The Primary Editing Motifs In Shaun Of The Dead

The primary editing motif is one of fast, repetitive cuts that allows Simon Pegg (Shaun, the protagonist) to express his inner narrative. It is through the effective use of pace and editing that the film is able to establish its own unique voice with which it tells a tale of an every day man who rises through an impossible situation and comes out victorious.

The reoccurring motif of rapid and self-repeating edits is what allows us the audience to understand the world as Shaun sees it. The mind of a spaced out daydreamer is rarely if ever linear. Chris Dickens (Editor of Shaun Of The Dead) edit is constantly seating the minds with clues about what is happening is Shaun’s world. He does this by using cutaways of valuable information that guides

The most iconic use of editing in Wright’s movies is the smash cuts that are traditionally reserved for tooling/suiting-up montages in the build-up to action sequences. They often consist of whip-pans, fast cuts, and zoom-ins. Here, Wright uses them to cover very mundane tasks. These are four examples of iconic editing within Wrights films. (Refer to reference images 3 – 10)

1. Things that enter and leaving the frame in funny ways. (Refer to reference image 3, 4, 5 and 6)

Reference image 3. Reference image 4.

(Shaun of the Dead, 2004, Edgar Wright) (Shaun of the Dead, 2004, Edgar Wright)

Reference image 5. Reference image 6.

(Hot Fuzz, 2007, Edgar Wright) (Hot Fuzz, 2007, Edgar

The powerful sound effects that accompany each zoom and cut create a sense of pace and impact that provide a humorous contrast to the actions that are actually taking place. These also foreshadow and provide build-up to the second part of the film when the action scenes that the sound and editing imply, actually take place (Corrigan, 2012).

The main iconic edit in Shaun Of The Dead is swipe cuts, which is where the shot swiftly 'swipes' to the next one with a small sound effect to keep pace and create a surrealist theme to the film, the editing maintains continuity throughout. Using tools such as eye line match and action match to do this. It is interesting to note that the zombies as characters cannot have an eye line match, reinforcing the difference of our main characters and the ensemble of extras.

The continuity edit in Shaun Of The Dead directly links to the comedy genre films that Wright has taken inspiration from. By highlighting realness to the situation through the genre conventions of continuity the audience can relate to the characters far easier and thus find humour in their predicament (Anderson,