“Look Ma, No Keys!” or, The Future of Picture Editing
As we in the post-production community look forward to the release of Final Cut Pro next week, many have speculated how Apple will move past traditional editing paradigms and create an app that “skates where the puck will be”, to quote Mark Raudonis use Wayne Gretzky’s famous phrase at the pre-NAB Editor’s Lounge. It’s true that much of the current iterations of Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, and Adobe Premiere are based on old metaphors, and if technology today has the potential for much more, why not use it? I don’t know what Apple has come up with, and I don’t expect it to be anything as physically-based as this, but regardless– here’s some ideas I’ve had, originally written in early 2010:
Documentary, Narrative and the Suspension of Disbelief
“Artists use lies to tell the truth”, as Alan Moore wrote in V for Vendetta. Documentary is a medium that freely offers what many narrative filmmakers tire endlessly to achieve, namely the ability to convince the audience of the film’s “reality”, aka the Suspension of Disbelief. The more Joe Moviegoer is convinced of the reality the filmmaker has crafted, the more likely he is to emotionally invest himself in it. Documentary doesn’t have to worry about this; it implies that from frame 1, what Joe is seeing is real, and exists in the same world he does.
