In the blink of an Eye Second Edition

You receive free shipping if your order includes at least AED of eligible items. Any item with "FREE Shipping" label on the search and the product detail page is eligible and contributes to your free shipping order minimum. You can get the remaining amount to reach the Free shipping threshold by adding any eligible item to your cart. In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought -- provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question -- Why do cuts work?

Along the way, he offers his unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more.

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In this second edition, Murch reconsiders and completely revises his popular first edition's lengthy meditation on digital editing which accounts for a third of the book's pages in light of the technological changes that have taken place in the six years since its publication. We will send you an SMS containing a verification code. Murch also provides a hierarchy of importance to factors in editing decisions, giving them percentage weights: Previous post Your Weekend Viewing: Fish Next post Movie Review: The Revenant Movie Reviews Archive.

In the Can Wednesday Links: Classics Re-released Making Box Office Thanks for visiting Making the Movie. Did you find this information helpful? Please contact us if you discover any weirdnesses. Thank you for visiting Making the Movie As filmmakers, we value an independent voice. For that reason, we do not accept paid reviews. We are happy to review filmmaking products and movies on a free, no-expectations basis. For more information, read our Review Policy. The idea is that at the top levels of performance in different fields, people start seeing, saying and doing very similar things.

The short version of the why is that we are all operating in the same reality and in order to operate with maximum possible functioning in response to that reality, you must have a fairly clear view of it, which leads people who have nothing to do with one another top athletes, scientists, film editors Pure gem in the rough.

The short version of the why is that we are all operating in the same reality and in order to operate with maximum possible functioning in response to that reality, you must have a fairly clear view of it, which leads people who have nothing to do with one another top athletes, scientists, film editors, writers, etc to come to startlingly similar conclusions despite radically different lived experiences. In this book, Walter Murch affirms this idea for me in a way that is wholly unexpected, and yet which resonates richly with me.

This book is nominally about editing film, as practice, as art, as science. However, along the way of explaining what makes for film editing greatness, Murch discusses ideas which can be found in other disciplines and pursuits. Film analogues of such ideas as combinatorial explosion math, statistics, epistemology , thin-slicing beh sci, beh econ , and grounded theory soc are found relatively early on in the book. I'll include the quotes in this review for verification purposes. This has always been the case, no matter what editing system is used: If a scene is photographed with only two shots - one each from two different camera positions A and B, let's say -you can choose one or the other or a combination of both.

• Lady of the Woods (Thunder Royce).
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• Los superconductores (La Ciencia Para Todos) (Spanish Edition).

As a result, you have at least four ways of using these two images: However, once the number gets much larger than two shots-and a director might shoot twenty-five shots for an average scene-the number of possible combinations quickly becomes astronomical. On linear film machines, like the KEM, you achieve ten times normal speed by reducing the amount of time that any one frame is seen by ninety percent. So a frame is on for V of a second, not V24 of a second.

They achieve ten times normal speed at the cost of suppressing ninety percent of the information. So if you ask a digital machine to go ten times faster than normal, it will do so by showing you only one frame out of every ten. You are not seeing ninety percent of the film—whereas when you watch sprocketed film at high speed on a KEM or Steenbeck, you see everything. You are only shown what you ask for. The Avid is faster at it than the Moviola, but the process is the same.

There is a higher level that comes through recognition: You may not be able to articulate what you want, but you can recognize it when you see it. What do I mean by that? Well, if you learn to speak a foreign language, you will find that there is a gap between how well you can speak it and how well you can understand it when it is spoken to you. And when you make a film, you are trying to learn a foreign language—it just happens to be a unique language that is only spoken by this one film.

The system is constantly presenting things for consideration, and a sort of dialogue takes place. For example, in detailing the differences between traditional hands-on film editing and digital editing, one of the differences Murch discusses is the posture. The traditional editing machines required standing to work and digital stations didn't, and Murch felt that that was an important enough distinction that he moved the components of his digital work station around to emulate the physical arrangement of a traditional editing machine. This resonates fairly strongly with what Austin Kleon is talking about in Steal Like An Artist, in terms of creativity and cognition being fully embodied.

Humans must use our hands and our senses to interact with the art we create first, then do the cleaning and digital stuff afterward. Murch also expounds on a link between blinking and thinking which was entirely novel to me.

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A blink being a psychological segmentation, marking the end of a thought or a thought-chunk and being a tool for marking individual comprehension and group comprehension in an audience. This is similar to Kahneman and Tsversky's work in measuring pupil dilation to tell whether people were still working on a problem. I see a link there that seems well worth exploring for someone in that field.

Murch also had a touch of almost.. For example the following quote, "A vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive action: Murch emphasizes order as being incredibly important to outcomes in a way that seems reminiscent of the theory of constraints body of work.

Here's the quote for that "In the early stages of fetal development, it is difficult to tell the difference between human and chimp embryos. And yet, as they grow, they reach a point where differences become apparent, and from that point on, the differences become more and more obvious. For instance, the choice of what comes first, the brain or the skull.

In human beings, the priority is brain first, skull next, because the emphasis is on maximizing the size of the brain. Any time you look at a newborn human infant you can see that the skull is not yet fully closed around the top of the still-growing brain. With chimpanzees, the priority is reversed: At any rate, it seems to be more important for a chimp to be born with a hard head than a big brain. The thumb and the fingers, skeletal posture, certain bones being fully formed before certain muscular developments, etc. This is a good book by someone who has clearly put much deliberation, time, and effort into their craft and into asking bigger questions than is strictly a requirement of their vocation.

I recommend this to anyone interesting in people in general. It's a good perspective on what it takes to be the man behind the curtain that everyone in Oz is to disregard. Jan 06, K. My dad found this book stashed away from back when he had to read it in college and said I might find it interesting. I'm no professional but I do enjoy the subject of video editing.

There were bits of editing techniques that I thought were interesting and I want to try sometime. The last few chapters about blinking hence the title were especially enthralling. It was a great look at how they edited back in the day. The best part was laughing at how much has changed in the industry since the 19 My dad found this book stashed away from back when he had to read it in college and said I might find it interesting. The best part was laughing at how much has changed in the industry since the 's. I found myself saying "little did he know This was a short, interesting read I'd recommend to anyone with any interest in the field of the movie industry.

Apr 26, Kris rated it it was amazing Shelves: The phrase "Renaissance Man" is bandied about a bit too loosely or negatively these days, but Walter Murch is a marvel as a craftsman and author. He manages to break down what many perceive as a highly technical profession to a simple series of intuitive human responses.

He also manages to give a quick survey of the state of editing technology and where it's headed. I highly recommend this book to anyone who edits, no matter the format or the context. Feb 08, Brian rated it it was amazing. I would not have the confidence to be an editor without this book. Walter Murch is a brilliant editor who has cut some of the best movies in the history of film and he thinks it all comes down to catching reactions and feeling the cuts based on actors processing information.

If that description does not make your cinematic mouth water, this book may not be for you but for my money it's a great tool of the trade. Jan 23, Billy Ram added it. A great insight into the process of editing films from a very well experienced artist. A must read if you are, in any way related to the artist side of filmmaking. A fast and simple read.

Jan 28, Spencer Jackson rated it it was amazing. Makes you rethink the whole concept of video editing. May 07, gaminette rated it liked it Shelves: Sep 11, Rui rated it really liked it.

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A great book to start with editing. Past a c A great book to start with editing. Jul 13, Lucas rated it really liked it. Very short- more detailed stories from experiences on any or all of the movies Murch edited would have been nice to extend the length. I liked hearing about the manual film editing machines- the stand-up machine with foot pedals and wheels sounds nice, it would be interesting to have a work station for computer based work that could be operated with both hands and feet for various purposes.