ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a model which provides a systematic template with which to address the concept and process of editing from three distinct perspectives: operational, narrative articulation and as a strategy to express complex meaning. The existence of personal, ideological and esthetic models that attempt to descriptively and analytically define editing complicates efforts to create a satisfactory model that is both theoretical yet practical and that brings together all the elements and levels and ways these relate to each other in an audiovisual communicative dynamic. At its basic level, editing is an operational process in which an editor interacts directly with a series of images and sounds in the form of fragments of celluloid or magnetic strips that contain the shots with which he/she will create a narrative product. Editing options involve assembling and recreating the plot in its overall form and meaning through the manipulation of the duration of the images and sounds.
