The Film Editing Room Handbook: How to Tame the Chaos of the Editing Room, Fourth Edition

6. Special Cases

All the editing room procedures I’ve outlined up to this point apply primarily to straight dialogue movies cut using NLEs in the United States. Many other types of movies exist along with many more ways to edit them. Let’s consider a few of them.

Synching Musical Sequences

Silent Night, Silent Cowboy has a musical scene in it. It takes place on a saloon set where the lead cowboy in our movie-within-a-movie enters the town saloon and gets involved in a fixed poker game. He walks around the room, amazed at the newness of everything. He sees two cowboys singing together, one of whom is playing a guitar (see Figure 6.1, on page 80, and Figure 6.2, on page 81, for the lined script pages).

The director could shoot this scene in several ...