Editing Seven Samurai (section)

===Filming===
[[File:Eiganotomo-thesevensamurai-dec1953.jpg|thumb|alt=Film makers stand in front of actors while filming the movie.|Akira Kurosawa directing Seiji Miyaguchi (far right side)]]Long before it was released, the film had already become a topic of wide discussion.<ref name="richiedonald" /> After three months of pre-production, it had 148 shooting days spread out over a year—four times the span covered in the original budget, which eventually came to almost half a million dollars. Toho Studios closed down production at least twice. Each time, Kurosawa calmly went fishing, reasoning that the studio had already heavily invested in the production and would allow him to complete the picture. The film's final battle scene, originally scheduled to be shot at the end of summer, was shot in February in near-freezing temperatures. Mifune later recalled that he had never been so cold in his life.<ref name="robnixon" />

During filming for the scene where the samurai arrive at the village, Kurosawa set up a shot at the top of the mountain from which the village could be seen in the valley. In order for this to work as an evening shot, the crew spent the entire day setting up for the single shot, but camerman Asakazu Nakai and Kurosawa ended up debating when to start shooting the scene by looking at the light through the camera's viewfinder. Despite spending the entire day preparing, Nakai's hesitation to start shooting caused the sun to set and the scene wasn't shot.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Nogami |first=Teruyo |title=Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa |publisher=Stone Bridge Press |year=2001 |isbn=9781933330099 |location=Berkeley |publication-date=2006 |pages=112–114 |language=en |translator-last=Carpenter |translator-first=Juliet Winters}}</ref>

Through the creative freedom provided by the studio, Kurosawa made use of [[telephoto lens]]es, which were rare in 1954, as well as [[Multiple-camera setup|multiple cameras]] which allowed the action to fill the screen and place the audience right in the middle of it.<ref name="richiedonald" /> "If I had filmed it in the traditional shot-by-shot method, there was no guarantee that any action could be repeated in exactly the same way twice." He found it to be very effective and he later used it in movies that were less action-oriented. His method was to put one camera in the most orthodox shooting position, another camera for quick shots and a third camera "as a kind of [[guerrilla]] unit". This method made for very complicated shoots, for which Kurosawa choreographed the movement of all three cameras by using diagrams.<ref name="robnixon" />

The martial arts choreography for the film was led by [[Yoshio Sugino]] of the [[Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū]]. Initially Junzo Sasamori of the [[Ono-ha Itto-ryu]] worked with Sugino, but he was asked by the Ministry of Education to teach in Europe during production.