Why “Whiplash” Won an Oscar for Best Editing | Hacker News Reader

Why “Whiplash” Won an Oscar for Best Editing

williamdickersonfilmmaker.com

130 pointssoneca64 comments

Site is down, here's an Internet Archive mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20150520140301/http://williamdick...

This is really trying to find meaning where there is none. "Andrew's life didn't need editing", wtf. It's just a way to introduce the main character and his nemesis, that's all there is to it.

The reason it is oscar-worthy is : drums are by definition repetitive, a character playing drums is mostly static, there are no real dialogs possible while drums are being played, and the movie overcame all these obstacles.

One of the problems is that the article ascribes a lot of decisions to the editor that were actually made by the writer or the director. Which is weird, because something can't be an editing decision if it had to be shot a certain way, because editing comes all the way at the end after everything's been shot.

Of course, writing about film is hard, because it's such a collaborative medium. It's hard to attribute a decision to a single person, when in actuality it was probably hinted at in the script, then improved from the director talking to the actor, or the DP suggesting an experimental camera angle, or the editor finding an accidental shot that just happens to work for the scene.

So let's look at whether some of these decisions were born in "writer," "director", or "editor" land. I'll pretend that Whiplash wasn't written and directed by the same guy.

  However, after rushing to get to the studio, he 
  realizes that he is early — by 3 hours. He was 
  manipulated, leading him, and us, to question: 
  should he trust Fletcher’s version of “time?”

This series of cause-and-effect events is the story, which is the purview of the writer.

  Andrew re-enters the rehearsal space in slow-motion.
  He gets behind the drums, also shot in slow-motion,
  until Fletcher re-enters the room, which resets the
  film into normal motion.

Again, if you had to shoot it in slomo, it wasn't the editor's decision. It's hard to say if this would come from writing or directing. The script could say "he approaches the bench in slow motion," or it could say "he approaches the bench" and the director intuits that the film should ratchet up the tension.

  It’s interesting to note that while his drumming is off, 
  the editor chooses to place cuts of Andrew placing 
  band-aids on his hand that are in perfect rhythm with 
  the timing of the ride cymbal –-

This does sound like an editing decision. But again, the script could easily say "He band-aids his hand in rhythm with the cymbals."

If you want to read more about some actual decisions an editor goes through, I highly recomment In The Blink Of An Eye, written by sound and film editor Walter Murch. Tony Zhou's Vimeo series Every Frame A Painting is great too, although it focuses more on directing and cinematography.

Interesting article - I am always curious how the psychology behind the edits subconsciously plays into my understanding of, and feelings toward, character dynamics.

For those who haven't seen it, Whiplash is my favorite movie of the past several years. The "third act" is probably the most intense finale I've seen in quite some time as well.

Highly recommended to anyone, musical background or not.

I am generally a movie curmudgeon with a high bar. I got it as an iTunes rental for a long flight. iTunes only gives you 24 hours once you press play. I watched it three times before expiring.

What else do you like you as much as this?

Spinal Tap. Point Break. Sneakers. Primer.

Cool, agree on the first two, will have to rewatch Sneakers, haven't seen Primer. Here are some of my favorites: Kramer vs. Kramer, High Noon, Groundhog Day, Leon: The Professional. High Noon in particular is told in real time so it has this intense feeling like Whiplash.

Sneakers is wildly entertaining on many levels. Plus it was an early hacker movie which was cool. Primer is trippy, one of those rare movies where you will instantly watch it again after the first viewing. Then you'll google the plot and read for an hour and watch it a third time in the same day. It works though.

Primer is the best film featuring time travel that I've ever seen. And yes, the plot is highly convoluted, and there is virtually no explanation. Also, it was filmed on a very low budget, and some of the key dialog is hard to understand.

Along similar lines to Primer (both in terms of story and production), you might enjoy the film Coherence...

Primer was great! I liked the gritty, detailed, realistic but fictional engineering in the story as much as anything. That aspect reminds me of the Neill Blomkamp films - District 9, Elysium, Chappie.

I remember reading a review/summary/explanation of Primer that was written up--by necessity--in LaTeX.

remember this chart showing the timeline complexity of primer as well ? http://i2.wp.com/bitcast-a-sm.bitgravity.com/slashfilm/wp/wp...

xkcd's chart for Primer feels just as helpful:

https://xkcd.com/657/

wow, he nailed it again :)

Sneakers is such a great film and so very underrated.

If you haven't seen it The Conversation is a brilliant film for a hacker. And Pi

> For those who haven't seen it, Whiplash is my favorite movie of the past several years. The "third act" is probably the most intense finale I've seen in quite some time as well.

Totally agree. I watched it during a flight totally randomly. I didn't expect much but it was a great surprise. The finale was so intense I had to watch it a second time.

Even as a musician, it's the human expression side that talked to me. Expressing your voice and ideas. Also the existential notion of time, no rush no drag, very important outside of the instrument.

The final part was like being in a rocket taking off, pretty intense.

he did mess up the shuffle tho on the beginning building snare fill thing. good drummer who played it but he wasnt buddy rich :)

I thoroughly despised this movie. To me it felt like a celebration of a sadistic abuser mind-raping a kid, and never being punished for it. No music teacher I know would have gotten away with what Fletcher did without going to jail.

This is not how you teach jazz. This is not how you teach anything.

A film about sadistic behaviour isn't necessarily a celebration of it.

It set up a false dichotomy between being abusive to students in order to achieve excellence and softballing them with praise so they'll never work hard. Most people I've talked to bought into this dichotomy after watching this movie, thinking that there is some kind of tradeoff between greatness and abusiveness. The movie legitimizes this false dichotomy, not by condoning the abuse, but by implying that it is the unfortunate price of greatness. Whether or not this was the intended message, it seems to have been the message that most people I've talked to have internalized from it.

While you are right it is a false dichotomy. It isn't completely made up either. Greatness can (often) be achieved through abusively pushing someone to their limits... Like most elite sports athletes...

Am I way off base thinking this?

You would like Frank Herbert's books: Dune, Dosadi... It's weird how most of his books have as a common element exactly that: suffering leads to greatness (the Fremen, Sardaukar in Dune, as well as the introductory Gom Jabar, the Dosadi people in Dosadi, etc...)

And for what it's worth, I personally think you are way off. Most of the time, abuse/suffering leads to stunted growth and/or trauma. Very few transcend that. I think you've got confirmation bias (as I once had).

Many examples would prove you right, but I can't help thinking it would be better to fuel someone's desire for excellence instead of abusively pushing him.

Counter example would be Marion Bartoli who won wimbledon against all odds and her own limits, pushed by her father, then immediately stopped being a professional tennis player. Too many sacrifices. Pretty common in women pro tennis.

And there was also the case of Argentinian footballer Gabriel Omar Batistuta, one of the greatest strikers of all times, who had this to say about the time which followed the end of his career:

> "I left football and overnight I could not walk anymore. In two days I could not walk...I peed in the bed, the bathroom was 3 meters away, because I did not want to get up. It was 4 am and I knew as soon as I stood my ankle would kill me. (... ) "I went to see the doctor (specialist in Orthopaedics and trauma) Avanzi and told him to cut off my legs. He looked at me and he said I was crazy. I insisted. I couldn't bare it any longer. I can't explain to people how bad the pain was," he said

from here: http://www.conmebol.com/en/content/batistuta-i-asked-they-cu...

I really liked the player when I was a a teen, I would always pick the Fiorentina in FIFA games to play with him. Overmedication (if not worse) so that he can always be on the field has put him in this condition. Very sad. But I read he feels better with his legs now.

Daniel Kahneman (from his autobiography, but he tells the same story in Thinking, Fast And Slow):

> I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, “On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better the next time. So please don’t tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.” This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them. I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback. We measured the distances from the target and could see that those who had done best the first time had mostly deteriorated on their second try, and vice versa. But I knew that this demonstration would not undo the effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

First, the demonstration Kahneman arranged is simply a demonstration of regression to the mean and is not evidence of the validity of his hypothesis.

Is the hypothesis itself wrong? We can test the validity of the hypothesis on all people by testing it on a subset: teachers with expertise in the subject they are teaching. Kahneman hypothesis implies that such teachers reward students only when their level of achievement is higher than it has ever been in the past and punish them whenever their achievement is below their highest level of achievement.

This does not hold true in my experience of my own teachers. I was occasionally praised for doing well or punished (in some sense) for doing badly but much more often when I spoke with my teachers they remembered trends: I started bad and got better slowly, I started off well but seemed to get lazy, etc.

In my experience teaching first year math courses I would only automatically remember individual achievements if they were very surprising. For example, a student who was failing suddenly moving into the top of the class on a test.

I think people have a natural tendency to focus on these kind of outlying events and assign them special significance that they may not actually have. Although Kahneman does not mention this tendency his hypothesis suggests he also believes this.

But compared to the interesting outlying events the vast majority of student's achievements are not memorable. This means a teacher will not automatically remember them. If the teacher does not choose to remember them then they will be forgotten.

Since a teacher's capacity to remember is limited, trying to remember all student's achievements or failures was low on my priority list. Knowing a student's general trajectory lets you tailor your approach when working with them on a problem whereas individual achievements or failures are usually just noise. Other teachers I knew seemed to feel the same way.

Of course my own experience is only a data point against Kaneman's hypothesis about people in general. I am sure there could be types of teaching environments where something like what he is suggesting could be true. If the performance of the students on a particular test were tied to the teacher's compensation or the opinion of people they respect or who have power over them then I can see how a student's performance on that test would get highest priority in a teacher's mind and this could lead to reactions of the kind Kaneman describes.

> Kahneman hypothesis implies that such teachers reward students only when their level of achievement is higher than it has ever been in the past and punish them whenever their achievement is below their highest level of achievement.

Not really, Kahneman is talking about doing better or worse than expected, not about your best or worst performance.

Regression to the mean arises when following up on any deviation from the mean – though of course the more extreme the deviation, the more pronounced the effect.

Similarly, the effect of regression to the mean is smaller when measuring longer periods of time (less measurement error means fewer fluke outcomes) but it doesn't disappear.

Of course, it's perfectly possible that strict teachers are truly beneficial even when accounting for regression to the mean, it doesn't have to be one or the other, and Kahneman certainly doesn't prove anything of the sort, but it does shift back the burden of proof to those who would claim that strict or even borderline abusive teaching is helpful.

> Not really, Kahneman is talking about doing better or worse than expected, not about your best or worst performance.

At a given point in time there are two quantities we need to worry about: how the teacher expects the student to perform at that point in time and the student's ability to perform at that point in time.

If the teacher is rational and has seen the student perform many times these quantities will be the same. I think the outcome is probably optimized if these quantities are the same at all times but in the real world there may large disparities in the values which can fluctuate over time.

Nevertheless, suppose it were the case that the values are always equal. Then Kahneman's hypothesis is obviously wrong. The student will perform better than expected roughly the same number of times they perform worse than expected (in the long run, obviously).

Regression to the mean exists, yes, but has no impact on the distribution of the events of being above the mean or below the mean.

I supposed that Kahneman would recognize this fact and he his reference to regression to the mean was based on a more complicated but much more realistic model where the expectation is not always aligned with reality. In such a model there must be a mechanism for relating the two quantities after each new performance/test/review.

I tried to think of how this model would work and suggested Kahneman meant that expectations were adjusted based on previous best values. I should have been clearer that other mechanisms were possible and that I was only guessing which Kahneman meant. Then I argued that based on my experience this is a poor model of how teachers punish/reward their students in general because it is unnatural and unhelpful to the task at hand. As this model is not valid his conclusion that people are incentivized to punish each other is specious.

>It set up a false dichotomy between being abusive to students in order to achieve excellence and softballing them with praise so they'll never work hard. Most people I've talked to bought into this dichotomy after watching this movie, thinking that there is some kind of tradeoff between greatness and abusiveness.

It seems especially egregious in creative fields. It might be good for muscle memory, I suppose, so perhaps it applies to drumming. But horrible for the hard creative problems which would include many aspects of music.

I do think the movie is ambiguous though. Watching it again, I started to wonder if the ending isn't just a fantasy of Andrew as he stares up at Carnegie Hall.

Interesting. My thoughts were this was the weak half-rationalisations of a teacher taking out his anger at himself for his own career having plateaued on his students. I think that's a shame that just because the film doesn't explicitly criticise this viewpoint (apart from through the whole narrative of course -- he ends up dropping out of school when he could've been happy being a good gigging musician with a girlfriend -- and someone commits suicide) people internalize it. See Fight Club I guess.

Exactly (what sofal said).

> I thoroughly despised this movie.

You don't have to like movies for them to have been good! You could despise a character while still thinking the movie was good for making you despise the character. That's an art.

If they have a strong emotional impact on you, they've "worked" (other than if they're just crap) because you talk about them, digest them and question their messages. A ton of great movies explore the darker side of humanity by using despicable characters; that's the beauty of story.

However, most (good) movies do have a lingering message, a thesis point the filmmaker is trying to make about people or the world. What do you think the message was in this movie, and do you agree with it?

It's a while since I watched it but I guess it's about the length some teachers will go to if they want the legacy of being the teacher of a great musician. It's about a nasty, revengeful, obsessive character who will stop at nothing to separate the wheat from the chaff to uncover a diamond or to screw over his enemies.

I don't think there's anything to agree with in terms of message since I didn't see in it any condoning of Fletcher's behaviour. Sure, in the end his approach did uncover greatness, but through seeing the toll it took on Neiman, I certainly wouldn't say the film advocates that that is how music should be taught. I also wouldn't say it contained a warning either.

There are several possible messages you could read into the movie, and that lends it depth.

Just because a movie evokes a strong emotional impact doesn't make it good. A strong emotional response can be highly negative as well.

If the movie is made to create a negative emotional response then I suppose one can say it succeeded in doing so, but it still doesn't make it good to the people who view it negatively.

Good as in effective at making the audience feel what the screenwriter set out to make the audience feel, but not necessarily good as in enjoyable.

Saying a movie is good and saying the screenwriter is good at their job is two different things.

I'm going with the classic definition; good as in "satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree" or "of high quality; excellent".

You didn't like the movie because it showed something bad?

It also applies to how many of us extract excellence from ourselves. Working intense hours, loathing ourselves for errors, losing our lives to release some app which is probably shitty and even ultimately meaningless to humanity when you allow yourself to think about it... :)

Also, many teachers have a lot in common with the one in the film. A lot are worse. (SPOILER: Modulo the unlikelihood of someone competing after stumbling about and obviously bleeding profusely.)

You hated it because it had a mean character in it? Your prerogative, I suppose. I thought it was a fantastic movie, despite not liking every person in it.

I hated it because its message was perverted. The "mean" character was rewarded -- not punished -- for his most sadistic act (the last 10 minutes of the movie), and as sofal has pointed out here, audiences seemed to have taken his behavior as the norm when pushing students to greatness. If the movie had ever implied that greatness can be achieved without abuse (which it can), I'd have had no problem with it.

I really enjoyed this movie, but I also feel like it was a Rorschach test for sociopathy. What you come away with at the end of this movie kind of says a lot about you as a person.

I felt like it was more of an attempt at justifying sociopathy, or at least exploring the impulse towards it.

The movie essentially argues that greatness comes from external pressure, from being pushed beyond your limits.

I loved this movie, and immediately commented to a few movie-buff friends of mine that I was certain that they'd get an oscar for the sound editing. The actual movie edit was artful and amazing, but the sound edit.. talk about meticulous.. every single drum hit?! Called it! http://www.nabshow.com/thought-gallery/oscar-winner-ben-wilk...

Sorry to be pedantic, but Whiplash won the Academy award for best sound mixing; the award for best sound editing went to American Sniper. Mixing involves the spatial and tonal quality of the sound; editing the temporal and semantic quality.

But either way yes, it is very meticulous, and I think you'd be even more shocked to look at the project files, because each individual sound you hear in a film often involves multiple layers of sound or multiple treatments of a single source sound through different mix busses. As a rule of thumb there are bout 10 edits on the sound track for every cut you see on screen. Thankfully there are some tools available to partially automate the process, but in the it requires a huge amount of work and near-endless reserves of patience.

Source: movie sound is what I (mostly) do for a living, though I haven't won an Acamdemy award for it.

"Mixing involves the spatial and tonal quality of the sound; editing the temporal and semantic quality."

What does that even mean? I thought sound editing was the creation of all the sounds and sound effects, and mixing was the mixing.

The same thing you said, though in a more abstract way. By temporal I mean where they go on the timeline, and by semantic I mean the content of the sound. Much of the time what you hear simply matches what you see on the screen, either from production sound or from a sound effects library or by a foley artist, eg if you see a glass bottle smash on the floor you will probably just use a natural sound for that. But then you have to look at what it means in the context of the story - suppose the bottle is being smashed on the floor by an alcoholic who has finally decided to fight his addiction? You migh choose to emphasize that with music, or you might emphasize it by layering in other sounds from elsewhere in the soundtrack or some purely expressionistic sound like a heavy lock opening. Also, you'll frequently use sound to speed up or slow down the action by transitioning into the next scene before or after the camera cut.

Mixing involves setting the levels of the different sounds, but it also includes some decisions about how the sound moves, what sort of reverb and coloration are used (spatial) and how it's balanced against the music, how it's EQed (tonal).

Hope that helps.

Sound editors are responsible what to include in the track and when, sometimes much more or less than what the mics on set picked up.

Sound mixers are like sound engineers in the rest of the business, crafting relative levels, dynamics, tonal transformations like EQ, and spatial transformations like reverb.

Have there been blinded tests done to gauge audience impact? I hobbied a bit with sound and when I see, for instance, the result of "professional mastering" side by side, I've often thought the pre-mastering version was better. No doubt this isn't always the case, but it makes me wonder. Especially given how much myth and superstition seems to happen in audio, even coming from pros.

Not to come across as rude - I'm just ignorant and curious.

Not really. There are some loudness measuring standards and conventions about the 'right' level for dialog vs peak volume, but really it's down to the combined tastes of the mixing engineers, the director, and the producer, with the latter having priority. Thus there are fads about particular sounds (eg notice how every big exposion in a sci-fi film now is announced with the same falling sub bass sound...) and pressure to push the volume envelope on action pictures (Michael Bay is notorious for this sensory overload approach to both picture and sound).

Wow! I was instantly sure that this came down to someone at some DAW making a few million little tweaks on individual drum hits... Thanks for the correction and the detail!

Oh I think it amounts to the same thing. Automation can help but it's fundamentally painstaking stuff. As a general example, imagine someone walking down the street, but you don't like the original recording for some reason and decide to replace it. All the footsteps have to be matched up and that's tedious. There are plugins that will match the peak sounds of one recording to another to save you aligning every footstep (or word if you're replacing dialog) but you often end up having to do things by hand. Then if it's one person alone the footsteps may sound too simple so you need to add some fabric swish for their clothes. Or if it's two people, you need to have two different sets of footsteps which is really really annoying. Three people walking is fine because nobody can keep up with that so you can completely fudge the timing and nobody will notice.

The big challenge in movie sound is not to distract from what's going on in the story, which often means throwing away sounds that are present in the real environment but with are excluded by the picture frame, and whose presence thus becomes confusing to the audience because they don't know where the sound is coming from. I hate shooting in restaurants for example, because most restaurants have very loud refrigerators and of course most of them can't be switched off for food safety reasons. When you eat dinner don't notice this because there's music, other diners, maybe the person(s) you went to have dinner with, and the sound of your own body chewing and swallowing - so your brain just filters all the background noise away and lets you focus on the conversation or whatever. But when you watch the same thing on a screen, your brain is like 'what's that big machine noise? why does the lead actress sound like a farm animal? why is it all so echoey?' Total nightmare :-)

I haven't seen Whiplash yet but I'm looking forward to it.

I just recently decided to study film editing a bit deeper. Here are two classic reads that I highly recommend:

On Film Editing Kindle Edition by Edward Dmytryk (http://www.amazon.com/Film-Editing-Edward-Dmytryk-ebook/dp/B...)

In the Blink of an Eye Revised 2nd Edition by Walter Murch (http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Revised-2nd/dp/1879505622) (sadly no Kindle version exists for this one yet)

Cached: http://goo.gl/6AYpQd

That article illustrates the maxim that writing about music is like dancing about architecture

Most years the big films which are up for Best Picture and Best Director, are often nominated for other more niche awards.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nominated for Best Sound Mixing. And you have to wonder if it really had far and away better sound editing than hundreds of other films that year.

fyi: Whiplash was originally shot as a 20min short (different lead actor) which then got it's budget expanded so they could re-shoot and go for a full length movie. Annoyingly don't have details to hand.

Personally I was absolutely blown away by it...

Well there's a false headline. Oscar winning is the story of people, not of objective criteria.

The article is a story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com