THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:Renowned film editor Beena Paul runs out of words to express her love for the art of editing. Addressing the participants of six-day-long Television Workshop organised by the Kerala Chalachithra Academy, Beena says that editing is the art that facilitates storytelling through images.
The session was an interaction between the editor and the fifty-one selected students from the field of media and journalism. The class was rich with subtle, but informative elements on the aesthetics and rhythm of editing. In the discussion, Beena spoke about the basic concepts and terms related to editing. The choice of the shots, their order, pace and structure are the most important things to be taken care of while editing. She says,
“Every shot has its own story to tell and we choose the ones that best suit the plot we want to convey. Now, this is where the grammar of editing comes. The beauty of it is that you follow the grammar, and once you learn it, you break it. Editing has the ability to provide an angle to the shots. This is the power of editing, it can create a point of view for shots that would otherwise convey nothing significant.”
Beena further talked about the subjectivity in the area of editing. “Nothing in media is objective, everything differs from people to people,” she says. She believes that editing is more of an aesthetic job than a technical one.
The differences between film editing and television editing were also discussed, like the frequent use of ‘switching’ in television rather than actual editing.“The responsibility of both film and television is to inform the public, but in both these cases, the narratives are different. One is fiction and the other is not. So in the television industry, everything happens at the moment. Also, TV channels need to respect people’s privacy and dignity. These days we see channels becoming more intrusive, this has to stop,” she says.
The interaction was one among the twenty sessions held during the workshop, in which experts from different fields in media introduced various concepts and technologies involved in their respective fields.
“Chalachithra Academy is also a centre for television studies, not just movies. But this is the first time in the twenty years of its existence the Academy is organising something like this,” says NP Sajeesh, the workshop coordinator. Inaugurated by Shashi Kumar, the chairman of Asian School of Journalism on June 16, the workshop concluded on Thursday.