Editing has changed and developed in many ways in the early stages of film making, all because of a few individuals dared to explore different ways of editing. In this blog i will be explaing the few indivuals who made those changes.
Thomas Edison ran a film laboratory which is where he made the Kinetographic Camera and the Kinetoscope were invented. He also developed the 35mm film strip, which then became the industry standard. Once he done that, he went even further and developed a projector to play the film.
The Lumiere brothers worked with Edison to create short films with just one long, static, locked-down shot. During their first films, the only thing to make them popular with the public was simple movements as films had never been done before, so just filming traffic moving was a big hit in their early years. This can be seen in the film Sortie d'usine, which was made in 1895 by the Lumiere brothers.
G.A. Smith is a filmmaker that used editing, but in his early years there was no editing and each film only lasted as long as the film in the camera. An example of this would be a film he made called 'The Miller and the Sweep'. Later on he made a film called 'The Kiss in the Tunnel'. This was said to mark the beginning of narrative editing. He took advantage of the brief onset of darkness as they went into the tunnel to splice in the shot of the couple.
George Melies is a magician who once saw a lumiere brothers film and saw the possibilites of a novelty more than just motion itself. So he bought a camera, built a studio, wrote scrips, designed sets and soon he discovered basic camera tricks we see today. There is a rumour that he discovered the art of stop motion by accident when his camera broke down for a brief second. In 1886 he made a film called 'The Vanishing Lady' using a technique known as in-camera editing. It never occured to him to move the camera for long shots or close-ups, which sadly resulted in his films being over-looked.
Edwin S Porter is an American filmmaker who helped Thomas Edison make films longer and more interesting, as before they done this together films normally only lasted a minute/minute and a half. This helped revoulutionise the way films are done today as they was able to introduce a plot to the films. The film that made this breakthrough was 'The Life of An American Fireman', which was premiered in 1903. It was among the first to have a plot, but it also had action and a never before done close up of a hand pulling a fire alarm. He also introduced a method called splicing in that film as he was able to show the outside of the burning that was on fire and also the view of the women and child inside of the burning building.
Porter was also famous for another film called 'The Great Train Robbery' which was one of the first to have a serious plot, with different locations, different camera angles, action sences and and a story you can follow and relate to, the s a big step, going towards how films are made today.
The next filmmaker im going to talk about is Charles Pathe, he was famous for his film called 'The Horse that Bolted' which was premiered in 1907. Charles was the first to introduce the filming technique called Parallel Editing, which is when you cut between the two story lines. He done it between the Horse which was eating the grain and running around in the middle of the street causing havoc and the delivery man who was doing his deliveries to his customers while the horse was running away.
D.W. Griffith was an American film director, who was one of the early supporters of the power of editing. He made use of cross-cutting, as it allowed him to show parallel action in different locations.
His work was highly regarded by many and greatly influenced the early filmmakers understanding of editing.
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