5 - Editing

Summary

In The Handbook of TV and Film Technique (1953), an industrial publication intended for future television commercial productions, Charles W. Curran wrote that commercials

must be exactly 60 seconds in length, followed by 2 seconds of black. This means on 16mm film, picture portion is 36 feet; 1 foot, 8 frames in black—on 35mm the picture portion is 90 feet; 3 feet is [sic] black. All films must be supplied with SMPTE leader at head, the sound track must be 59 seconds in length, and sound track and picture must be physically printed side by side at first frame of the picture.

Curran repeated the same durations and specifications in a revised 1958 manual. By 1968, the thirty-second spot became increasingly common, in part to make television exposure more affordable to sponsors; as of 1972, the half-minute ad had “all but taken over.” In the mid-1980s, the fifteen-second commercial was born. In the internet age, commercials are sometimes as short as five or ten seconds. Historically, some commercials span these lengths, meaning variations cut at more than one running time, the shorter version usually broadcast once the longer version becomes well known. This is all in addition to experiments with subliminal cuts in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as time compression editing in the 1970s, the latter being commercials sped up by 20 or 25 percent to squeeze more information into the final running time.

The accelerated continuity and relative velocity of television commercials have resulted in the use of various editing techniques, most borrowed from Classical Hollywood filmmaking. In 1954, Sponsor questioned whether optical effects like dissolves and wipes were being overused as transitions in TV spots. In other cases, though, editing techniques in TV commercials have been at the vanguard of the American film industry.

In 1985, a thirty-second commercial promoting Honda Scooters, directed by Steve Horn and edited by Larry Bridges for Wieden+Kennedy, not only relied on swish pans and jump cuts, but innovatively used film leader tape, flashes of white screen, and even a frame going overexposed as transitional devices (Fig. 5.1). This commercial possesses an abstract, raw quality, invoking many stylistic practices of postwar American avant-garde film production. The Honda ad was credibly marketed for a younger, ‘hip,” and mostly urban audience, with its shots of an out-of-focus New York City and its disaffected inhabitants traversing pregentrified lonely streets.