Research - Editing

Learning from what I have seen in cinemas, online and TV it was pretty apparent that everything, from angles to post-production, is deliberately chosen to impact the audience and convey the meaning which the directors and writers have envisioned.

Because my genre was horror/thriller it made sense to focus solely on these two specific topics.

Being a photographer and having edited a few videos myself, I was aware that significant conditions that are used in Horror include (but not limited to):

DESATURATION

                                                     LEFT: Before               RIGHT: After

Desaturation is basically reducing the saturation of an image, but not completely turning it Black and White.

In the above example we can see how the Greens from the leaves and the grass have been pulled, as well as a little Blue from the sky. This gives the scene an almost apocalyptic sense (Post-apocalypse if you will) which is naturally associated with something going wrong.

SOUND
I personally cannot emphasize the importance of Sound in the Horror genre. If someone asks me what percentage of sound is important in a 'Scary Movie' include I will always say "more than 50%".

Now even tho I have a reasonable knowledge of using elements to my advantage, it obviously wasn't enough. So, I started to research on film openings.

I started out by just simply watching videos of opening scenes and finding the common factors, below I have a few of those.
(Below the videos are the links leading to the source videos)

SOURCE LINK

SOURCE LINK

Editing

Although, I had a good understanding of editing scenes i.e. matching the sequences and cutting on beats, I found it good pracitce to furthermore explore the ideas and conventions of cinematic editing. Sure enough, I picked up a lot more new iformation along the way.

Dialogues 

It it essential to know when to overlap the scenes, because it is important to show emotions. Overlapping allows the editor to convey the emotional reaction. In real world scenarios, when watching two people talk, you would ocasinally turn to see the reaction to the other person, and you would not always turn to the other person exactly when they start speaking. Ofcourse there are exception, such as when two people are arguing, debating, simply just when both of the people are speaking you will hear a person's voice before looking towards them, or you will look at the person before they start speaking to see their reaction.

This kind of editing is subtle, but again, highly useful.

This video by Chris Shaw explains the types of cuts, specially the overlapping, and how they are used to convey meaning.

And this video by Chinfat explains the editing process

180 Degree Rule

This rule states that when two actors in a conversation are shot, an imaginary line between the two is drawn and the camera must never unintentionally cross the line.

This video by FilmRiot summarizes it: