Editing from Mel Brooks

We're moving into post-production and as I move into the editing suite, I need to think first think about is the pacing of the film and getting it to fit into to two minutes. I immediatley looked to how the films of Mel Brooks are edited because our scene is directly inspired by his film Young Frankenstein. 

A part of my research was this video of how Mel Brooks would keep things long as opposed to the quick cuts we usually see in comedies. This was made further true by the average length of a shot that our teacher said. I can't exactly remember but it was 2 to 5 seconds I'm pretty sure. I knew immediatley that would not be the average for my film, or at least I would try for it not to be save for the more Edgar Wright inspired shots. 

Brooks would prefer a shot to last about 8 to 12 seconds as it was the perfect amount of time for a setup and punchline. I took this into consideration when planning the length of the shots during filming. While our shots were always under Brooks preferred 8 to 12, reaching 5 to 7 most of times, it's the same principle. This is something I forgot to mention to our teacher when he suggested adding more shots to fill in the run time. What we lacked in shot amount would be made up in shot duration. 

And it worked, perhaps too well as we got over the run time not accounting for missing shots, but always better to have to cut shots than to go back to production add.