Editing, Design, and the Details
If you ask people that love the original Star Wars movies, they’ll tell you it’s because they were fun escapism, full of amazing special effects and spaceships.
But the professionals in the movie industry know better. The secret, dear friends, of the original Star Wars movies, is in the EDITING.
Marcia Lucas, George Lucas’ wife during the 70s and 80s, led the editing team for the original trilogy. While the SFX team was winning Oscars for their work, her team was quietly garnering awards for their editing skills.
Why is editing so important? Because it determines whether a scene is boring or exciting, whether a joke stays fresh or overstays its welcome, if the focus lingers too long on the Death Star so that the audience sees the flaws in the model.
A split second of bad editing is all it takes to ruin a scene. A moment that the average person never notices, except subconsciously. If done right, the audience is amazed. If done wrong, the audience is disappointed.
In visual design, that split second is equivalent to a single pixel width. It’s hardly noticeable, EXCEPT when it’s done poorly. The human eye can detect uniformity, or lack of it, and the brain gets subliminally annoyed when things simply “don’t look right”.
