Purposes of editing

Purposes of editing

Storytelling – storytelling is the conveying of events in words, sound and/ or images.

Stories have been shared by human beings for tens of thousands of years as a means of recording and representing the world and for the purposes of:

·        Entertainment

·        Education

·        Cultural preservation

·        Installing moral values

Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include:

·        Plot

·        Characters

·        Narrative

·        Point of view

The term ‘storytelling’ is used in a narrow sense to refer specifically to oral storytelling and in a looser sense to refer to narrative technique in other media.

Plot – cause and effect process that develops – through the product, the cause and effect relationship and the ordering of events and working out how events may have manifested.

Story – the story is the whole world and what is taking place chronologically – the narrative elements and all the means as when to communicate.

The phase’ visual storytelling’ applies to film and a host of other media.

Sometimes it carries with it a perspective edge: in a pictorial medium, you should tell your stories visually - rather than, for example, through lengthy dialogue.

Show, don’t tell, in other words.

As a concept, “visual storytelling” refers to the way that producers of moving image products convey the meaning of action and events through images without recourse to the written or spoken word.

This is principally achieved through two techniques:

·        The choice of shots;

·        The way those shots are edited together.

Visual storytelling is seldom purely visual.

In film, it needs concepts and music and noise and much of the time a modicum of dialogue to work most fully.

But given the power of the image, a director who invests in ‘purely visual’ passages first and then considers how his/her images might be reinforced by the other inputs, gains huge dividends in the long run.