• Most new users don't bother reading our rules. Here's the one that is ignored almost immediately upon signup: DO NOT ASK FOR FANEDIT LINKS PUBLICLY. First, read the FAQ. Seriously. What you want is there. You can also send a message to the editor. If that doesn't work THEN post in the Trade & Request forum. Anywhere else and it will be deleted and an infraction will be issued.
  • If this is your first time here please read our FAQ and Rules pages. They have some useful information that will get us all off on the right foot, especially our Own the Source rule. If you do not understand any of these rules send a private message to one of our staff for further details.
  • Please read our Rules & Guidelines

Structuring Story in a Long Edit

VCRusso

Member
Messages
5
Reaction score
0
Trophy Points
1
Hello, I'm new to fan editing and I wanted to get a feel for something, specifically in a TV-to-Movie context. I'm working on a project using a season of a show with 22 episodes as a basis. 

Minor spoilers ahead for Gotham if you haven't seen it.

//

Gotham, particularly in its first season, follows a case-of-the-week format, being a crime drama. However, it also has a running storyline about Gotham's organized crime underworld that spans from the premiere to the finale, and this storyline sinks its way into the cases of the week at times. I've been trying to distill the best parts of this running mob storyline and make a film that follows it, with some minor side plots for flavor, and in the interest of doing more with the subsequent seasons once this project is done.

The question I wanted to ask is how editors typically take a lot of content and bake it down. Do you try to fit everything into a three or five act structure, do you just go with your gut and see how the movie flows? And as a follow up, if you foresee an edit getting past a 3 hour timeframe, do you consider breaking it into two parts or keeping it as one film?
 

The Scribbling Man

Tenant of the Tower of Flints
Staff member
Donor
Faneditor
Messages
4,644
Reaction score
2,416
Trophy Points
148
This is a good question and an interesting topic. I myself am also working on a TV-to-movie project, and it can be very hard to break away from an episodic format.

What I would recommend is approaching it like a writer; watch through the material, absorb it, consciously think about what can be removed and what can't, take notes - afterwards, you really need to script out your edit. It's kinda like writing a screenplay, only you've got to write it using bits of other people's screenplays that you've been given - like a screenplay jigsaw. It's fun, but challenging. You will probably find some things need to change when you start editing, and you won't truly know whether it works until you have your first draft to watch through, but having a planned out structure as a starting point i would say is key to not tying your mind in knots and fast wanting to abandon the project. 

Most films can fit into a 3 act structure, and so it's wise to do this with any TV-Movie project as a starting point. Most series will also have a three act structure, but this will occur across the whole season, while individual episodes will have thier own inciting incidents and resolutions in order to make them function well as "episodes". In order to remove this "episodic" feeling, you need to remove all these mini "resolutions". Obviously, this varies depending on what the content is, what's available and what you consider important to the narrative; but generally speaking, I would say you want to cut anything that is not relevant to the overarching season story - and by not relevant I mean you don't need it. 

Secondly, if there is an episodic narrative that is needed, look to see how you can remove that structure. For example, there is a sub-plot that takes place with a certian set of characters during one episode - you take this subplot, seperate it from the rest of the episode and spread the scenes out over the course of several episodes that you piece together. This way the mini-narrative of this episode sub-plot is then moving at a similar pace to the rest of your narrative, and can resolve at a similar point.

A lot of "act structure" is to do with emphasis and perception. You make the audience feel like something has kicked off, and then you make them feel like it's resolved... or you plant something to tell them it's not over YET. Often things feel episodic because they resolve too soon, and then introduce something new that doesn't connect to former events. A way to avoid this is to keep things moving, and not allow anything to completely resolve too soon. 

I could go on. There's a lot to think about with this stuff, and each series is going to bring its own challenges when translating to the film format. 2 things I would strongly recommend though:

1. Don't decide you're going to turn a season into a movie and then figure out how to make that work. Watch the material and think honestly about what works best for the material - maybe it would work well as a movie, maybe it needs to be 2 movies... or three movies. Or maybe it's two movies, with 2 standalone, but relevant shorts sandwhiched in between. If something just won't fit, and everything else does, don't force it. Think outside the box and don't dismiss the possibility of needing to re-jig your plan. 

2. Look at your characters. Who are your main protagonists and antagonists for this "movie"? Where do they start and where do they end up? Does point Z feel like it's a natural end point for point A? Does it resolve things introduced at point A, or is it just a series of unconnected events? What have your characters learned or not learned? Does your end make sense without it's beginning? If so, maybe your beginning needs to change. 

