In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch

Author:Walter Murch [Murch, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Astronomical Numbers

But first I’d like to take a moment to emphasize the astronomical number of ways that images can be combined in a motion picture. This has always been the case, no matter what editing system is used: manual, mechanical, or electronic.

If a scene is photographed with only two shots— one each from two different camera positions (A and B, let’s say)—you can choose one or the other or a combination of both. As a result, you have at least four ways of using these two images: A, B, A+B, and B+A. However, once the number gets much larger than two shots—and a director might shoot twenty-five shots for an average scene—the number of possible combinations quickly becomes astronomical.

It turns out there is a formula for this. Here it is:

C = (e x n!)-l

“C” is the minimum number of different ways a scene can be assembled using “n,” all of the shots the director has taken for that scene; “e” is the transcendental number 2.71828..., one of those mysterious constants (like n) you might remember from high school. And the exclamation point after the “n” (the one instance where mathematics gets emotional!) stands for factorial, which means you multiply together all the numbers up to and including the number in question.

For instance, the factorial of 4 = Ix2x3x4 = 24. The factorial of 6 = Ix2x3x4x5x6 = 720, so you see the results get big pretty fast. The factorial of 25 is a very large number, something like 15 billion billion million—15 followed by 24 zeros. Multiply that by “e” and you get (roughly) 40 followed by 24 zeros. Minus one.

So a scene made up of only twenty-five shots can be edited in approximately 39,999,999,999,999,999,999, 999,999 different ways. In miles, this is twenty-five times the circumference of the observable universe.

If you had fifty-nine shots for a scene, which is not at all unusual, you would potentially have as many possible versions of that scene as there are subatomic particles in the entire universe! Some action sequences I’ve edited have had upwards of 250 shots, so you can imagine the kind of numbers involved: 88 followed by a solid page of zeros—91 of them.

Now, the vast majority of these versions would be complete junk. Like the old story of a million chimpanzees at a million typewriters, most of what they banged out would make no sense at all. On the other hand, even such a “small” number as 40 followed by 24 zeros is so huge that a tiny percentage of it (the potentially good versions) will still be overwhelmingly large. If only one version in every quadrillion makes sense, that still leaves 40 million possible versions. For just one scene. And a theatrical film usually has hundreds of scenes, which themselves can be (and frequently are) rearranged from their original script order.

So the queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach of every editor beginning a project is the recognition— conscious or not—of the immense number of choices he or she is facing.

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