Similarly, when somebody... if you're going through a door and the door closes, you do not necessarily say 'I will cut when the door is closed' unless you're trying to make a point about slam. But just if there's somebody moving through a doorway, you cut at the point at which the door's closing is inevitable. Not before because it could always be that the actor will go halfway through and then stop and... but I have another thought. And if you wait until the door is closed, then you've dissipated the potential of that moment of transition because now the potential has been realised, the door is closed. Whereas if you cut at the moment that closing is inevitable, then the film keeps moving in a fluid way rather than stopping. And this would apply in various other ways. You know, somebody moving towards the edge of a frame line. Are they going to exit the frame? Where do you cut? Do you cut when they've left the frame or...? No, you cut when it is inevitable that they are going to leave. That is an identifiable frame, and you can identify that by this technique of dynamic trimming that I talked about earlier which is: you cut.
And now what I do is I would just note that in my mind. I would say, what's the timecode of that frame? You know 122. And then I rewind, and I hit again, and I look. Did I hit that same frame? Usually, I do, or you know. So what that tells me is if I can hit that same frame twice or three times in a row, that tells me that it's beyond my conscious control. I can't decide to do that. I have to do it the way a musician plays a note. When does the oboe enter? At exactly the right moment. If you enter too soon, you ruin the piece of music. If you enter too late, you ruin it. So you have to enter, or the drum has to hit at exactly the right moment for the orchestra to be correct. And in that sense, we are... the editor is a musician within the orchestra of the film hitting these entry points of, each shot is another instrument that is coming in that's playing a little melody and you want that instrument to come in at the right... at the right point.
And a way of doing that is this 'cutting on the fly' or 'dynamic trimming', where you decide the frame at which you're going to cut out of a shot by running the shot at normal speed and then hitting that frame on the fly. Noting where you hit it and: can you do it again. If you can't do it again, then that's also a good indication that this is not a good area to cut, there's something wrong with the rhythm. So maybe you should cut a whole phrase later or a phrase earlier. But there's something wrong... If you can't do it, then there's something wrong about the area that you've chosen. And... so that's another good indication.