Just some food for thought. I hope that helps.
 

VCRusso

Member
Messages
5
Reaction score
0
Trophy Points
1
The Scribbling Man said:
This is a good question and an interesting topic. I myself am also working on a TV-movie project, and it can be very hard to break away from an episodic format.

What I would recommend is approaching it like a writer; watch through the material, absorb it, consciously think about what can be removed and what can't, take notes - afterwards, you really need to script out your edit. It's kinda like writing a screenplay, only you've got to write it using bits of other people's screenplays that you've been given - like a screenplay jigsaw. It's fun, but challenging. You will probably find some things need to change when you start editing, and you won't truly know whether it works until you have your first draft to watch through, but having a planned out structure as a starting point i would say is key to not tying your mind in knots and fast wanting to abandon the project. 

Most films can fit into a 3 act structure, and so it's wise to do this with any TV-Movie project as a starting point. Most series will also have a three act structure, but this will occur across the whole season, while individual episodes will have thier own inciting incidents and resolutions in order to make them function well as "episodes". In order to remove this "episodic" feeling, you need to remove all these mini "resolutions". Obviously, this varies depending on what the content is, what's available and what you consider important to the narrative; but generally speaking, I would say you want to cut anything that is not relevant to the overarching season story - and by not relevant I mean you don't need it. 

Secondly, if there is an episodic narrative that is needed, look to see how you can remove that structure. For example, there is a sub-plot that takes place with a certian set of characters during one episode - you take this subplot, seperate it from the rest of the episode and spread the scenes out over the course of several episodes that you piece together. This way the mini-narrative of this episode sub-plot is then moving at a similar pace to the rest of your narrative, and can resolve at a similar point.

A lot of "act structure" is to do with emphasis and perception. You make the audience feel like something has kicked off, and then you make them feel like it's resolved... or you plant something to tell them it's not over YET. Often things feel episodic because they resolve too soon, and then introduce something new that doesn't connect to former events. A way to avoid this is to keep things moving, and not allow anything to completely resolve too soon. 

I could go on. There's a lot to think about with this stuff, and each series is going to bring its own challenges when translating to the film format. 2 things I would strongly recommend though:

1. Don't decide you're going to turn a season into a movie and then figure out how to make that work. Watch the material and think honestly about what works best for the material - maybe it would work well as a movie, maybe it needs to be 2 movies... or three movies. Or maybe it's two movies, with 2 standalone, but relevant shorts sandwhiched in between. If something just won't fit, and everything else does, don't force it. Think outside the box and don't dismiss the possibility of needing to re-jig your plan. 

2. Look at your characters. Who are your main protagonists and antagonists for this "movie"? Where do they start and where do they end up? Does point Z feel like it's a natural end point for point A? Does it resolve things introduced at point A, or is it just a series of unconnected events? What have your characters learned or not learned? Does your end make sense without it's beginning? If so, maybe your beginning needs to change. 

Just some food for thought. I hope that helps.

Appreciate the in depth response. I've been looking at this very much from a writer's perspective, being someone who writes actively. Writing film is a different beast from stories and books though. I've been mapping out things in an outline, as well as keeping a changelog of how I've broken down scenes. I was writing out dialogue and the context of each scene in a screenplay format-- I plan to continue that although it has been more timeconsuming than I thought (though that was probably largely inpart to me following along on Netflix so I could get the dialogue word-for-word with the subtitles). 

What I have in mind currently is that the mob storyline can fit into a film, but it may lose some of the necessary context. So, trying to be more concise in runtime but cohesive in narrative, I may wind up having two 2-hour movies instead of one 3 and a half hour movie. What I did before is run through the season and break each episode into scenes, then tag each scene on a scale (KEEP, KEEP?, CUT?, CUT). If I were to keep everything I tagged with "KEEP" and "KEEP?," I'd probably still have about 7 hours of the show sitting around.

Again, appreciate the depth of your reply. I'll definitely reframe some of what I've started with and try and go forward with all that in mind.

[Side Note: What you said about shorts is interesting, because I thought about doing that with some of the self-contained episodes. Gotham has an interesting origin for lots of mainstream Batman villains. In the season I'm focused on now, there's a two-episode arc about Scarecrow's origin that I think could be an entertaining hour long piece. That's worldbuilding, secondary stuff, though, the character doesn't have a bearing on the overarching story.]
 

The Scribbling Man

Tenant of the Tower of Flints
Staff member
Donor
Faneditor
Messages
4,644
Reaction score
2,416
Trophy Points
148
No problem. Sounds like you're approaching things the right way - not that there's neccessarily one "right" way, but what I mean is it's clear you're putting in thought and planning before diving in, which I think is essential. 

With my current edit the challenge I've found is pacing. I think my narrative is mostly there, but because it's based off of 20 minute episodes, I didn't take into account how scenes would naturally be shorter and switch between groups of characters at a faster rate. Translate this to a movie runtime and it feels very quickfire from the start, so I'm trying to figure out ways of extending or merging  scenes to make sure we stay with characters a little longer before switching perspectives. 

You're right. TV/Film is a different beast to books, stories etc. - and I think in a book it's much easier to justify a variety of unconventional structures and still have it work. I also write actively (or am trying to); I mostly like the short story format, but opportunities in recent years have revolved around scripts, so I've found myself getting quite into that way of thinking. I find that even with more standard fan-fix edits it's good to think like you're writing/editing a script, because you are changing a narrative and need to be aware of why each piece is there and what you're sacrificing when you cut it.
 

VCRusso

Member
Messages
5
Reaction score
0
Trophy Points
1
The Scribbling Man said:

Pacing is a pretty big thing right now. Because of Gotham's case of the week format, sometimes you'll get big stretches of cohesion when the episode is a setpiece one, and other times, if you remove the unrelated plot, you might get what essentially amounts to a montage. Granted, having 45-50 minute episodes does give me longer scenes to work with, I can't imagine if the episodes were half as long.
 

Malthus

Well-known member
Donor
Faneditor
Messages
1,599
Reaction score
1,632
Trophy Points
148
VCRusso said:
Pacing is a pretty big thing right now. Because of Gotham's case of the week format, sometimes you'll get big stretches of cohesion when the episode is a setpiece one, and other times, if you remove the unrelated plot, you might get what essentially amounts to a montage. Granted, having 45-50 minute episodes does give me longer scenes to work with, I can't imagine if the episodes were half as long.

Firstly, @"VCRusso" welcome to the site.

Having worked on a TV to film project myself I can only second what @"the scribbling man" says. A TV to film edit is a big undertaking since you have so much material to draw from and it might seem like a daunting task. Full disclosure I shelved my TV to film project in favour of making a few feature film edits just to get used to the editing process for that very reason.

Might I suggest you check out @"subjectzero"'s Babylon 5 film series. They have deftly structured their films drawing from multiple episodes and have been very successful at removing the episodic feeling. They did this by allowing multiple B plots to play out concurrently while using A plots as a back bone for each film.

I also strongly recommend @"lapis molari"'s Buck Roger's movies which edit the TV series into films and, amongst other things, demonstrate how conservative edits can have a significant impact on tone.

I would say this: Don't be afraid to keep world building and character development scenes. While they might not enhance your plot directly they can be of great benefit to pacing and will avoid your edit feeling like a montage. I've seen multiple edits where so much has been cut in the quest to achieve an arbitrary target runtime that the final product feels choppy, overly fast or too prosaic.

I look forward to seeing what you do with Gotham. Don't be afraid to share samples of your work, there is a wealth of knowledge and experience in this community and the feedback I received really helped me produce a product I was happy with.

Good luck!
 

VCRusso

Member
Messages
5
Reaction score
0
Trophy Points
1
Malthus said:

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check them out.

I have been working on a few small side projects to learn the ropes of my editing software. I've been using DaVinci Resolve as it's free, and it seems like many of the techniques that apply to more mainstream software like Adobe translate well into it. If Gotham proves to be too cumbersome for me at my amateur stage I may put more focus into those projects.

I am keeping a good amount of character stuff, where I can. There are some characters that could be cut out from the mob storyline and I'd still have a cohesive story, but there would be a hole left where a lot of several-episode, great material could shine if watched in a single sitting.

I'm planning on posting on here and documenting some of the more significant parts of the process on YouTube, similar to what Sheepish does with Venom, Star Wars, and Thor. I probably won't start that process until I have some significant progress or a full outline to show for my work. 

Appreciate the warm welcomes and advice from you both, I hope to have things to share soon.
 

The Scribbling Man

Tenant of the Tower of Flints
Staff member
Donor
Faneditor
Messages
4,644
Reaction score
2,416
Trophy Points
148
I second Malthus on the danger of cutting too much, and especially of being overly wary of runtime. Try not to worry too much about runtime on your first draft. Pacing has a lot more to do with how the narrative flows than it does with length of film. If you establish that the narrative is where you want it, but still think it's a bit long, you can work towards trimming with a better idea of what isn't needed. It's also worth noting that things can be streamlined by making tiny cuts here and there, whether to location shots, superfluous lines of dialogue, or whatever - whole scenes need not always be cut.

VCRusso said:
Appreciate the warm welcomes and advice from you both, I hope to have things to share soon.

You're very welcome! All the best with your project :)
 

lapis molari

Better edits through feedback.
Staff member
Donor
Faneditor
Messages
1,779
Reaction score
1,271
Trophy Points
143
Interesting project! I haven't seen Gotham, but I like the goal of your edit. :cool:

For my Buck Rogers edits, two things have proven very useful that don't apply to typical movie edits:

1) I made a spreadsheet of details from every episode. Including:
- Who wears what clothes when (outfits were worn repeatedly, making it possible to merge scenes while retaining clothing continuity).
- People / events that are referred to in multiple episodes.
- Which guest actors appear when.
- Turning-point character development (that impacts a character through the rest of the series).
- Different composers (for musical continuity when mixing scenes).
- Various details on continuity.

2) A search-method for creating new dialog (by merging bits from multiple conversations). To streamline this, I used the .srt subtitle files from each episode.
- Decide what words you need to connect existing chunks of separate dialog.
- Search your .srt files (I use notepad) for the the desired words. If you don't know the scene by heart, you'll want to watch it to verify the right character says it.
- If your search comes up empty, use synonyms until you have a few results.
- Compare your results for intonation, to find the version that best fits in your new dialog.
- Insert the best one in your audio. If the video matches, you're done!
- If the video doesn't match; you place the line off-screen, or you find a shot that does look consistent where you can dub the right word(s) over the right visual (provided the lip-sync is close enough).
 

VCRusso

Member
Messages
5
Reaction score
0
Trophy Points
1
Thanks for the tips. As far as character outfits go, the nice thing about Gotham is that most of the characters have a "uniform" of sorts, it being based on the comic books. Young Catwoman wears basically the same thing every episode- the differences in her costume are slim to none, Detective Gordon wears a plain suit and tie to work, Penguin has a very distinct suit, etc. The only character who doesn't is Bruce Wayne, being the billionaire he is. He has a different brightly-colored shirt or sweater vest in every episode, sometimes changing several times in an episode that takes place over more than a day or two. Luckily, he's got a fairly small impact in season 1, so he can be spaced out across the film where clear passage of time has occurred. 

I have a solid memory of the show's plot points and where they fall, as I've casually watched it four or five times (and the first season twice while taking notes for the edit). I do have a Google Doc that breaks down every episode into ~25 scenes a piece that each say what happens in around a sentence. It's definitely not the most user friendly format right now, so I could probably do with organizing it again. 

So far, I haven't needed to shift any lines from scene to scene or merge anything, though I'm anticipating it for the later bits of the season. Using the subtitle file is a good idea, I'll have to grab them out of the .mkv files soon. That'd probably help with the whole scripting portion I mentioned in one of my other replies as well. 

Also, Gotham is definitely worth giving a look if you have the time. The first season tends to be a bit slow, but if you're into Batman, the show gets more and more comic book-y and fun with time while keeping a decently dark tone. It also has, in my opinion, one of the top 3 acting performances of the Joker in live action ever. This edit I'm working on now will keep most of the main plot of the first season, but there's some cool stuff that will probably be left on the cutting room floor when all is said and done. The show does a lot of slowburning on some plotlines, which is why I think people didn't get into it much until around the end of the second season. It suits binge watching much better than a week-by-week viewing.
 

PaulisDead2221

Well-known member
Faneditor
Messages
176
Reaction score
47
Trophy Points
48
I'd recommend Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat", a screenwriter's book, to help nail down the most important parts to your narrative.  It's a great spin on teaching the typical three-act structure while being geared towards the tried and true "Hollywood formula" for film.

In my opinion, great for aspiring screenwriters and faneditors with big projects like yours alike.

When I was attempting a DCEU supercut (gone by the wayside with the announcement of the Snyder Cut coming to HBO Max), I basically started with a blank "beat-sheet" and worked out where the important elements mattered and when, which helped guide the overall arc on the story the three films (Man of Steel, BvS, Justice League) were telling.

The book one can get through in a few days easy--it's not at all long.  Examples of his "beat-sheet" system of organization has nearly an entire subculture of fans who analyze every successful film under the sun in "Save the Cat" terms.
 
Top Bottom