The Lumiere brothers were born in Besancon, France, in 1862 and 1864 and moved to Lyon in 1870 where they bothe attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon. Their father Claude-Antoine Lumiere (1840-1911) ran a photographic firm and both his sons worked for him, Louis as physicist and Auguste as a manager. Louis had made some improvements to the still-photgraph process, the most notable being the dry plate process, which was a major step towards moving images.
When their father had retired in 1892 the brothers began to create moving pictures. They patented a number of significant processes leading up to their film camera. The cinemtographe itself was patented on 13th February 1895 and the first footage ever to be recorded using it was recorded on March 19, 1895. This was how the first film "Sortie d'usine"was made
Lumiere Brothers made an early film by Thomas Edison (whose family invented a film camera and projector) and others were short films that were one long, static, lock down shot. They also did motion in the shot. motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, the first films simply showed activity such a traffic moving on a city street. This can be seen in the film below"Sortie d'usine"(1895) the first film that the Lumiere Brothers had made.
This was a significant film because it was the first film ever made.
2. G.A Smith - The Miller and the Sweep
George Albert Smith was born on 4th January 1864, London England and died in 17th May 1959 at the age of 95 in Brighton. His occupations were film making and inventing. The first film that he made was called "The Miller and the Sweep"this film was made shortly after Smith had acquired a camera. This film was one of the earliest films to show a clear awareness of its visual impact when projected, a clip from this is featured in Paul Merton's interactive guide to early british silent comedy how they laughed. The Miller and the Sweep was released in July 1897 and the running time for the film was 49 seconds.
George Albert Smith was a stage hypnotist, psychic, magic lantern lecturer, astronomer, inventor, and one of the pioneers of British cinema, who is best known for his controversial work with Edmund Gurney at the Society for Psychical Research. George's short films from 1897 to 1903 pioneered film editing and close ups and his development of the first successful colour film process, Kinemacolor.
Below is the first ever film that George Albert Smith had made and it was a great success as it was the first silent but
3. G.A Smith - The Kiss in the Tunnel
In 1899 Smith constructed a glass house film studio at St.Ann's Well Gardens. That same year he shot the single scene "The Kiss in the Tunnel" which was seamlessly edited into Cecil Hepworth's view from an engine front train leaving tunnel to enliven the staid phantom ride genre and demonstrate the possibilities of creative editing. This film was released in September 1899 and is 1 minute and 3 seconds long.
4. Edwin S.Porter - The Life of an American Fireman
Edwin Stanton Porter was born in April 21st, 1870 and died in April 30, 1941. He most famous as a director with Thomas Edison's company. Of over 250 films created by Porter, the most important films include Life of and American Fireman (1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903). The Life of an American Fireman is a short, silent film that was made by Edwin S.Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. It was shot late in 1902 and released early in 1903, this was one of the earliest American narrative films, it depicts the rescue of a woman and child from a burning building.
5. Edwin S.Porter - The Great Train Robbery
Edwin was the first American filmmaker who put film editing to use. He worked as an electrician before joining the film laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison in the late 1890s. When Edison's motion picture studio wanted to increase the length of the short films he came to Porter. The Great Train Robbery was an example of early editing form. The film used a number of innovative techniques including composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting. it is common misconception that the film contains cross-cutting, although the technique does not appear in the film. Some prints were also hand colored in certain scenes.
6. Charles Pathe - The Horse that Bolted
Charles Pathe was is a major french pioneer of the film and recording industries. He was born on 26th December 1863 and died 25th December 1957. In 1894 Charles and his brother Emile formed Pathe Records, two years later they created the "Societe Pathe Freres" to enter the motion picture production and distribution business. Both companies became a dominant international force in their respective industries. In 1929, Charles sold out his interest in the businesses and retired to Monaco where he dies in 1957.
