Kai Stromler wrote:You can't teach someone to improve their scene selection; you can notice if it's poor, but telling them to fix it amounts to saying "suck less". There's no useful information being transmitted, because there's no such thing as an optimal scene selection process. What sorts of content the editor values when working with certain kinds of music or concepts is always going to be up to personal choice: it's their job to convince the audience that their selections are good rather than bad. Good scene selection is an emergent property of good videos rather than good videos being a necessary consequence of good scene selection.
While there is no such thing as an optimal scene selection process, there are elements to be considered that I think should be considered. For example:
- the dominate colors in each scene
- the motion, and direction of the motion
- spacial relations
- How people commonly view movies. EG a character looking off screen followed by a shot of an object, viewers will assume the character was looking at the object.
- Learn about some film ideas, like the 180 degree rule or cutting on shape
Those are a few examples, and none will tell you the optimal scene selection. Hell, two people can select entirely difference scenes even while considering those issues. But thinking about them will probably mean you pick better scenes than if you never gave them a thought.