The "Boring" Editing Exercise That Teaches You to Cut for Emotion

Obsession has been the horror story of the year, and Curry Barker edited it himself.

In the film, a lovesick music-store clerk named Bear (Michael Johnston) gets his hands on a magical novelty wish-maker and uses it on Nikki (Inde Navarrette), the friend he's pined after for years. The wish works, eh, a little too well.

Barker made the film for less than a million dollars, and Focus Features paid roughly 20 times that after it screened at TIFF. It went on to be a sleeper hit that put its creative team and cast on the map.

We can pull a lot of lessons from the film. I talked to Barker about the writing earlier this year. The cinematography and lighting are lean but instructive. Today we want to look at the editing.

Austen Menges, a Texas-based editor who specializes in TV commercials and says he's spent two decades in that world, uses one Obsession scene to walk through a study exercise in a new video. Check it out below to learn the four techniques Barker uses to build dread.

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Emotion Matters Most

Menges uses a barbecue analogy - why not? Say two people want to become pitmasters. One buys the most expensive smoker they can find, plus every gadget to go with it. The other finds a mentor who teaches them that patience and timing matter more. It's skills versus doo-dads.

Guess whose meat people line up for?

"That's where most editors get stuck. They focus on software, plugins, and effects. But what makes people care about your edit is emotion, and almost nobody practices it."

None of this is new, and that's the point. Walter Murch built his Rule of Six around this idea in In the Blink of an Eye. As we've talked about before with Spielberg and editing, Murch gave emotion more weight than the other five criteria combined, at 51%.

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