History of film editing

A brief history of  early film

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was well known for inventing/patenting many different things (he accumulated over 2,000 patents in his lifetime) throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th century,  He developed many items that we now take for granted, such as the light bulb, the phonograph (an old device used to play music), various different communication devices like the telephone, and the Kinetigraph, a device used to capture film, as well as the kinetiscope: which was a box that you would look into through the top, and would display moving pictures.

Here's an old video showing the kinetiscope in action.

Film at this time was brand new, and was seen more like a magic trick, than a form of media by most people. It was exhibited at circuses, and lots of people came to see primitive footage, films shot with these early devices were grainy, colourless and short. they also lacked story and were usually used to just record things happening. At the time films were very basic and there was no editing afterwards, all of the editing would happen in camera and as the shots were being filmed. They would also have to be filmed in a strict order.

Lumiere Brothers

 The Lumiere brothers were active in the late 19th and early 20th century, they made films which were very basic, with very little editing or effects, but  their work was still ground-breaking at the time. The two brothers worked with photography to start with, after they saw a film made by Thomas Edison they were inspired to develop their own. The Lumiere brothers were responsible for the development of in camera editing, which is the process of editing all shots in a film in camera meaning nothing could be changed afterwards, this process would take lots of planning as everything would have to be done in real time. Modern editing is done using computers so shots can be filmed and easily changed afterwards.


Some of the basic rules of film were started with the Lumiere brothers, such as the 180 degree rule

This is a basic rule that helps keep continuity in a film, shots need to have characters on the same side of the screen as the previous shot, the camera needs to be positioned on the green line and actors need to keep the same position relative to the camera because if they suddenly jumped to the other side it would break continuity, and it would also be confusing for the viewer, this is known as a jump cut.

George Meliere

 George Meliere was another early filmmaker, what set his films apart from others was his creative approach, his films would have a narrative and a story, rather than just being recordings of people's daily lives, which was what most films at the time were.



His film A trip to the Moon is one of the earliest films to implement props, use effects and backdrops to create a fictional environment. The use of painted backdrops was an effective way of creating a scene at the time, if a director wanted to film on a certain location they might not be able to afford it back then, so they used backdrops which were much cheaper. Meliere's depiction of the moon was fantasy, which was unique at the time he made this film.  




There are examples of in camera editing in A Trip to The Moon, such as the parts when the creatures are chasing the people back to their space ship, the man hits one of them and it appears as if it turns into a cloud of dust, to create this effect the film would have been cut so the man hits the creature, another shot is inserted where the creature is off screen and some sort of powder is used to make smoke, and that shot is edited into the shot before it. This is a lot like stop motion films, where something is recorded or a picture is taken, then things are moved around before the next clip in order to create continuity with the two clips.

This is a very short practice film we made in a group, we used digital editing software to place a background behind an actor who had been cut out from a green screen, which is something I think we need to improve at working with. There is also some other basic editing  in this, we put separate shots together, edited ends from shots so that things don't loop, then we put them all together.

Edwynd Porter

Edwynd Porter was another innovative film maker of the early 20th century, he was behind many films such as the great train robbery. Edwynd's films were some of the first to be feature length, and focused on a story/narrative. His films featured a lot of in camera editing, like a lot of other early film directors. The Great Train Robbery was one of the earliest book to film adaptations and was very successful at the time. Porter's films usually featured one shot per scene, which meant that the camera wasn't moved around too often and would stay in one place for long periods throughout the film. The shots were spliced together once the length of the film was finished. Splicing is a technique in editing where you take two shots or more and simply join them together.

The Great Train Robbery's clips would be spliced together by hand, the film reel was stuck onto the end of a previous clip. Thanks to modern digital editing technology splices are simply dragged and dropped onto a timeline, shots are easily combined into sequences.

Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein moved onto film after studying to be a mechanic for a long time, his father and father before him were all engineers/mechanics however Sergei wanted to break the tradition and so he got involved in film. He was responsible for developing the formula for film montages- which is a method used by many film directors today to slow down or speed up time by using a sequence of different shots set to music. 

An example of montage can be found in the film Battleship Potemkin, which is one of Eisenstein's most famous (and notorious) creations, at the time of its creation it was banned across Russia and the USA. It depicts political/historical scenes from the Bolshevik revolution, where in Russia the royal family were ousted by the Bolsheviks, this was a very controversial topic at the time. There is quite a lot of shot variation in this scene, lots of shots are used quite rapidly from lots of different angles on different subjects to portray the stress/panic of the scene.

Eisenstein says that montage is a mix of different elements that relate to one another: "a purposeful 'fusion' of compositional elements together with a generalized 'countour' of the image." -Eisenstein

Here is a scene from the movie Battleship Potemkin, the Odessa Steps scene. In this scene separate shots have been edited together to create a continuous and meaningful scene, this is what all montages do in modern films. Montages are focused on showing rather than telling, and feature no dialogue (usually set to music) montages also manipulate diegetic time and space so that footage, sound etc. that is diegetic is either sped up or slowed down, this can be achieved by playing shots in slow/fast motion, skipping or repeating shots from different angles etc. In the Odessa Steps scene time is slowed down so that the baby rolling down the steps scene is much longer than reality, it's slowed down, and multiple cameras have been used to repeat the same point in time from different angles.

Walter Murch

He was a director responsible for more modern films such as apocalypse now,  the intro to this film has a lot of connotations, the part with the helicopter transitioning to a ceiling fan I think shows the man in the intro as traumatized by war, and the fan could perhaps be a trigger like what happens to people with PTSD. It could also be a metaphor like is used in Eisenstein's work.

We made a short film exploring manipulation of diegetic time, there are some issues that I've noticed that affect continuity, such as actors swapping places between shots, but this was a practice, and we've explored diegetic time in the part of the film where there's a lemon rolling down the stairs, we had to shoot that part of the film several times to get multiple different shots, alternatively we could have used multiple cameras at once to record different shots from different points of view. Then we edited these separate shots together so that the time it took for the lemon to reach the bottom of the stairs seemed much longer, without slowing down any of the footage.

This is our short film.

City of God- Modern Editing Style

Background

The film was released in 2003,  and is set in Rio De Ginero, in the favela/shanty town, it was directed by  Fernando Meirelles, and edited by Daniel Rezende. the theme of the film is life in a run down, poor favela in Rio De Ginero. This film is a more modern part of film history, and is the only film in this list to use digital editing, there are a lot of effects in this film that were not possible at the time other films in this list were made. some of the effects such as brightness and additional glare would have to be done in camera for older films, but using digital editing the editors were able to just apply effects to City of God.

Scenes

The editing in the film is very sporadic and lacks continuity,  this creates a feeling that the scene is fast paced which is typical of films edited with a modern style. Modern audiences tend to have a shorter attention span and prefer quick, flashy, action packed films that get to the point quickly. Modern films are mainly focused on action, City of God is very dramatic and action packed both in terms of the theme of the film (life in the fast paced streets of Rio) and the editing is also done in a way that makes the film more related to the genre.

Chicken Scene

a group of young people are chasing a chicken, and the editing helps make this scene more energetic and intentionally confusing, the lighting is also quite harsh at times. The cuts don’t really show all of what’s happening at once, they jump from shots of the chicken to a man laughing to kids running down the street, which makes it even more hectic. 

 We had a go as a group making a film around the concept of a chase, using influences from City of God. We attempted to create a relationship to the genre of action using lots of short, fast paced shots, without any sort of transition to create jump cuts, the shots of the lemon rolling involved us refilming some of the same things but from a different angle, this alters diegetic time so that it is longer, but it is more lively because the shots quickly switch between repeated shots from different angles.