Going non-linear

Parkside Community College in Cambridge was the first of the new Arts Colleges to specialise in Media. Andrew Burn and James Durran describe how non-linear editing has changed their students' work in GCSE Media Studies.

Going digital

At Parkside, we develop forms of media knowledge and production techniques across the curriculum. In our first year we have continued with the kinds of Media Studies work which many schools are familiar with, like pop videos, adverts and trailers. But we have also used animation to explore concepts in Science and Maths, and video documentary both for presentation and argument in Humanities and in KS4 courses in ethics.

New non-linear editing equipment has made an enormous practical difference to our recent work. In this article, we try to describe how students have used this system, and how it compares with the 'analogue' editing system they used before.

The system

Our Media 100 system, like competing systems Avid and Fast, is very clear visually. When clips of video are digitally captured (in our case usually from VHS tapes) they are stored in a 'bin', which appears as a window on the screen. Each clip is represented by a thumbnail image of its first frame. So the whole bin begins to look like a rough storyboard.

These clips are then placed on a 'timeline', though 'drag-and-drop' processes which come instinctively to students, even at Year 7 level. They can be edited simply by grabbing either end and stretching them, or by dragging them to an 'edit window' where they can be trimmed accurately, coloured, put into slow or fast motion, and so on. Transitions between clips can easily be changed to dissolves or a wide range of wipes. Sound tracks can be added, edited for length and volume, and easily synchronised with the video tracks.

Making trailers

A Year 11 Media Studies group worked for a day with Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, to make trailers of the film of his book for their WJEC GCSE coursework. This exciting and intensive day gave us some early insights into the possibilities of the powerful editing software.

The process allowed the students to distil the film, selecting

key moments in the narrative
key images, particularly dramatic closeup shots which powerfully represent the central characters
key sections of dialogue
key sequences of music from the soundtrack CD.

The dismemberment of selected sequences from the film and their reassembly into the trailer sequence made clear the processes of post-production, as the students superimposed their own sequence, transitions and soundtrack on the original.

We also noticed how the students developed a complex sense of different possible audiences. A key feature of non-linear editing is the opportunities it offers for 'redrafting'. This allowed our students to produce different versions of the trailer for different audiences: football fans, female audiences, and so on. Caitlin's group produced separate versions of their trailer for male and female audiences.

This ability to keep amending and rethinking produced some interesting decisions about censorship. A line of particularly obscene dialogue, delivered with gusto by Colin Firth, was chosen as an epigrammatic ending for one group's trailer. In the version for an audience of prospective parents, they bleeped out the offending words.

A music video

Another Year 11 group made a video for the Bluetones' song Bluetonic. Again, what stood out was the ability to produce different versions and to keep on working on them. This led to decisions about quality, taste and censorship: a particularly violent piece of archive footage showing a man shot in the head was tested out several times before the final decision was made.

Numerous detailed decisions about transitions were made. Complicated wipes and long dissolves were tried and removed, until the group eventually decided that the pace of the song needed mainly cuts. A few dissolves and two cross-zooms were kept in only because they contributed to the mood of the song and the meaning of the narrative.

'Vertical montage'

When making this pop video, the articulation of video and soundtrack was vastly easier than with the analogue system. The group placed the CD track on the audio timeline. They then inserted visual markers on the timeline with the tap of a key to mark the beat, so they could cut the video track on the beat, or synchronise particular key images with peaks in the music or with key words in the lyrics. Lip-synching was a dream, compared with the impossible guesswork or tape-counting we'd been used to. Seeing the video and audio tracks lined up on the screen was like a visual representation of what Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein described as 'vertical montage' - image and sound, vertically articulated. The students also found they were able to visualize the music using the wave-form on the audio track, which shows the peaks and troughs of volume like a graph.

The processes between storyboarding and the final version became considerably - and productively - extended. The bin, with its virtual storyboard, changed the way they chose clips; the timeline provided a working desktop for the assembly and reassembly of clips, effects, titles and music; the edit window was a toolbox for trying out different colours, speeds, lighting. Liam's evaluation emphasised how extensive the dialogue was through which these compositional processes were conducted:

As the actual editing process went ahead a lot of ideas were toyed with and discarded as a result of the complex and advanced equipment we were using. On several occasions we had to decide between the use of a simple cut or a Fast FX dissolve for each shot. In the end we decided that these should be mainly used to convey a change of scene ... and so any other dissolves in the video were discarded almost immediately. After debating this, we came to a unanimous decision that dissolves slowed the pace of the song too much and meant that we could not emphasise the strong beat of the song. When using simple cuts we could do this and make nearly every cut occur in time with one of the beats, an idea that only became possible once we saw the complexity of the editing suite.

What difference does this new equipment makes to the processes of composition, the kinds of 'visual literacy' in operation, and what the students get out of the process? What do we do when we read and produce images? Our students' use of non-linear editing raised issues of:

the relation between the production and reception of visual texts
the nature of visual composition; the analogy with language and literacy
the cultural context, the pleasures of production, and the social nature of visual language

Processes of visual composition

What are the analogies between language and non-linear visual composition? Julian Sefton-Green has suggested that "[non-linear editing] technology itself might make explicit aspects of media production that are more 'hidden away' in conventional (analogue) technologies." We agree with this, and hope to show that the visual representation of the editing process on screen makes transparent some of the mental processes involved in the act of composition.

