Dialogue Editing

Splitting Tracks 131
Be careful not to take this music analogy too far. The “rules” of a scene—
who’s on which track—are true only within the one scene you’re working on.
Just because Bill’s close-up is on Dial C in scene 76, he doesn’t have to appear
on Dial C throughout the fi lm. Nor do you need to create hundreds of tracks
to accommodate all the people/angle combinations you’ll encounter. On a
fi lm of average complexity, you should be able to elegantly edit the dialogue
using no more than 16 tracks, still providing the order and logic needed to
wrangle the tracks within each scene. This is possible only because you
recycle the tracks on entering a new scene. Unlike music production, where
a track takes on the name of its “inhabitant,” dialogue tracks steadfastly hold
onto their names: Dial A, Dial B, and so on.
Fortunately, the key to organizing your session by shot presents itself as soon
as you open the session. Unless you’re especially unlucky, the scene, shot, and
take information (or the slate and take number if the production used a
sequential slate-numbering system) will appear on the region names. (See
Figure 10-2.)
An Example of Scene Organization by Shot
Before the shoot, a scene must be broken into shots. At its most basic level, a
scene will contain a master shot, close-ups for each speaking character,
perhaps a two-shot or a dolly shot, and whatever other angles are needed to
move the story along. Let’s imagine a simple two-person interior scene and
see how it can be broken into shots. In the drawing room, Fanny and Edmund
Figure 10-2 Use the information in the region names to identify scene, shot, and
take.