The development of editing
The development of editing started with the beginning of
cinema. This started with a man named Eadweard Muybridge which was a
photographer between the dates of 1830-1904. He was very important in the
discovery of motion picture projection in his photography. He began his
photography in the late 1800s and in 1872 began his experiment with an array of
12 cameras taking photos of a galloping horse in linear motion.
Muybridge influenced all of cinema in modern times because
of this discovery that he made. The motion that the images captured when played
in chronological order at 24 frames per second give the illusion that the
images are moving. Thomas Edison invented cameras with faster shutter speeds enabling
faster frames per second when the images are played back. Here is a video
showcasing what I have said: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYKZif9ooxs
Thomas Edison laboratory invented a device called the
Kinetograph, which had a peephole motion picture viewer, ten years later it had
a projector view for audiences and the entertainment business for this boomed.
Frames and frame rates are important in film today as they are used to adjust
the speed of the image in production and post-production.
The very first actual film cameras
were invented in France by the Lumiere brothers and also in America by Thomas
Edison.
Lumiere Brothers
These cameras operated by a roll of film that moved frames
mechanically past a shutter and a lens system.
The films that were shot with these types of cameras were
not edited; they were usually taken in one shot with a single point of view. The
idea that shots could be taken using a variety of shots choices, multiple shot
angles, and that the camera could follow the story or the action didn’t come
into play until editing in camera was invented.
Editing in camera is where you use the camera to shoot a
film in linear order using one take each time all the way through to the end of
the film. The end result of this when played back is a film with multiple
shots. However this can be an arduous process if something in the middle of the
film goes wrong you can’t edit out the bad takes.
A modern version of this editing technique is this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqJQnNjwFjg
An early historical version of this technique is this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXL_djAd3MA
These examples show that these films can be shot from
different points throughout.
Editing in camera is difficult to do effectively and was
never going to be a permanent solution to editing a film. Early film makers
needed a way to trim shots after they had been film at the end and the
beginning of their shoots in order to shorten the section of film, these were
called clips.
Early film makers went on to physically cutting tape and
taping it back together to edit their films.
For many years this was all done by hand until 1924 when Iwan Serrurier
invented the first mechanical editing machine. He was the founder of the
Movolia Company. Here is a video showcasing this company: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9emTyMfEtJc
These machines allowed editing to become easier to use and
cutting techniques developed more sophisticated. The technique of cutting film
and reassembling them in order whether cut by hand or by machine is called
linear editing. This is because you assemble clips one after each other in a
mechanical and linear fashion. From 1920 until 1945 nearly all film editing was
done on Movolia decks until in 1945 the German company Steenbeck introduced
their editing machine. Steenbecks are still used today for editing with the
same process of cutting film.
Video tape was invented in 1951 by the Ampex research team.
The first video editing system came a few years later in 1956.
The first video editing systems were also linear editing
systems but instead of the clips being cut the clips and data was copied over
onto another tape using a control deck. This introduced clip in and out points of the
clip you wanted to copy across.
The quality of video editing was nowhere near the standard
of film, so it was only used for television. The first feature film to be shot
using video editing was Julie and Julia in 1987. The very first commercial
movie that was shot in HD was in 2004.
In 1970 people first started to try non-linear editing but
no-one was able to commercialise the system into the market. Lucasfilm started
to develop theirs in the 1980’s; with their EditDroid (This was a disc based
format).
This again did not
commercialise into the market. The first commercially successful non-linear
editing systems were created by AVID in 1989 when AVID launched the AVID 1
media composer editing system. The AVID editing system was a hardware &
software system that was based on Apple computer technology.
This was the first technology that turned tape into data,
and could move around on a timeline. A main major development that progressed
this was digital cameras. The first of which was the professional Sony D1 introduced
to the market in 1986. Digital cameras and data files introduced a new type of
editing called non-destructive editing; A type of technique where digital
information could be changed without changing the original file.
After the information had been turned digitally the data
could be manipulated in ways that had not been thought of or tried before in
systems like linear editing.
Genre: Genre is
how something is defined into a category. For example a film like Alfred
Hitchcock’s “The Birds” goes into the category of horror because of its codes
and conventions. Another example would be “Step Brothers” being a comedy, or “Star
Wars” being a sci-fi. Films are put into
categories like this so it easy to recognize what type of film something
typically is, and also because each film follows codes and conventions that are
explained in each typical genre. Here is a short excerpt of the film Star Wars
showcasing that it clearly is a Sci-fi action film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h_DMjfY7ZU
Pace and rhythm: Pace
and rhythm is something that is commonly used in editing for films and is used
to create tension in a film. The more cuts in a short space of time within a
film will create more tension. There are
different ways to create tensions in cuts for example if a film is an action
film, the tension created will be different to tat of the tension in a comedy.
Here is an example showcasing tension in an action film “The old republic”:
Here is an example of tension created in a comedy “Step
Brothers”:
Combining shots into
sequences to engage the viewer: This is a technique in which the story is
revealed to the viewer by suggestion in each shot, and also it correlates to
the type of genre the film is. For example in a horror film you can usually
tell when something scary is going to happen as a direct result of combining
shots into sequence. Here is an example of this in the horror film “Devil”:
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