How can we describe these processes of visual literacy and of visual production, in relation to the technology used by our pupils? What distinct compositional actions do the pupils go through as they edit?

Selection and identification

digitising media: students make provisional decisions about where the beginning and endings of clips will be and about the selection of which clips to use.
naming of clips: The clip bins show the first frame, arranging the clips in the order they were digitised, so they produce an elementary storyboard. This 'shorthand' on the screen of a series of initial frames is more immediate than a written exposition of each scene would be.

Sequential composition: horizontal montage

ordering of clips on the time-line: this is like composing sentences in a sequence of clauses; and also makes Eisenstein's principle of film as montage very clear. The meanings of juxtaposed clips are constructed by fine-tuning the beginning and end frames of each clip by 'dragging' in and out. Unlike the analogue equivalent, this is a very direct, intuitive and physical way of manipulating the visual medium.
cutting/copying and pasting: these skills are directly analogous with language and IT. They allow repetition - which is quite hard to do in an analogue set-up - as easily as in language/word-processing.
transitions: as Julian Sefton-Green found, the classic film edits of cut, dissolve, wipe and fade were those most used, in spite of the wide array of digital effects which are availiable. After cuts, dissolves are the transitions used most often, to signal time, compression and mood. Perhaps these transitions perform the function of connectives in language, signalling combination, opposition, temporal shift, and so on.

Audio, effects and graphics

sound: Eisenstein described the union of sound and image as 'vertical montage'. In non-linear editing, the representation of this relation on-screen is literally vertical: the audio line is vertically below the video line. In fact, the screen display sets up four elements of vertical montage: video, audio, effects, graphics. So the technology makes the grammar of visual composition transparent and material. The model, which is in the student's head in analogue composition, is now visually represented on the screen: Alex, who made one of the Fever Pitch trailers, referred to "the film in his head", and the way this related to the representation of elements of the film on the screen.

Social roles, pleasure and taste

As students edit, two things become apparent:

the whole text is a social construction through dialogue, rather than the unified vision of the single artist in Eisenstein's account (and, thus, much more like the process of film composition in reality, as distinct from the 'auteurist' version).
the production of the whole text is a kind of dialogue between the 'proto-text' in students' minds or on their storyboard, and its 'actualisation' in the exciting process of production - changes and amendments made at the point of experimentation, drafting, plastic manipulation of the image and sound material.

These rather abstract ideas were lived out in the editing room, as students argued, contested and played with each other's different versions of the collaborative texts they were making, proposing, and often actually saving under separate filenames: their personalised versions, mutinous oppositions to the consensus, uncensored versions of the cleaned-up public text, even parodic joke versions.

The social processes of non-linear editing are different from analogue. They are less frantic: there's less of the "buzz" of performance, and the undeniably productive need for students literally to work tightly together in the moment of production. But on closer investigation, what roles did they actually perform in the analogue editing process? Arguably, the most creative editing/compositional role was played by the pupil(s) on the vision mixer, who controlled transition effects, colour effects, audio and video mixing. The others, though often involved in the decision-making, may only have been pressing play and record buttons.

In the non-linear environment, which is set up much more as a one-person operation, the danger is that just one person controls the keyboard. However, it`s easier to ensure that each person plays a part: the opportunities for discussion are much greater, since there's much more 'redrafting' and there are separate editing jobs. One person could edit the audio tracks, they could each have one sequence of which they are director, they can have separate timelines; all of these items can then be imported into the main sequence when they are ready.

Finally, it`s worth remarking on the pleasure of powerful compositional effects. A clear instance of this was a moment with a Year 10 group, making an advert for trainers. They wanted to make several repeats of a basketball 'slam-dunk' shot, synchronised with the rapid beat of their music track. This was easily done - they marked the beat on the timeline with markers; trimmed the shot to the right length, then copied and pasted it with familiar keyboard commands. Immediately, the impressive sequence was ready; and Craig was so excited he shot out of his seat.

There`s also the pleasure, in adverts and pop videos, of themselves as elements in the visual narrative: they can manipulate images of themselves as actors/participants in new and powerful ways. And the pleasure of putting into effect their profound knowledge of popular genres, images and narratives, through technologies that, for once, allow them to make really professional texts.

Analogue

In an 'analogue' system, there is some form of physical correspondence between the form in which sound or pictures are stored or transmitted, and the sound or pictures themselves. So, for example, a vinyl record is an 'analogue' system, because the shape of the grooves on the record is related to the volume and pitch of the sound which the listener hears. A CD, on the other hand, is digital because the patterns on it represent the music in the form of numbers.

Auteurist

Auteur film theory holds that a ‘quality’ film is the product of thevision of a single artist ? the director ? despite the industrial nature
of film production. Auteur is the French word for author.

Digitising

The process of converting analogue images into digital form which the editing software can manipulate.

Drag-and-drop

A way of transferring information between computer programmes, or between different modes of one programme, by using the mouse to physically move it on the screen - so a picture can be 'dragged' from the bin and 'dropped' on the timeline.

Non-linear editing

Analogue video editing is linear, because each shot usually has to be recorded on the videotape in order, and it is difficult to go back and revise edits. Because digital video images can be manipulated on the computer before being committed to videotape, digital video editing is non-linear: shots can easily be reshuffled and rearranged.

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