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'Professional software needs to work on $150 million movie'
Walter Murch Film-maker
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And I think Apple said, 'You know, we're going to go somewhere else, and we're going to pursue...' I've never heard them say this, but actions seem to speak louder than words, which is, a time is coming shortly where you will not graduate from high school without making a film, but that's part of our... That will be part of our education. And this is already true in certain schools. In fact, it's already true in certain schools that you have to make a film even to get into the school. It's like: show us your... show us what you can do, a kind of video CV of your life, and that will allow us to get a sense of you.

So this is all in the name of media literacy, which is undeniably important, because of what we have been talking about earlier. The culture now is so deeply suffused with media in all of its forms, thanks principally to the internet, but also many other things, that we live a huge portion of our lives in that world. And it's... Even if you don't make media yourself, it's good to know about it so that you can know when you're being manipulated, or just to have some insight into it. And so I think this is part of the reasoning behind a full education now.

100 years ago, 150 years ago, obviously, you couldn't graduate from school without knowing how to read, and how to write an essay, and how to do relatively advanced mathematics for a teenager. I think those are still in place. But added to that now is: can you make a film? Do you know how to shoot images, and then put them together, and present something? And this is a market that is, I would say, ideally suited to Final Cut X, which is full-fledged, but not with all of the dangly bells and whistles, and multiple levels of sophistication that a professional piece of... You know, a totally professional software needs to have to work on $150 million movie.

And clearly, from a marketing point of view, from an economic point of view, this is a good decision, because the market for those things... How many high school students are there in the world? Many hundreds of millions. And if you can sell this software for whatever it is, $250, to 100 million students all over the world, do the math. It's... That's a big item. And because they offer a platform that other third parties can populate with added bells and whistles, Apple doesn't have the responsibility for those things. They can simply say, 'If you're having problems with that, you have to talk to that person, not us.'

Born in 1943 in New York City, Murch graduated from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. His career stretches back to 1969 and includes work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, and The English Patient. He has been referred to as 'the most respected film editor and sound designer in modern cinema.' In a career that spans over 40 years, Murch is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Francis Ford Coppola, beginning in 1969 with The Rain People. After working with George Lucas on THX 1138 (1971), which he co-wrote, and American Graffiti (1973), Murch returned to Coppola in 1974 for The Conversation, resulting in his first Academy Award nomination. Murch's pioneering achievements were acknowledged by Coppola in his follow-up film, the 1979 Palme d'Or winner Apocalypse Now, for which Murch was granted, in what is seen as a film-history first, the screen credit 'Sound Designer.' Murch has been nominated for nine Academy Awards and has won three, for best sound on Apocalypse Now (for which he and his collaborators devised the now-standard 5.1 sound format), and achieving an unprecedented double when he won both Best Film Editing and Best Sound for his work on The English Patient. Murch’s contributions to film reconstruction include 2001's Apocalypse Now: Redux and the 1998 re-edit of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. He is also the director and co-writer of Return to Oz (1985). In 1995, Murch published a book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, in which he urges editors to prioritise emotion.

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.

Tags: Apple, Final Cut Pro X

Duration: 3 minutes, 26 seconds

Date story recorded: April 2016

Date story went live: 29 March 2017