Editing Analysis: Jaws

Jaws Editing Analysis

The Principal Photography for Jaws bean on May 2, 1974. The film was distributed by Universal Pictures. It made $470 million dollars on a $3.5 million-dollar budget. It is still the seventh highest grossing film of all-time. Jaws was directed by Steven Spielberg and edited by Verna Fields. Jaws won 3 Academy Awards they were for editing, best original dramatic score, and another for best sound. Jaws had many production issues when it came to the building of the shark to be used on the set in Martha Vineyard. Jaws was edited around the shark actually and you don't see the shark until about halfway through the film. So, by not overusing the shark actually makes the film feel more realistic and a lot scarier. I know we

They use harpoon gun that connects the harpoon to the shark and the barrel. By them doing this every time before the shark attacks the barrels come up. Together with, the music and the editing create great tension it keeps rising and every time the shark attacks he has his own music that brings the film from a 5 to a 10. Without sound editing this movie would not have the Hitchcock horror feel like it does Verna Fields did a great job blending everything together. Verna Fields made sure through her editing style she used would make the shark look as authentic as possible. The best scenes in the movie take place on the boat. These are the scenes that makes Jaws great. The last quarter of the movie are three main characters trying their best to stay alive and to kill the shark before it kills anymore people. As a matter of fact, this film was selected by the national film registry as culturally significant motion picture. The editing used in the last quarter of this film is amazing the shark disappears and reappears like a game of cat and

The decisions used by the director helped create an even greater final cut. Many scenes would feel a lot different if the shark would've been used more often like it was planned in pre-production before they couldn't get the Shark built fast enough before a lot of the beginning scenes were already filmed. Many scenes in the beginning where you think the shark is there was the director pulling on the girl who is the first person to die in the movie. This was Steven Spielberg biggest obstacle that he was working on up to that point and having a great editor like Verna Fields who won an award for this movie did many things during the edit that were very uncommon during that time like editing behind where you would normally cut so it would feel a little weird to the viewer. Everything about Jaws is just a little different and it made a movie that I couldn't keep from watching and deserves every award it won. This movie brought a lot of the thriller aspects used in Hitchcock films like Psycho and The Birds. The editing style created a great thriller with many horror aspects that many films use to this