Editing In Early Cinema

Thomas Edison 

Thomas Edison ran a film laboratory where the Cinematographic camera and the cinetoscope were invented. He developed  the 35mm film strip that came to be the industry standard.He also eventually developed the projector to play it!

The Lumiere Brothers

Edison worked with the Lumiere Brothers and produced short films that were one long, static, locked-down shot. Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, so the first films simply showed activity such as traffic moving on a city street. This can be seen in the film Sortie D'usine (1895) -  by the Lumiere  Brothers.

G.A Smith 

Initially, there was no story and no editing. Each film ran as long as there was film in the camera. An example of which is The Miller and The Sweep (1898) by G.A Smith. In 1899, G.A Smith made The Kiss In The Tunnel. This film is said to mark the beginnings of narrative editing (creating a story). Smith felt that some 'extra spice' was called for in the then popular Phantom Ride genre. He took advantage of the brief onset of darkness as they went into the tunnel to splice (cut and then stick two pieces of film together) in the shot of the couple.

George Méliés 

 George Méliés was a magician who had seen the films made by the Lumiere Brothers. Méliés saw at once the possibilities of a novelty more than just motion its self. He acquired  a camera, built a studio, wrote scripts, designed sets and soon he discovered and exploited the basic camera tricks we know so well today. In 1886, he made The Vanishing Lady using a technique known as in-camera editing.

AS1: Task 3: From Analogue to Digital Editing

Analogue Editing

Analogue editing is the cutting together of pieces of celluloid film. Traditionally films are made up images printed are to acetate negatives. These are then ‘spliced’ together to form a reel of film. These are then feed through a projector at a constant speed of 24 frames a second appear to be moving. This is known as analogue.

     The First Moviola

Before the widespread use of non-linear editing systems, the initial editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film work print (cutting copy in the UK) by physically cutting and passing together pieces of films, using a splicer and threading the film on a machine with a viewer such as a Moviola.

Video Editing

Video editing is the process of editing segments of motion video production footage, special effects and sound recordings in the post-production process. Before digital technologies became available magnetic tapes were used to store information – these known as video tapes. Most video editing has been superseded by digital editing which is faster and cheaper.

Digital Editing

Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analogue) form. Digital editing is the use of computers to order and manipulate this digital data. Digital cinema uses bits and bytes (strings of 1s and 0s) to record, transmit and reply images, instead of chemicals on film. The whole process is electronic so there is no printing or ‘splicing’ involved.

Non-linear editing

In digital video editing, non-linear editing is a method that allows you to access any frame in a digital video clip regardless of sequence in the clip. The freedom to access any frame, and use the cut and paste method, similar to the ease of cutting and pasting text in a word processor, and allows you to easily include fades, transitions and other effects that cannot be achieved with linear editing. 

In-Camera Editing

In editing, you can film and edit different scenes and delete bloopers (scenes that went wrong). In-camera editing is different. Why? Because in-camera editing is about being able to shoot through one film, with only the pause and record buttons. The difference between editing and in-camera editing, is that when doing in-camera editing, you only get one shot. You cant re-do a scene if it goes wrong, therefore you have to practice before doing it. In early cinema, they used in-camera editing because they didn't have the technology and the skills that we have today. Here is my example of in-camera editing:

Me and Gabriel thought of a short story for the film we were about to make. We kept toying with the idea of being a 'happy couple', but then me finding out that he had cheated on me. In the end we realised that there were a few errors in this idea. One was because we chose a place where there was many people. Also, the story we made was in-depth and became complicated. Then we came up with the idea about starting our film with Gabriel walking up the stairs. This gave us an idea to show of our in-camera editing skills and so I moved the camera as he was moving, almost like the camera was following him. After practicing this scene and then finally shooting it, we came to thinking about how we were going to get both me and Gabriel in the next shoot. But before that, we confirmed that I would be angry at Gabriel for talking to my best friend straight away so that the film didn't get complicated. The shoot we decided to do was to film the whole room. With this, the camera would stay still and we could get a clear shot. Not only this, but we could capture everything happening in the room from this angle.

We then thought it would be a good idea to have me slapping Gabriel. This physical motion was 'edited' but in camera. I did this by slapping Gabriel in slow motion. This created a suspense.
After this, we decided that me and Gabriel would walk of separate ways.

The pro's of our film were:

-We worked well as a team
-Our in-camera editing skills were shown off in a wide variety e.g moving the camera with the person
-There were no bloopers (outbursts of laughter etc)
-The storyline was straight forward.

The con's of our film were:

-There were only two of us so we were limited to someone directing the camera
-Could of used a 'point of view' (where the camera is looking from a point as if it is someone's eyes), especially when I slapped Gabriel
-Could of made the film a bit longer