Elliptical Editing

Elliptical Editing

Elliptical editing is a technique used in film editing that allows an event's duration on-screen to be shorter than its duration in the story. The simplest type of elliptical edit is a cut between two shots, both of which show part of the same event.

Editors use elliptical editing to control the pace of the story. A long, tedious event that may take hours in the story may be edited so that film spectators only need to sit through a few minutes. For example... In the Batman film, Batman Begins, elliptical editing is used to cut a journey shorter, as you can see when he is walking on the hill its shows where he is walking too, but a few seconds later he arrives as destination. The editors did this because it may have become boring if they would've left the whole journey in the film.

We also elliptical edited our own journey video, we did this as the original journey was over a minute long and we chose to include only really necessary shots to shorten it to about 30 seconds.