7. Cross cutting - D.W. Griffith Birth of a Nation
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith born January 22nd 1875 and died July 23rd 1948. He was a premier pioneering American film director and was best known as "the director of the epic 1915 film" The Birth of a Nation. The Birth of a Nation was made using advanced camera and narrative techniques. This film was extremely controversial for its negative depiction of African American, White Unionists and Recocnstruction and its positive portrayal on slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. This film was banned in many countries because it intended to show the history of prejudiced thought and behaviour and because of this the film was not a financial success, however was praised by critics.
The movie was credited as one of the events that inspired the formation of the "second era" Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia in the same year. The Birth of a Nation was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK. This was also the first motion picture to be shown at the White House and watched by the President Woodrow Wilson. Because of Griffith's innovative film techniques, it make The Birth of a Nation one of the most important and influential films in the commercial film industry and was considered by many to be one of the greatest films of all time.
8. Parallel cutting - Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather
Parallel editing is primarily used to show multiple events happening at the same time, either from different perspectives, or at different locations. In the “Baptism & Murder” sequence, time is compressed to show both the baptism of Michael’s nephew and godson, as well as the planning, build up, and eventual murder of the mafia dons of New York.
9. Lev Kuleshov - Montage Experiment
The original images of the Kuleshov ecperiment were a shot of a bowl of soup, then with a child playing with a teddy bear, then with a shot an elderly woman in a casket. When this film was showed to people they praised the actor's acting, the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the child and the grief when looking at the dead woman. The simple act of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship.
10. Dziga Vertov - Man with a Movie Camera
Man with a Movie Camera is a experimental silent documentary film made in 1929 with no story and no actors. It was directed by a Russian director Dziga Vertov and edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Verov inventes, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style. Sight and Sound poll, film critics voted Man with a Movie Camera the 8th best film ever made in 2012.
11. Montage Sequence - Rocky Balboa
Montage editing contains different images, quickly edited together. Images do not provide a sense of the narrative moving forward but are still full of meaning, rapid cuts force the viewer to consider the connections between the images being shown. There may be obvious connections or they might be deliberately unconnected. Montage editing is often used to reflect chaos, tension or disturbance a characters state of mind perhaps. An example of the 'Montage' is a sequence from Rocky Balboa 4 the training scene, which is shown below.
12. Soviet Montage - Sergei Eisenstein Strike & Battleship Potemkin
Battleship Potemkin is a silent film that was directed and released by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925. This film represents a dramatised version of the mutiny that occured in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers of the Tsarist regime. Battleship Potemkin was named the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958 and has been called one of the most influential propaganda films of all times.
Sergei Eisenstein was briefly a student of Kuleshov's but the two parted ways because they had differemt ideas of montage. Eisenstein regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating meaning. By contrasting unrelated shots he tried to provoke associations in the viewer, which were induced by shocks.
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein born 23rd January 1898, died 23rd July 1948 was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist who was often considered to be the "Father of Montage". The film depicts a Strike in 1903 by the workers of a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia, and their subsequent suppression. The film is most famous for a sequence near the end in which the violent suppression of the strike is cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered, although there are several other points in the movie where animals are used as metaphors for the conditions of various individuals. Anothe theme in the film is collectivism in opposition to individualism which was viwed as a convention of western film. Collective efforts and collectivisation of characters were central to both Strike and Battleship Potemkin
13. Montage example - Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
In this clip it shows how the animal is being slaughtered while the two men are fighting the cow being slaughtered represents the men fighting, its like a comparison between the two different scenarios. They are the same but different in many ways.
14. Continuity editing
Continuity editing remains a sense of realistic chronology and generates the feeling that time is moving forward, it may use flashbacks or flash forwards but the narrative will still be seen to be progressing forward in an expected or realistic way.
15. Jump cut - A bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard)
A jump cut is where the audience's attention is brought into focus on something very suddenly, this occurs by breaking the continuity editing this is known as discontinuity making it appear as if the section of the sequence has been removed.
