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.
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:
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.
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