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Short Cuts – Wheels on Fire (2001)

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clip The editing experiment education content clip 1, 2

Original classification rating: G. This clip chosen to be G

Clip description

Using Sophie (Gemma Bishop) in her wheelchair to shoot dolly shots ends in tears when Ross (Alex Tsitsopoulos) accidentally tips her out. Meanwhile Oscar (Damien Bodie) shows Anna (Lucia Smyrk) how he has edited the footage he shot of her and she is horrified.

Curator’s notes

by Annemaree O'Brien

Sophie is played very convincingly by Gemma Bishop who had to learn to use the wheelchair and not her legs to play this role. Sophie is a very strong character and in this scene her humiliation and frustration communicates a powerful message to the audience.

Oscar’s editing ‘experiment’ is based on Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov’s late 1910s pioneering experiments with editing montages and the impact it has on the viewers. In this famous experiment, Kuleshov inserted the same close-up shot of an actor’s impassive face before three very different shots – a bowl of soup, a dead person, and a cute young child. Film audiences at the time consistently believed that the actor actually showed a very different emotion for each situation – hunger, horror, and delight. Viewers today are probably too experienced to respond in quite the same naïve way but editing is undoubtedly a powerful way to manipulate meaning in filmmaking.

Teacher’s notes

provided by The Le@rning FederationEducation Services Australia

This clip shows media studies students Ross (Alex Tsitsopoulos) and Sophie (Gemma Bishop) filming a soccer game. Ross pushes Sophie, who is in a wheelchair, as she films. He ignores Sophie’s pleas to slow down and accidentally tips her out of the wheelchair, much to her dismay and his horror. Meanwhile, Oscar (Damien Bodie) shows Anna (Lucia Smyrk) some footage he has shot and edited, in which he has inserted her laughing face after a shot of a cemetery. Anna is shocked and perceives the editing as dishonest, but Oscar fails to respond to her reaction in the way she expects.

Educational value points

  • This clip, set in a media studies class at the fictional Sunridge High, touches on classroom issues around filming techniques and producing meaning in film. The new digital video camera becomes a means for the students to discover more about each other and about themselves. The media studies theme provides a rich source of material for writer Marieke Hardy to explore melodrama, drama and comedy through her script.
  • The clip refers to the way that the students are being educated to deconstruct visual texts. The viewing of visual texts and developing the ability to interpret these texts has become increasingly significant across curriculum areas in recent times. Oscar demonstrates how film is a constructed medium, not a mirror of reality, by using Anna’s image out of context. Understanding the power of the choices that editors make is fundamental to the study of film.
  • As this clip demonstrates, editors have the power to alter how someone appears in a film through the many choices at their disposal, including the length of shots, the insertion of transition effects and intertitles, and the points at which shots are cut. Anna’s version of 'reality’ or 'the truth’, which is what she expected to see, has been blurred by the intervention of the editor. The subjects of film footage often sign release forms indicating that they are aware of how their image will be used, but even with this safeguard there is a lot of room for surprise when the footage is released.
  • Montage, the word used to describe Oscar’s ordering of the shots in his film, is French for 'assembly’ or 'putting together’ and refers to the way an editor constructs a film, carefully selecting shots to create effects through their juxtaposition. Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970) was a 1920s filmmaker who showed the power of montage to create meanings that individual shots alone do not possess. Kuleshov experimented with the way images could affect an audience differently if he changed the shots preceding and following them, thereby altering their context.
  • Marieke Hardy, who wrote Short Cuts, has been a popular media presence since her early appearances in Neighbours in the mid-1980s. An actor, writer, producer and commentator, Hardy has worked in radio on 3RRR and on the ABC television’s First Tuesday Book Club. She writes columns for publications including The Age Green Guide, her blog, 'Reasons You Will Hate Me’ and the Polichicks left-wing fashion website. Hardy won an Australian Writers’ Guild Award for Short Cuts in 2003.
  • Short Cuts demonstrates the talents of a number of young Australian actors who appear here as students in a media class. Damien Bodie (1985–), for example, who plays Oscar Coxon, the editor in the second part of the clip, followed his Short Cuts role with appearances in Neighbours, Blue Heelers and the film Hating Alison Ashley (2005).
  • Short Cuts was applauded for its fresh approach to teen drama. Colourful, humorous and ready to experiment with fast editing, camera angles and transition effects, the series had the spontaneity and immediacy desired by young viewers. The fluid, energetic and confident approach to filming is particularly evident in the students’ own films, as well as the narrative framing them. Shortcuts won a number of awards, including an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Children’s Drama Series in 2002.