Task One - Editing in early cinema

Editing in early cinema

•      Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was famous for running a film laboratory which the Kinetographic camera and the kinetscope camera were invented, he was also responsible for bringing and creating the 35mm film which is now the industry standard. Lastly he created the projector to play it which is now used in pretty much all school to display work and other related things, without this invention it would be very hard for teachers to show work to all the students at the same time.

•       Lumiere Bros - Sortie d’usine

Thomas Edison also worked with the Lumiere Brothers to create short films which were a one long, static and locked-down shot. The motion within the shot was all that was actually necessary to amuse the audience just so that the first films were showing activity such as cars moving on the city streets. An example of this is in the film 'Sortie d'usine'.

•      G.A Smith – The Miller and the Sweep

In their films there was no story or editing but each film ran as long as there was film in the camera. G.A Smith – The Kiss in the Tunnel - In 1899 G. A Smith made 'The Kiss in the Tunnel'. The aim of the movie is to mark the beginnings of narrative editing, Smith believed that some extra spice was needed in the popular "phantom ride" genre. As they went into the tunnel to splice he took advantage of the brief onset darkness, to do this he stuck the pieces of film together and then cut them during the shot of the couple.

             

•     George Melies - The Vanishing Lady

George Melies saw the possibilities of a novelty instead of just motion its self, he got himself a camera, then built a studio, designed sets, wrote scripts and then soon after he discovered the basic camera tricks and exploited them. 

It is also said that he accidentally discovered the art of stop motion from a camera which had broke down on him for a quick second. Finally he made 'The Vanishing Lady' by using the technique known as in camera editing. 

Unfortunately he never moved the camera for close-ups or long shots and this caused his work to be overlooked and then the commercial growth in the industry led him to be forced on of business and this meant he wasn't earning any money and he eventually died from poverty. In the film 'Hugo' his life elements are portrayed within it.

•       Edwin S Porter – The Life of an American Fireman

Edwin had made a breakthrough film called 'Life of an American Fireman' in 1903 and this film was historically one of the first films which had a plot, action and a close up of someones hand pulling a fire alarm. He also discovered the important aspects in motion picture language in which the screen image did not need to show a complete person from head to toe. The key discovery which made all narrative motion pictures and television possible was splicing together two shots which create a contextual relationship in the viewers mind.

•      Edwin S Porter – The Great Train Robbery

Porters then went on to creating a ground-breaking film called 'The great Train Robbery (in 1903)'. This movie was a perfect example of how the early films began to resemble the type of films which we seen in this modern day.

•       Charles Pathe – The Horse that Bolted

Charles Pathe introduced the first technical known 'parallel editing' cutting in between the two story lines in the film 'The Horse that Bolted (1907)'.

•    D.W. Griffith

Griffith was a film director who was an early supporter of the power of editing, to show parallel action in different locations he would use the cross cutting technique. He used editing techniques in the production of feature length films and he was one of the first directors to do this technique. He was mostly remembered for his movie 'The Birth of A Nation' which was a very controversial film in 1915.