Some of my amateur video work is to be included in a documentary film about planned obsolescence - I’ve been discussing with the producer about the best way to get the footage to her and she used the term ‘rushes’ - from context, it was easy to understand that this means the pieces of pre-edit footage - but I’m curious about the etymology - where did the term come from?
(I did try googling it, but my search was confounded by a lot of other unrelated instances of the word)
I think it comes from the fact that they are “rushed” through production and then “rushed” the the important people who have to see them. cite
I cannot find anything either - but have always assumed that since *rush *means to hurry, these were short bits that were rushed out the door before editing.
Cool - thanks for that.
I tentatively guessed it might be that, but then I also wondered if it might be something to do with papyrus (especially the way it’s constructed from individual pieces into a whole sheet).
The term comes from how the prints were rushed through the lab.
How it works in film - the scene is shot. The film is taken from the camera and delivered to the lab for processing. There’s no hurry-up or corner-cutting here. This film is processed carefully - if it’s damaged, the day’s work is lost.
Once the camera negatives are processed, they need to be printed to positive film so people can look at them. This is the part that’s rushed and where the term comes from - there’s no color correction, timing, contrast/brightness adjustment, etc. done. Just slam it through the developer, dry it off and rush it back out to the screening room.
I believe this accounts for the crappy image quality you sometimes see on old blooper reels, like the original Star Trek one: bloopers may never have been printed at all except as rushes.