Taxi Driver is a Scorsese masterpiece with one of film’s most powerful protagonists, Travis. It’s Travis’s many contradictions that makes him one of the great characters in film history. In my film essay, we will be watching the final shootout scene in the brothel. During this scene we will be discussing how editing techniques reveals Travis’s disjointed state and decent into psychosis.

The Process:

I ripped the film from Youtube. I have the original DVD but I could never get MPEG to convert the files into .mp4 or any form really. Next, in iMovie, I was able to add my voiceover audio with a push of a button! I drew up a script and recored myself.

The main difficulty was normalizing the audio. The is a strange echo during the scene with Travis talking to the Pimp. I struggled for hours trying to play with audio settings but I was only successful in mitigating it but not fixing it. For the other scenes it seems to be fine but those scene already had distorted sound.

Real movie editors have tough jobs. Hours of tedious work that only realizes small successes. It’s tough work and I cannot say I will be applying for any of those positions any time soon. or ever.