Film Editing Techniques

Deadpool (2016)

Ryan Reynolds starring newest edition of the Marvel’s X-Men universe, Deadpool boomed the box office last week stunning the viewers with incredible sound and cinematic editing along with powerful visual effects. It didn’t fail to impress the superhero sublime in the classic blockbuster portrayal.

 So what does make the anti-hero movie so likable? Other than of course the sarcastic wit of the character that captures the mass attention, the editing of the film helped it stand out amongst typical super hero blockbusters.

The role of movie editing plays a ginormous role especially in superhero flicks or in this case ‘antihero’. The stunts and visual effects are needed to stun the audiences all over. Same for ‘Deadpool’, Julian Clarke did master editing to visually aid the blockbuster hit especially with the flashback and rewind techniques fine-tuning the footage.

The editing in Deadpool was more than important because of the gratuitous and vulgar scenes, making it ‘watchable’ for the mass. Julian Clarke used Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects to edit Deadpool. The paradox of editing this particular film was taking the decision of what to flush out and what to keep for the audience ease of viewing.

The movie didn’t work with a linear narrative and was more fragmented than whole so it matched the cynical, witty tone of the movie. The editing captured the various moods and emotions of the film, especially the dramatic torture scenes and the doomed cancer scene.

The movie mostly had comical themes with visually tensed fight scenes. There were various break shots, rewind and slow-motion shots to tell Wade Wilson’s tragic story into Deadpool which had an underlying sadness to it. The camera shots mainly used were wide angle and long shots capturing the destruction scenes. The emotional scenes with Wade Wilson were shot by close up shots. The color scheme of the movie was mainly muted so as Deadpool’s bright red costume stands out.

The pace of the movie is pretty fast with the soundtrack being upbeat such as ‘Salt-n-Pepa’ and ‘Wham!’ which is adding to the goofiness of the movie theme. The movie used a lot of Fade and Dissolve shots and especially Low Angle and Mid shots for the fight scenes.

The layering and the effects such as the building destruction, the fire fight scene, the mutant energy scenes were created on Adobe After Effects. There were pretty advanced techniques used catering handheld camera shakes and rendering on After Effects.

There editing techniques used such as cutting frames for collisions and fight scenes to create the exaggerated effects and to amp the speed up along with the pace of the film, Digital snap zoom was used to draw the audience attention and especially 22FPS shots were filmed.

All in all Deadpool gave a visually appealing experience with master editing techniques and skills.