Development of video editing

Lumiere brothers

The Lumiere brothers invented cinematography in 1895. There first screening to an audience was in the basement of the grand cafe in paris. The footage was workers leaving the Lumiere factory, the content of the film was not important to the viewers as the fact they were watching moving pictures amazed them. George melies saw a lot of potential in the idea and wanted to buy a cinomatographe from the Lumiere brothers for 10,000 franks but they saw him as potential competition so refused his offer. So what George melies did was he bought a english made projector called the animatograph and as he was a mechanic he turned it into his own camera for only 1000 franks, this meant he could make his own film as part of his stage show.

The first editing skill was the jump cut and it was made by accident when George melies was filming a bus coming out of a tunnel when the camera crashed and then skipped to the next vehicle, but when he looked at the footage after it looked like the bus had turned into another vehicle. This revolutionized the way he edited from then on, he used it in a lot of his films as he could make people disappear and reappear right before the audiences eyes. After his discovery of the jump cut, he also introduced the fade in, fade out and overlapping dissolves. George started to make narrative stories rather than single shot films but he kept the theater idea by having the backgound like theater productions.      

As you can see it looks like the average theater production where there are no camera angle changes and the scenes last for a very long time. During the production of "The trip to the moon" The camera was never moved so they had to move the scene around it to make it look like it was moving.

Edwin S. Porter

Edwin set up the first projector in koster & Bials music hall but after a short while in 1900 he became head of production at the Edison Skylight Studio and he served as Edison's director and camera man. Taking influence from George Melies trip too the moon, Edwin Decided to try and have a go at creating a narrative for his film called "Life of an american fireman". What made his film so special was that he used actual archive footage of firemen and mixed it with his staged film to create a fictional narrative. But he stuck with the old ways of editing and used Temporal overlaps. This means for instance if you watch a clip of someone climbing through a window from one angle then as soon as they get out of shot you watch the same clip again but from a different angle, perhaps from outside of the building. Although this didn't matter to the audience as they were still amazed at the
technology that the were witnessing.

Georges Melies

Georges Melies was a french film maker that created the film " A trip too the moon. This was a really successful film as he filmed in on a cinematographe which had never been scene before. This involved multiple photographs flicking at a constant speed to trick your eyes into thinking that the pictures are moving. But rather than using drawings he used real people.

Continuity Editing 
D.W Griffith, who went by the stage name Lawrence Griffith, submitted a adapted play to Edwin porter who turned down the play because it had too many scenes in it. But instead he hired him as a actor for one of his films instead. He eventually ended up finding a job at Biograph and made over 450 different films which made film making more of a well known film. The effect "cut in" was created by griffith and was first used in the greasers gauntlet, 1908. He used this to show the emotional impact on the certain characters by cutting in to a certain place, like the characters face.

D.W Griffith made a film in 1915 called "The birth of a nation" but unfortunately the film was pro ku klux klan so immediately it got banned in many places and a lot of people were upset by this. This prompted Griffith to make to make another film in 1916 called "Intolerance which cost  $2.5 million to create. The first scene was a staggering 8 hours long but then trimmed it down to 3 and a half hours, but the film did not sell that well and left Griffith in a lot of debt that he would be paying for till he died.

Old Ways Of Editing 

In the early 1900's, editing films was a very tricky task. It involved cutting film manually with scissors and then placing them over a bin. You had to be precise enough to cut the film in between the different scenes and if you had even just a couple minuets of film then you would be there for hours cutting and editing the different clips. When they edit these films they would have to add transitions and all sorts of effects like the jump cut and different dissolves. One they got everything they want put into the film, they would then tape it back together being careful not to get any in the way of the scenes.The one problem with the film that was used in cameras was that it was highly flammable so it was very easy to catch fire and loose everything. 

Modern Day Editing

Compared to editing in the past, we have computers to do everything for us. Rather then doing all of the effects manually by hand, we have computers that know how to automatically edit footage to what we want. Modern day technology has changed so much over the past couple of decades as even with filming it wasn't that long ago that we were still using film to record rather than SD cards. The fact that the editing technology has improved so much means that we can get alot more done in a much shorter period of time 

Soviet montage 

Soviet montage was invented between the years of the Russian revolution and the rise of starling, the way they edited films have made a big impact on the film industry today as the soviet montage method is used in lots of films. It started by the Russians experimenting what film looked like when you put short footage together in different ways to see if it make sense.

Eisenstain was a big theorist in montage films where he was inspired to make films such as Strike and October which were montage films created as he used images and contrasted them to look the same clips.



Film and editing techniques are used in many ways to get the effect that you want, they can be really simple or really complicated. Simple editing techniques like cutting is used to go between scenes but as it gets more complicated when you include stuff like cross cutting and jump cuts.

180 Degree rule

The 180 degree rule is a basic guideline in film making. If two people are having a conversation in a film and are facing each other, and the first camera angle is over the shoulder looking at the other character ( over the right shoulder), then when it switches to the other character it has to be over the left shoulder so that it doesn't confuse the viewer. Another example of this is if the person is running down a street and you watch them run to the left side of the screen, but if you break this and switch over to the other side then it will look like he is running to the right. 

Continuity Editing

Establishing shot

An establishing shot is usually the first shot  of the new scene, designed to show the audience where the action is taken place. It is usually a very wide shot or a extreme wide shot. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishing_shot

Reverse shot

A reverse shot views the action from the opposite side of the previous shot. For example if two people are having a conversation, you would be looking at one person talking but when the other person talks the camera will switch so that you are looking at the other person. This shows a general conversation taking place.   

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/reverse-shot

Cross cutting

Cross cutting is when a series of clips that are shot in different locations are played together. The two different scenes are often linked with each other.

http://www.elementsofcinema.com/editing/parallel-editing/

Eye line match

Eye line match is a film technique that makes the viewer see what the character would be seeing on screen. The eye line shot starts by a character looking at something that we cant yet see and then is followed by a cut to an object or another person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeline_match

Re-Establishing shot

This technique is very commonly used as it shows the location of where the scene is. If you didn't do this the viewers could get confused as to where they were. The shots are normally a long shot of either a building or a specific location.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/establishing%20shot