Early experiments of editing

When films first came around they weren’t anything complicated like a full on action movie, they were just short films about a train pulling into a station or a tractor driving into a farmyard, they didn’t have any meaning or narrative. Then along came the Lumiere brothers who were the first people along with the Edison Company who started to create films with a plot and narrative. They would set up a camera and would have a short film come to life in front of the lens, they didn’t move the camera or use any high tech angle shots they just placed the camera in a certain position and starting filming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk

Everything changed in 1903 when Edwin S. Porter constructed a film with different shots instead of just one shot for 3-5 minutes. The film Porter created was called ‘Life of and American Fireman’, the film was a breakthrough because it had a plot, action and a close up of a hand pulling a fire alarm, audiences were amazed at this, as they had never seen anything like that as they were used to seeing everything happen in one shot. The film consisted of a continuous narrative over seven scenes, which were cut into a total of nine shots.

 Porter was one of the first people to use editing to add meaning to a film as he felt editing was what really told the story not the actors or actresses, he also created and defined many film transitions which play a large part in film editing theory today. Instead of just cutting between shots, Porter created dissolves which were gradual transitions from one image to another. In ‘life of an American Fireman’ this technique helped viewers follow what they saw as a complicated outdoor movement.

Here are some of examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4C0gJ7BnLc

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U12rUOQAqNk

Porter continued to experiment with different techniques within the cinematography in other films. ‘The great train robbery’ was a very popular film and is still shown in school today all these years later, as an example of the early editing form. The film is recognized for is dynamic, action editing and also piecing together scenes which were shot at different times and places which involve audiences because of the emotional impact of the static long story.

Porter was also one of the first people to use real footage the he had found, and transform it into a story that he wanted to tell even though the footage he had found was nothing to do with the story he wanted to tell. This just shows how Porter saw editing as a new light in creating and telling stories.

As the years moved on Porter started to discover more important aspects of the motion picture language, he discovers that the image he was filming did not need to show a whole person and that cutting the two shots together created a relationship with the characters in the viewer’s mind. Porter thought the discoveries he had found were key discoveries as they would help make motion picture and television possible that is that the different shots can be photographed at different locations over a period of time and them combined in the finished narrative.

Dw Griffith

Dw Griffith (David Llewelyn Wark Griffith) was born in Crestwood Kentucky. When Griffith began his creative career as a play writer he struggled to grab success during poverty, only one of his plays managed to become a performance so Griffith decided to become an actor and appeared in many plays as an extra.

In 1907Griffith still writing as a playwright decided to travel to New York and attempt to sell his scrip to Edison Studios producer Edwin Porter. Unfortunately Porter rejected his script but decided to give him a main role in ‘Rescued from and eagles Nest’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lflJ6ZVKgo Enjoying this Griffith decided to explore the motion picture business, and then in 1908 Griffith accepted an acting job for the American Mutoscope and Biograph company Widely known as Biograph. In 1908 Biographs main director Wallace McCutcheon grew ill and his son Wallace McCutcheon Jr took his place, but unfortunately he was not able to keep and bring the studio its success it had been experiencing, so as a result Biographs head Henry Marvin decided to give the position to Griffith who then went on and made his first movie ‘The Adventures of Dollie’ for the company still at a young age. Because of company resistance to his goals and his cost overruns on his films Griffith left Biograph, and took his actors with him and Joins the Mutual Film Corporation. Griffith then formed a studio with the Majestic studio manager Harry Atiken and the company was then known as Reliance- Majestic studios and was then later renames Fine Arts Studio.

Mutoscope Logo

'The adventures of Dollie' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CyJRT1zONw

Griffith is widely known for his crosscutting, close-ups, iris shot, flashbacks and also the invisible cut Griffith liked to use this as he thought it helped the action stay fluid instead of cutting to different scenes make it all muddled up for viewers it helped the scenes flow more smoothly.

Verna Fields

Verna Fields is an American film editor, and television sound editor along with many other job roles. Fields mainly worked on small projects in the early years of her career (1954-1970), so it would her gain recognition and get people interested in her work. Throughout the 1950s she worked for a number of television shows and worked on independent films like ‘The Savage Eye’ in 1959, and also on some minor studio films such as Peter Bogdanocivh’s first film.

