Editing Theory Assignment

The first known film screening was in 1895, Paris, France in a basement of a Cafe. This film was by the Lumiere Brothers. A person in the audience , Georges Melies saw a lot of potential in film making and offered to buy a cinematograph from the brothers. The brothers however saw him as potential competition and refused to sell it to him. Georges was not fazed by this refusal and instead bought an old English Animatograph for 1000 Francs.




Georges Melies

In 1896 Melies was filming a bus in Paris, however his camera jammed and stopped filming, when he got the camera working again the bus was replaced with a hearse. When he looked back at the film he noticed that the bus was there one second and then it got replaced with a hearse as if by magic. This would be known as the 'Jump-Cut' . He would use this technique in his later films. Melies would also introduce other techniques like 'Fade In & Fade Out', 'Overlapping Dissolves' and 'Stop Motion Photography'. He also had a habit of NEVER moving the camera, in 500 films that Melies made he never moved the camera in a scene.

Edwin S Porter

Edwin S Porter went to work for Edison Skylight Studios in 1901. He was Edison's go to editor and cameraman. He was massively influenced by the works of Melies. Especially Melies' 1902 film 'A Trip To The Moon'. He was so hugely influenced he would duplicate Melies work and distribute it for the company he was working for ,Edison - Illegally. After years of working for Edison he would produce his own narrative film. 'Life Of An American Fireman'

He took stock footage from Edison's library and put them together to make a narrative.

Edwin would push the limit of narrative film with his next film 'The Great Train Robbery.

The Great Train Robbery would consist of better editing and cleaner cuts, Filmmakers were beginning to notice that better edits could compress time. Porter could only push the boundary of film making so far. It would be by coincidence that the next pioneer of filmmaking would be turned down by Porter.

D.W Griffith

David Wark Griffith (abbreviated to D.W) aspired to be a writer however none of his plays ever impressed anyone enough. Working under his stage name Lawrence Griffith he submitted a play to none other than Edwin S Porter. The play was turned down however Porter offered him an acting role in his next film. Griffith would go on to work for Biograph films. All the pioneers before him were stuck in a tableau mentality, however Griffith would shift filmmaking out of that mentality into the multi-shot platform that we know now. He was the inventor of the 'Cut-In'. In his film 'Greaser's Gauntlet' (1908) he would cut from a mid shot of a tree into a full shot of the couple in front of the tree.

He was also the pioneer of the '180 Degree Rule' him and his fellow colleges discovered if you kept the camera on one side of the action you can avoid problems of confusion of geography. Griffith would also be the first to use 'Intercutting' where he cut between different shots in different scenes with parallel actions, He would first use this in his film 'After Many Years'. However one of his best examples of intercutting was in his film 'The Lonely Villa' where he cuts between 3 parallel actions, he cut from a woman and her children then to robbers in the house and also to her husband rushing home to save them, with faster cuts between shots he made the film really intense.

In 1914 Griffith would make an independent film which at the time was the most expensive film to date, it would also be the first world wide blockbuster. The film was called 'A Birth Of A Nation'. However the film was considered racist even in 1914. The film was pro Ku Klux Klan and it didn't please a lot of people. The film was censored in some parts and was flat out banned in some states.

Griffith was furious with the accusations against him and would release a pamphlet defending his right to make it against what he called Intolerance and in 1916 his next film was called 'Intolerance'. Intolerance intercut between 4 Separate narratives, It also cost $2.5 Million to produce. He used most of the profit from his previous film to make Intolerance. At first it lasted 8 HOURS before he came to his senses and got it down to 3 and a half hours. Intolerance BOMBED at the box office D.W Griffith would die still paying the debt for Intolerance.

Soviet Montage

At the end of World War One Russia was in trouble, The Bolsheviks lead by Vladimir Lenin had overthrown the Tsar in 1917 and the county populated by around 160 million people were torn apart from years of civil war. Most of the population at the time were poor and illiterate. One of the priorities of the new government was to communicate with the rest of the country and they turned to film in order to achieve this. However most of the producers of the pre-revolutionary cinema were capitalists, whereas the new Bolshevik government was Socialists, so the producers were either driven out of the film making industry or were un-cooperative with the government. Resources available for making films were scarce, what ever they had was put into a Cinema Committee in the New People's Commissariat Of Education. The Cinema Committee was headed by Lenin's wife and they founded a film school to train and teach new film makers. The VGIK - All Union State Institute Of Cinematography or the Moscow Film School as it is now known. It was founded in 1919 and would be the first film school in the world. The main purpose behind the film school was to make films in support of the Bolshevik government.

Lev Kuleshov

Kuleshov was one of the few filmmakers to stick around after the Bolshevik government was elected.
He was one of the co-founders of the Moscow Film school. His superiors at the school didn't think he would teach well under the normal curriculum so they let him teach his own group outside of the school. This group became known as 'The Kuleshov Workshop'. This workshop attracted the most innovative students. Because film resources were so rare they didn't actually make films, instead they wrote scenarios and assembled actors in a mock filmmaking exercise. The studies would take a major turn when D.W Griffith's 'Intolerance' would play for the first time in Russia. Lenin loved Intolerance so much that he ordered it to be played all across the Soviet Union. Kuleshov's workshop focused on this in their studies, they would dissect Griffith's editing technique and took the film apart and reassembled it in hundred of different ways to see what impacts different edits had. In 1922 more film resources were becoming available and Kuleshov was ready to experiment with the techniques that the he learned from D.W Griffith. The first of his films that would experiment with D.W Griffith's techniques would later become known as the Kuleshov effect.

