How To Be Single (2016)
How To Be Single is a romantic comedy edited by Tia Nolan.
The film is filled with very poor special effects, the most glaring of which is the regular appearance of snow in several scenes; the snow has no depth of field, only appearing in the background as undefined white blobs, never appearing in the foreground, despite it landing on the featured characters’ shoulders and heads.
The cuts in the film are often too quick, such as when there are conversations between two characters; more often than not, the cuts between the two angles to show each speaker are far too fast for the audience to see the speaker or the other person’s reaction. Considering this film relies heavily on conversation, it makes no sense that the edit should rush through these scenes trying to set a pace too fast to be suitable for this genre.
The colouring on How To Be Single is very nice; the colours have been softened, so that moments such as sunlight streaming through the windows are a lighter, softer colour that suit the genre, while the more wild party scenes feature saturated, bright colours that fit with the drunken view that the film is trying to convey. These saturated colours also fit with reoccurring neon pieces.
These neon pieces are used in special effects as well; one scene uses these neon colouring to count bottles of beer drunken. This would be fine had there been previous examples of counting or tracking aspects of the main character’s life via special effects but due to the way these neon numbers were included halfway through the film with no precursor, they don’t quite fit with the previous style set by the film. It also serves to speed the pace of the film up so while it does seem out of place, it is very effective in changing the film’s pace quickly without taking up too much time of the edit.
The cuts between various scenes are often jarring; where they could’ve been a match cut or a fade, there was instead a straight cut that broke the audience’s concentration. This meant that while the film’s colouring was nice and the audio was synced nicely and the sound effects and songs never got in the way of the dialogue and the story’s progression, the film was overall lacking due to the strange special graphics and too fast cuts.