During the ‘New Hollywood’ era Fields came into importance as a film editor and industry executive, where she had created close bonds with directors such as Peter Bogdanovich and Steven Spielberg in there early careers. This was when Fields was given the name ‘Mother Cutter’. Films with a great success such as Jaws(1975) and Graffiti(1973) brought Fields a level of recognition that appears to be very unique among many film editors.  Jaws was an enormously profitable film and was given the tittle of ‘Summer Blockbuster’. The excellence contributions that fields gave to the film were widely acknowledged which then led to her receiving an Academy Award and an American Cinema Editors award for best editing for the film. Within a year of the film’s release she had been appointed as Vice President for feature production at Universal Studios, and was then among the first woman to enter upper level management in the entertainment industry.

History of Film Editing Technology

Before the use of non-linear editing systems, editing was done with a workprint which is a copy of the film. You would cut and paste pieces of the film together using a splicer and then thread through a machine with a viewer such as a Moviola or flatbed machine such as a K.E.M or Steenbeck to make sure what you have put together is correct.

Moviola    

  Steenbeck Machine  

  Steenbeck Machine  

                                                                        

When the workprint had been cut to the state that you want it, it was then used to make an edit decision list also known as an EDL. Now day’s production companies have the option of bypassing negative cutting process as they feel it is easier not to do it, as the physical negative does not need to be cut and hot spliced together as there is different technologies that can do the workprint process quicker.         

Splicer

 Today most films are edited digitally on programs such as Avid or Final Cut Pro then then helps you bypass the workprint. In the past, the use of a film positive which is not the original negative, allowed the editor to do as much experimenting as he or she wished, without the risk of damaging the original unlike today.

Final Cut Pro

Vsevolod Pudovkin

Pudovkin was one of the pilots of the theories of action pact montages, in films which are used to tell a short anecdote, to create an emotional effect. Pudovkin’s techniques describe several ways editing can be used to enhance the viewer’s understanding of a story, and they’re all designed to create a specific reaction from the audience, something which he calls relational editing.

Contrast: cutting between two different scenarios to highlight the contrast between them. Pudovkin suggests moving from scenes of poverty to someone really rich to make the difference more apparent and realistic.

Parallelism: here you can connect two seemingly unrelated scenes by cutting between them and focusing on parallel features. For example if you were shooting a documentary about fisherman catching all kinds of fish then killing them and if they don’t want them they would just chuck them back in the sea in the Atlantic, you could then cut from a unwanted dead fish begin thrown back into the ocean to a family chomping down on some fish’n’chips. This shows that both scenes drawing our attention to the fish. It creates a relationship between the two scenes in the viewers’ mind.

Symbolism: you move from your main scene to something which creates a symbolic connection for the audience. In the film living in Soviet Russia Pudovkin suggested cutting between shots of striking workers being shot by Tsarist police and scenes of cows being slaughtered. The audience’s mind then associates the slaughter of the cattle with the slaughter of the workers.

Simultaneity: This is used lots in Hollywood today: cutting between two simultaneous events as a way of building up suspense within the audience.  For example if you watching an action film and there is just about to be a big fight you might cut between the bad guys preparing all their weapons for the battle, and between the good guy saying by the his family members just in case he does not survive. This then creates tension and atmosphere within the audience

Leit motif: This ‘reiteration of theme’ involves repeating a shot or sequence at key moments as a sort of code. For example in Jaws when the audience sees a point of view shot of the shark in the water the audiences automatically knows that the shark is about to attack.

Walter Murch

Murch says that there are six different factors to consider when making a cut and getting it 100 percent.  They are:

 Emotion (51%) — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?

Story (23%) — Does the cut advance the story?

Rhythm (10%) —Does the cut occur "at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'"

Eye-trace (7%) — Does the cut pay respect to "the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame"

Two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%) — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?

Three-dimensional space of action (4%) — Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the audience.

Edward Dmytryk

When editing Dmytryk uses seven rules that a editor should think about when editing They are:

Rule 1: Never make a cut without a positive reason.

Rule 2: When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short.

Rule 3: Whenever possible cut 'in movement'.

Rule 4: The 'fresh' is preferable to the 'stale'.

Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action.

Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper 'matches'.

Rule 7: Substance first—then form.