Editing

    Editing is another very important aspect for filmmakers when it comes to the creation of there films. Editing the scenes allows you to take the very best and take exactly what you want from a particular scene and you have the ability to discard unwanted materials for your film. Editing has come a long way over the years and the techniques now have become more digital and technological from past years, but the goal has always stayed the same.

    When it comes to editing for drug films film makers have use this in order to accomplish different things such as getting the sense of being high through visualizations and use of many different picture and other things happening within the scene. For instance in Requiem For a Dream (2000), throughout the film you see this use of editing when it comes to when the characters in the film are using the different drugs that were introduced in the film. I have included a scene from Requiem For a Dream below.  You’ll notice how the filmmakers used different forms and techniques of editing in order to give the viewer this idea of they things that happen to your body when you are doing drugs. You visualize the drug use, the eyes dilating, etc. This scene is an especially great example of a cut scene that uses two shots and joins them together and you can in this clip when it shows a split in the screen with two separate images. According to Chew, “Cuts are motivated by dialog, reactions, and staging in order to invite believability. It's a cinema seducing the imagination”.

    Another film that I think has great examples of editing is the film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). You see the use of editing throughout the film and the filmmakers did this in order to give this feeling of an almost psychedelic euphoric state of mind. This is because the film is based on two men that travel across the country to Las Vegas and with them they bring more drugs and other substances that only spell out disaster from the very beginning. The types or techniques of editing that the filmmakers in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas used depended upon what they wanted to get out from the scene. Also, the filmmakers really concentrated on the type of drug or drugs that the characters where using during a particular scene in order to determine the different forms of editing that they used during a scene. For instance, depending upon the kind of drug that the characters were using the scenes would speed up and slow down and it would make you as the viewer perceive the characters in different ways. Also, at times when the characters were getting into the more psychedelic drugs the use of editing was used to get almost this spiral effect to get you as a viewer more connected with the characters and create the feelings and thoughts that the filmmakers are trying to convey.

Chew, R. (2009). The Art and Craft of Film Editing. Cineaste, 349(2).

Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (1997). Film art: an introduction (5th ed.). New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies.