A Detail Is Not a Detail

When I started my first editing internship, I thought that removing or adding a single frame was perfectionism, even nitpicking. How could one frame - 1/24th of a second - be so important? 1/24th of a second is insignificant, right? A detail, so small. Surely you can't even see it? Well...

Think again.

I was shown, and I saw. Not only does a single frame make a difference - it makes a big difference.

It's the same with music. A classic mistake people often make at the start is syncing the music exactly on the target frame. When in fact you need to start the music one frame before the target. Why? Because the brain processes image and sound in a slightly asynchronous way. The brain anticipates meaning from the image, but needs the sound to arrive just slightly ahead in order to perceive them as simultaneous.

These details - and many others like them (the detail of a gesture, a caught breath…) - are what separate a good edit from a bad one using the exact same material. You have to know how to spot them.

Editing taught me that. The way I work as a script doctor inherited it. Because in script doctoring, it is the same: truth is born from detail.

It's in the precision of a beat of silence, in the description of a micro-gesture, a glance, a costume element or a set detail, that the film's breath and rhythm are created. Details are what carry the subtext and the emotion.

Obviously, I'm not talking about flooding the screenplay with useless details. Describing the color of the wallpaper or the make of the car is usually pointless, unless it tells us something about the character, or pays off later. I'm talking about meaningful details.

A detail is meaningful when it reveals rather than describes. The brand of whisky? Useless. The fact that he pours himself a double before noon? Now we're learning something about the character.

On stage directions, it's the difference between "He closes the door behind her, nervous" and "He closes the door behind her a little too hard, takes three steps toward his desk, and stops, lost in thought, lips pressed together, eyes cast down, darting." Or simply the difference between a line with no stage direction, and the same line preceded by "He hesitates, then smiles."

These details are very often missing from the screenplays I work on, and the reader is left unable to feel everything that's at stake.

The script consultant's job isn't only to solve problems of structure or dramatic progression, it's also to calibrate perception, to check whether the emotion lands at the right moment, whether the subtext is readable without being spelled out.

This is true in editing, in screenwriting, but also in design, in fashion, in architecture: detail organizes perception. It's right, or it isn't.

Details are not details.

Déborah Braun / 90pages

Script doctor

SERVICES