Editors shape the perception of the story characters beyond the actors’ performance and the directors’ instructions through choice of shot, take and timing (Pearlman, 2016).  This artistic aspect of editing is often attributed to intuition – unreflected split second expert judgements.  But intuitive meaning ’unarticulated’, makes it problematic to teach the shaping of characters beyond craft skills like continuity and perspective.

The proposed presentation aims to explicate methods for teaching interpretation of actor performance, tools for molding it further and skills to ultimately create a character for viewers to emotionally invest in.  By developing students’ awareness and articulation of implicit knowledge such as kinesthetic empathy, laws of physics, autonomous reactions and cultural conditioning, the outcome is a method for furthering student’s ability to shape and develop multifaceted characters through editing and to build narratives around characters and relationship that offer depth and complexity across the role roster. In doing so, the students’ capacities for responding to multiple complexities may also be enhanced.  

The presentation is a case study of a teaching method developed and used with editing students at Stockholm University of the Arts, applied to both narrative fiction and documentary film.