The Kuleshov Effect

Kuleshov took a shot of an expressionless face and used it to create 3 different short films. He would edit the face with a bowl of hot soup, a person in a coffin and a seductive woman on a couch. The actor in the film was considered amazing they thought his range of emotions in the film were astonishing, from hunger for the soup, to depression over the lost of a loved one and the lust for the woman on the couch. Even though the three shots were all the same shot repeated the audience read expressions on the actors face and then put the story together with the shots that it was paired with. In another Kuleshov experiment, Kuleshov would take another 3 shots. One of the actor looking frightened, a shot of a revolver and another shot of the actor looking happy. At first the shots were arranged as the actor looking happy, then the revolver and finally the actor looking frightened. The audience interpreted this as the actor becoming cowardly. Then the shots of the actor were swapped places and the audience interpreted this as the actor becoming brave. Kuleshov would push the boundaries even further with his experimentation of creative geography. He would take different shots filmed in totally different locations and make the audience believe that the character was anywhere Kuleshov wanted them to be. Kuleshov believed that the creation of the film didn't begin when the cameras started to roll, that was just getting the footage a film was born in the edit. Which the Soviets called the 'Montage'

Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein is considered one of the pioneers of early cinema, along with D.W Griffith. Eisenstein developed film intellectually and through theory. 'Battleship Potemkin' is considered the best work of Eisenstein's career. Filmed in 1925 as a 20th anniversary of the revolution against the Tsar. It took 10 weeks to shoot. and included the famous Odessa stair sequence. The film was pure propaganda. What made the film such a massive film was the editing. Eisenstein lists five different methods of montage. Firstly, Metric, this is cutting based off of how long each shot is. This can be used to gain a basic response, tempo.  The tempo can be lowered or raised depending on how you want the audience to feel. Second Rythmic, cutting based off of the tempo of the shot. Third, Tonal, cutting between shots of different tones. Fourth, Over-Tonal, this combines all of the three previously listed methods. Fifth, Intellectual or Ideological, this method was used to create concepts through different shots that where nothing to with eachother. This would be the method that Eisenstein favoured. Eisenstein would use his next film 'October (Ten Days That Shook The World)' To see what intellectual montages could achieve. This three hour long film was full of Intellectual editing. This led to the audience not enjoying the film as they got confused.

Soviet Montages would be puched even further in the 1950's when the French New Waves (A Blanket Term for French Filmmakers of the late 1950's and 60's given to them by Film critics) as well as other big names like Alfred Hitchcock began using soviet montages as part of their films. A classic example of a montage scene is in the critically acclaimed film 'Psycho'.

On November 2nd 1939, The BBC (British Broadcast Channel) aired for the first time, unfortunately they had to stop airing during the second world war. In 1948 the first commercial broadcast was aired in the US. This was revolutionary for home entertainment at the time, it became extremely popular by the 1950s. Before this time there wasn't a way that everyone could watch TV, however now everyone could watch their favourite shows and news programmes.

The Broadcasting companies made this possible by filming on a set with a bunch of different cameras set up to a machine called a 'switcher', this was a machine that would allow you to switch between the different cameras, so you are able to get better shots. One of the main issues with this was that everything had to be broadcast live. To be able to record they would need a machine called a 'Kinescope'. Which essentially is a camera pointed at a monitor playing the show that you want recorded, this machine was essential in bringing people together through Television. A process caled 'Hot Kinescope' was developed so that people in different time zones were able to watch the same program. For example a program could be aired in New York at 9pm Eastern Time and it would be only 6pm over in Los Angeles (Western Time). The Kinescope would record the show in New York, then the film was rushed into development and then they could air the show at 9pm in Los Angeles.

The Purpose Of Editing

There are many different reasons why editing is important.

• Time Saving - People moving from one scene to another is a prime time to use a jump cut, it saves the audience time and it also shaves a few unnecessary minutes off of your film.
• Set the pace - The Editor has the ability to set the speed of the entire scene. For example in any action film when their is a huge chase happening the length between edits will start to quicken, this is because the editor is deliberately making the edits more frequent and making the scene faster in tempo which will lead to the audience becoming excited and can't wait for the outcome of the scene
• Creating a Relationship - Editing allows the audience to build a relationship with the character if the character gets some news and then depending on how the next shot depicts them it will make them either the antagonist or protagonist depending on the reaction.

The Conventions Of Editing

Continuity Editing - Continuity Editing is cutting style that is used to maintain a sense of continuous space and time.

Jump Cut - A jump cut is a transition from one scene to another.

The 180 Degree Rule - The 180 Degree Rule is a guideline that states that when two characters are interacting then the cameras should always be on the same side and they should maintain the same right/left relationship. So if the camera locks on one character and they are facing to the right side of the camera then the other character should face the fight side.

Dissolve - A dissolve is when you take two shots and transition between then in an almost fading motion.

Shot-Reverse-Shot - A Shot - Reverse - Shot is when one character is shown looking at another character, this mainly happens when the other character is off screen, then the camera cuts to show the other character looking back at them.

Cutting To A Sound Track - Cutting to the sound track can help build the entire emotion of the film. it is the same when you are editing a music video you always want to cut to the beat. So if in the film there is a happy, upbeat song then you want the cuts to be quite quick to express the liveliness of the character and soundtrack, and when the film takes a darker more sombre turn then the editor would tend to make the cuts farther between to make the audience feel sad.