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Have you seen these early geektastic exercises in editing from Edgar Wright?

Published at: April 8, 2011, 4:54 p.m. CST

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little slice of fried gold for your viewing pleasure as the weekend kicks off.

I've always loved seeing how filmmakers develop, it's one of the reasons I read autobiographies and obsess over behind the scenes stories and images. Robert Rodriguez's book, Rebel Without A Crew, should be taught in schools and is a must for people with any desire to get a deeper understanding of the passion involved in making film or those that harbor that passion themselves.

In that book he talks about his early experiments with editing as a young man, crudely editing between two VCRs using footage from his favorite movies.

Recently Edgar Wright has posted two examples of that very same technique he did as a 19 year old. One is focused on Guns in movies and the other on car chases/wrecks, both cut to the tempo of Beatles music. I love seeing the playfulness of the cuts and video selection, which show a raw form of the comedic timing he'd develop that we'd all grow to love with Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim.

Both can be found on his blog and I've embedded them here.

First up is Edgar's turn at guns-guns-guns, preceeded by some words of his taken from his blog!

 

The following clip I edited together while at Bournemouth Art College. Way before I’d ever seen an Avid suite, this was done over some long weekends locked in a VHS tape to tape editing suite. Yes, VHS!

So if you are wondering about the low quality of the sound and visuals in the following montage, there’s a simple answer. All of the clips were sourced from either films I’ve recorded off the TV, sell thru VHS tapes I had bought and also films that happened to be in the college library. I literally had piles of VHS tapes in the edit suite. So that explains some of the glitchy clips.

As for the audio edits, hey it was VHS and I was 19. This is the first time I used a ‘real’ editing suite.

So cast your minds back to the last century and see how I misspent my youth; cutting together bullet ballets to John Lennon’s melodic attack on the NRA.

I give you my 1993 mash up; ‘Gun Fetish’.

 

 

God, I love that song. And now we have the car compilation. Watch for the "Aaaahhh" moments from Helter Skelter and how he chooses the right images to go along with that bit of the song. Here's what he has to say about them:

 

You’ll see a fair amount of overlap from the last montage, obviously, but also quite a few new and some fairly obscure clips. Again, I leave it up to you to tell me what. And I will send a little prize for the person who gets them all correct. And a couple of them might stump you.

I’d also say I didn’t have access to some of the key pre 1993 car films at the time, indeed some of the best car chases in cinema I’d yet to see. One I had seen, but could not source the tape at the time (with my limited supply of material and a student bank account deeply in the red) was 1968′s ‘Bullitt’.

Yes, that’s right ‘Bullitt’ is not present. Anyone commenting ‘No Bullitt? FAIL’ or complaining that the split track audio or video are not perfect, can go fuck themselves. Or send a handwritten note back to the 19 year old me in Bournemouth, Doc Brown style.

Think of this as an exercise in the early 90′s in cutting together car chases without “Bullitt”. I basically made these for myself and to figure out how to edit.

 

 

So, yeah. These won't change your lives, but a bit of coolness for the weekend, no? Also, if you visit his blog and correctly identify all movies used for these clips he'll send you a little prize. 

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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