite sober narrative style striking, also the ruffles and omissions. Largely invisible, however, remain a multitude of hidden cuts, which editor Jinmo Yang tells us about in a very revealing interview of the series Art of the Cut.
For example, several different takes were imperceptibly edited together in dialogue scenes, so that continuity is maintained even when actors show their best performance in different takes. These VFX cuts hidden in pans are often asked for by director Joon-ho Bong (and made by Jinmo Yang in Adobe After Effects). Bong, on the other hand, doesn't like repetition, he prefers to show something only once, this explains the omissions in the narrative process.
Anyway, according to his editor Joon-ho Bong already has some pretty exact ideas on how the finished movie will be structured on set. The film is shot according to the storyboard, even a rough cut is already done during the shooting to see if the pictures in the montage work as planned. Additional reserve material is shot very rarely, also no so-called master shots (a continuous, wide shot of a scene), which are usually taken to have something up your sleeve later on in the editing. Nevertheless, the film changes a lot during the right editing, especially in terms of tempo, rhythm and timing.
A very interesting interview in which you learn a lot about the workflows -- and also that the film was edited in Final Cut Pro 7. He is simply used to this program and hasn't updated his operating system for 4 years now, says Yang, so that he can continue to use it...
By the way, the film itself is definitely worth a visit (it will be available in streaming and as DVD/Bluray from the end of February) -- how the paths of a very rich and a destitute family cross through sophisticated manipulation is masterfully realized in every respect, which was rewarded with the Golden Palm in Cannes and in January with a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Language Film. The film is also a great success at the box office worldwide and was voted best film 2019 in Indiewire's film critic survey.
If you have already seen Parasite, or don't have the chance, you can watch one of the key scenes here -- it illustrates very well what we mean by condensed editing:
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Nerdwriter has taken a closer look at just this scene and also points out one of the hidden cuts:
;)
