Not even a limb breaking in digital surround sound can match the horrific noise of a packed movie theatre when the pre-preview commercials come on. They are inevitable these days, and nothing short of an angry rush on the projector room is going to stop them.

The editors who cut these cinema spots know all about it. Editing is how they make a living, however, and having sat in the audience after shelling out $8 to $12 themselves, they know that if the spot has to be there, it better be interesting. They also know the dos and don’ts of cutting an ad specifically for the cinema.

‘If you are in the cinema, you don’t want to be sold something,’ says Flashcut’s Mick Griffin. ‘People want to be entertained. I’ve been in the cinema and have seen an ad for some car, and it was just the car driving around, slick eye-candy stuff, and it didn’t do anything. People were just waiting for it to end. If you do something that is a bit of a story and people are into it for the minute-and-a-half, that is a huge difference.’

Griffin and fellow Flashcut editor Norm Odell have cut their fair share of cinema ads and know there is nothing worse than having to sit through a badly edited spot at the movies. Through their experience, both in the suite and in the audience, they have learned how to avoid the headaches caused by quick cuts, poorly done slow-motion sequences and everything else that generally annoys the audience. First and foremost, they agree, the spot has to be entertaining.

‘I think the idea is key,’ says Odell, who cut the Clearnet cinema ads. ‘Things have to get behind the idea. I’ve seen stuff that doesn’t hold up well on the big screen because there just isn’t any idea and it is a technique thing.’

Griffin says the editor has to understand the audience the spot will be playing to, the size of the screen on which it will be shown, and when to hold back on the quick cuts and other flashy techniques.

‘You have to slow down your cutting a bit,’ says Griffin, who has posted cinema spots for clients like Salon Selectives, Cantel and Labatt. ‘Television is a small screen so the actual decay times of the shots are way different, so you can’t cut it extremely fast and try to tell the story. Good editors always try to lead your eye around the screen so you are seeing everything you need to see. You can play your shots quicker if your eye is not having to search all around the screen.’

Griffin says on the large screen, quick cuts work more effectively in feature films, using the example of Oliver Stone’s jfk. In the instance of jfk, and Natural Born Killers (another Stone opus), the quick cuts are used to evoke an emotional response from the audience, which is rarely the intent with a cinema ad.

Odell says the creation of a cinema spot cannot be an afterthought and footage given to the editor must be shot specifically for the big screen.

‘Decisions have to be made in the initial cinematography of the spot on whether or not the scene will want to be slowed down a lot or sped up a lot,’ says Odell. ‘A sufficient amount of film has to be shot to handle slow motion so you don’t get the artifacting that you’d get in a normal slow-motion shot. On top of that, you get the ghosting thing happening, which is not really desirable.’

Blue Highway’s Andy Attalai, who has cut theatre spots for Kraft and Mazda, says he enjoys the overall spectacle of the cinema ad. He also appreciates the freedom to cut a spot in a less structured fashion, without having to worry about whether the footage left with him will all fit in a 15-, 30- or 60-second space.

‘The beautiful thing about cinema commercials is the scope of their size and the richness of the image, the treatment and complexity of the sound,’ says Attalai. ‘These are things you have to keep in mind when you are cutting. You can favor wide shots whereas in television you have the smaller screen size and close-ups. You can favor imagery to fit a wider screen.’

The bottom line for cinema ads, however, is to keep the spot entertaining and to make it as enjoyable to the audience as the film itself – well, maybe as enjoyable as the previews.

‘I don’t think [audiences] are necessarily ready for or expecting to see a commercial, so you have their full attention and that needs to be respected,’ says Odell. ‘It needs to be entertaining, which I think is something people forget sometimes in tv advertising.’ *