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Week 7: First assemblies
Build a first cut, use shared critique vocabulary to diagnose the story it actually tells, and choose one focused revision before submitting Assignment 1.
5 April 2027
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A first assembly exists to be judged, not admired — its job is to surface a cut’s real problems while there is still time and footage left to fix them. This lecture separates first assembly, rough cut and fine cut as distinct stages, works through the critique vocabulary used to describe any cut (framing, rhythm, continuity, point of view), and confronts the self-critique problem: why a maker cannot see their own cut clearly, and the concrete techniques — time away, watching muted, watching out of order, showing a stranger — that manufacture the distance needed to see it.
Outline
We open by distinguishing what each edit stage actually decides, then apply the four critique terms to a worked scene before turning to diagnosis: what story does this cut currently tell a viewer with no other information, tested with the one-sentence throughline check. From there we cover L-cuts and J-cuts as a concrete editing technique, reading the production log against the footage you actually have, and revision triage — picking the single highest-leverage priority instead of a long list of small fixes. The session closes by mapping that priority and a media-record check onto Assignment 1’s actual marking weights, and by asking you to start noting a question for the final project.
Bring an editable first assembly, even if it is incomplete, plus your production log.
Teaching team
- ZIMU LI — convenor