Continuity Editing
Editing Textual Analysis
Top London policeman, Nicholas Angel is sent to a quiet country village as punishment for being too good. But the village is not all it seems! Numerous deaths lead Angel into a final showdown with the villagers in ‘God’s Country’. The sequence is from the end of the film – the final shoot out between Angel, his sidekick Danny and the villainous villagers.
The scene begins with an establishing shot, this follows the convention of shot sequences. This opening shot, ”Welcome to Stanford”, sets the scene for the audience telling us where we are. The audience needs its spatial awareness in order to not feel jarring.
The scene begins with a fade into the establishing shot, this is a gentle transition into the scene and implies a passing of time.
When the school children get out the cans, there is a jump cut between the other cuts to create the craziness of the children grabbing at the cans.
At 01:13, there is a montage where Angel gets suited up for battle, it gives us a quick visual representation of the character and his motives, also implying a passage of time. The music playing also excites the audience and increases tension and expectations for the battle.
Majority of the action sequences in the scene use a rhythmic 4/4 beat to cut in time with the music which keeps the audience in sync and keeps up the pace in the scene. A couple of hidden wipes by people walking through the frame also keep rhythm and passes time easily without having to spell out everything to the audience. A wipe when it cuts from the police station to the protagonist on his horse shows the time passing best.
The Kuleshov Effect
“The Kuleshov effect is a film editing effect demonstrated by Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.”
(Explination and the effect at work^)
(My attempt of the Kuleshov Effect^)