Real-Life Math
Film editors are artists in their own rights. They do more than just
chop up film and make scenes fit together. But sometimes, they have other
considerations on their minds. Time, for example.
You're a film editor
working on a big Hollywood production of a new comedy. You and the director
work closely on a rough edit of the film. But when you're done, the movie
is 133 minutes long.
The studio says no way. See, there is an unwritten
rule that comedies can't go over 120 minutes -- and the studio would love
it if you could get it down to 110 minutes. Audiences get fidgety after two
full hours. Plus, any longer than that and the number of showings a single
theater can host in a day gets reduced. So it's back to the cutting room.
The
director is frustrated. He loves the movie as is and he refuses to cut any
scenes out. He asks you to take a cold, technical look at cutting. You look
at a breakdown of the scene structure. You notice that of the 37 scenes, 3
are longer than 10 minutes in length. You decide to focus on those long scenes.
You
put the film on a counter and notice that the 3 long scenes are all 70,000
frames long. Since film runs at 24 frames per second, you can begin to size
up how much can be taken out of these scenes.
How long are these
scenes and how many frames need to be cut in order to make the film 13 minutes
shorter?