How Blackfish Was Edited

Blackfish (2013) is a documentary that I have seen on several occasions and rewatched to refresh myself on how it was edited recently. Blackfish is an incredibly hard-hitting documentary that doesn’t really need any further explanation because you like the rest of the world have probably already seen it, and if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour and go and watch it because it’s probably the most engrossing and well-made 83 minutes of factual video you’ll ever watch. Now I’ve hyped it up, lets talk about how it was edited.

Kasatka and Ken Peters

In this particular clip, like most of the film, it gets pretty serious as the interviewees are asked to talk about a horrible ordeal a particular trainer, Ken Peters, had to go through. The clip starts with a black screen labelled with the date with a voiceover of a news broadcasts which is cut to shortly after. This clip is followed by footage of the actual attack which is subtitled with details of the encounter. This scene is edited together so that Dave Duffus, the interviewee, speaking throughout the entire clip and it cuts between him and the archive footage of the incident. This is when we get our first editing decision that relates to shot size. In this particular scene the interviewee is shot in a close up, this is because of the severity of the subject matter and the intensity of the situation it was clear that the editor (Eli B. Depres) wanted to hone in on the emotion of the interviewee, at least while the archive footage was still rolling. After this we see the shot size shift back to a more comfortable and familiar distance from which an interview would be taken from (Medium-close up), this is due to the fact that in relation to the archive footage the tone has become much lighter as trainer Ken Peters managed to escape Kasatka’s jaws and therefore the Depres wanted to convey that tone has changed from just a few minutes earlier, where the audience may have been on the edge of their seats.

In  conclusion, from this short clip we can learn a lot about how film makers manipulate audience emotions based on the shot types they choose and how they relate to the wider narrative of the edit and the shots surrounding them. By most accounts the medium shot is a perfect balance between the long shot and the close-up (Moura, 2014) and generally creates a safe space for the audience. Whereas the close-up is more useful for the film maker when they wish to empathise character/participant emotion.

MOURA, G., 2014. SHOT SIZES: Telling What They See [viewed Feb 6, 2019]. Available from: http://www.elementsofcinema.com/cinematography/framing-shot-sizes/