A bout de souffle is a 1960 French film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, It was his first feature-length work and one of the earliest, most influential of the French New Wave. At the time, the film attracted much attention for its bold visual style and the innovative use of jump cuts. A fully restored version of the film was released in the U.S for the 50th anniversary of the film in May 2010.When originally released in France, the film had 2,082,760 cinema views.
16. Eye-line match
Eye-line match is when we see a character looking at something off screen and then we cut to a shot of what they are looking at.
17. Match on action
Match on action is an editing technique for continuity editing in which one shot cuts to another shot portraying the action of the subject in the first shot. This creates the impression of a sense of continuity the action carrying through creates a "visual bridge" which draws the viewer's attention away from slight cutting or continuity issues. This is not a graphic match or match cut, it portrays a continuous sense of the same action rather than matching two separate things. This is shown in the video below.
18. Graphic match - Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
The filmmaker can choose to place shots in a certain order so as to create a smooth visual transfer from one frame to the next. When two consecutive shots are matching in terms of the way they look this is called a graphic match. This is shown in the example below.
19. Moviola
A Moviola is a device that allows a film editor to view film while editing. It was the first machine for motion picture editing when it was invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924. Moviola the company is still in existence and is located in Hollywood where part of the facility is located on one of the original Moviola factory floors. An example of this is shown below.
20. Digital editing - Final Cut Pro/Avid
Today, most films are edited directly on systems such as Avid or Final Cut Pro and bypass the film positive work print altogether. With the advent of digital intermediate the physical negative does not necessarily need to be physically cut and not spliced together; the negative is optically scanned into computers and a cut list is conformed by a DI editor. An example of it is shown below.
21. Rules of editing (Edward Dmytryk)
The Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk stipulated seven "rules of cutting" that a good editor should follow;
Rule 1: Never make a cut without a positive reasonRule 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
22. Criteria of editing (Walter Murch)
According to the director and editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now), when it comes to film editing, there are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are in order of importance, most importnat first with notional percentage values.
- 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 the moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'" (Murch, 18)
- Eye-trace (7%) - Does the cut pay respect to the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame (Murch, 18)
- 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 diegesis?
23. In camera editing
This process take immense amounts of planning so that the shots are filmed are the ones that will be viewed in directly that order. There is no cutting out and editing scenes later on and when the very last scene is filmed by the videographer, the production is completely finished. Below is an example of "In camera editing"
24. Following the action
Following the action is when there is movement, or in an action scene the camera would follow the event/action that is taking place. In the extract Mr & Mrs Smith the camera rotates around the gun battle to show more of the action instead of staying at one angle.
25. Multiple points of view
Multiple points of views is when the actors are showing each side of a particular point of view, this could also be when one character will show what he/she is seeing and then it will change to the secondary character and do the same. An example of this is Iron Man which is shown below.
26. Shot variation
Shot variation is the technique used in filming to create a sequence of images using movement. The shot can be either static or mobile but must be a continuous motion, for example the shot begins as a long or wide shot and ends in close-up. In the following example from The Matrix it begins in long shot, the camera moves in a circular motion and ends in a mid-shot.
27. Manipulation of diegetic time and space
Manipulation of Diegetic time and space is when a film uses effects to show an age or time change, either a person, an object or even an environment is shown either getting younger or getting older. There are many films use these techniques but an exampl of this is The Time Machine. The time traveller enters the time machine and the environment changes as he travels through time.
28. Analogue editing
Analogue editing is the cutting together of pieces of celluloid film. In the past, film editing was done by Analogue editing in which the editor cuts the film tape with a razor blade, binds the tape over the head and finally tapes the whole thing back together. This method is difficult and time consuming as the cuts must be precise as there is no undo button like there is now.
29. 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. Most video editing has been superseded by digital editing which is faster and cheaper. Before digital technologies became available magnetic tapes were used to store information these are known as video tapes.
30. Non-linear editing
In didgital 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 a 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.
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