Unit 16: film and video editing techniques by zoey s.
Task 1: The Development and principals of editing
Note: The text in red is taken from reliable primary sources.
History of editing
Editing is one of the most significant things in the history of films because it has a very big impact on the film side of things. I am going to look at some of the most significant history makers in editing.
The Lumiere brothers were one of the first editors to creating history for filming.
They invented cinematography. Cinematography was a device that was well known. It did three things. It recorded, captured and also projected motion pictures one of the brothers, Auguste dropped his art and pursued a career in photographic processing because he saw the benefits it had money wise. Because of this he set out to do a business in manufacturing and he also supplied photographic equipment. His brother Lois joined him in the process and he was examining the equipment. When Louis joined his father there \they flourished. There was a discovery in this process, a discovery that accelerated the progress of photography. He designed a dry plate process in 1881 which gave his fathers business a great boost. This dry plate process was mostly known as an ‘Etiquette Bleue’. The showing of generally 10 short films that lasted around twenty minutes in total was held in the boulevard de capucines in Paris. It was the first public demonstration of their cinematographe device. This device then functioned as a camera. Their work mostly contained moving images from of everyday life looking back; the Lumiere brothers had a strong belief that cinematography would be a medium without a future because they thought that people would get bored of looking at screen because they could simply go to the place/street where the shorts were being filmed. Nonetheless, the train pulling into the station film arrangement reportedly had the audience ducking and screaming because it was so realistic to the point that they believed that that the train was about to mulch through.
These are some pictures of the cinematography machine:
The Lumiere Brothers have been credited with over 1,425 different short films and had even filmed aerial shots years before the very first airplane would take to the skies.
Edward S Porter
Edward Porter was born April 21 1870 and died April 30, 1941. When porter was to refurbish make improvements to Edison Company’s motion picture equipment, he served as cameramen and a few other things. He did the simple one shot (Kansas Salon Smashers):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPzUSfYxzBU
and many others. But this wasn’t the end; the progress quickened and films with special effects started appearing (The Finish Of Bridget McKeen in 1901):
There are also multi scene anecdotes that are inspired by politics and contemporary events. One of these multi scenes film is Sampson Schley Controversy which was also made in 1901:
Porter also filmed the extraordinary Pan-American Exposition by Night (1901):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6WmPL98s4M
which used time-lapse photography to produce a circular panorama of the exposition’s electrical illumination, and the 10-scene Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), a narrative that simulates the sequencing of magic lantern slides to achieve a logical, if elliptical, spatial continuity.
In the early 1900s porter continued to pursue film and was now practicing continuity editing. When you are selecting one shot films and arranging and rearranging them into 15-minutes programs to be able to have them for screen presentation is very much similar to the just taking isolated shots and putting them to make single shots. Porter found his inspiration from other film makers. The one film that really influenced his work was Georges Méliès (A Trip to the Moon). Porter also did The Great Train Robbery film in 1903 which was a huge success for him and it also is affirmed to be the first narrative film to have accomplished such continuity of action. . The film depicts the robbery, the formation of a posse, and its pursuit and elimination of the gunmen. The Great Train Robbery comprised 14 separate shots of noncontinuous, nonoverlapping action and was a major departure from the frontally composed, theatrical staging used by Méliès and most other filmmakers. The film ended with a startling close-up of one of the outlaws firing his gun at the camera.
David Griffiths
David Griffiths is mostly referred to as the father of narrative cinema. He created a few techniques such as parallel editing. Parallel editing is a technique used to alternate two or more scenes. These scenes often happen together but in different places. It may happen that the scenes are simultaneous; they periodically culminate in a single location, where the applicable parties go head to head with each other. In the short film (The Lonedale Operate (1911)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYQ3947Owr4
David expands the technique by using parallel editing to arouse anxiety. Griffiths inspired and influenced many filmmakers. He was highly praised by Kuleshov and other soviet filmmakers and greatly altered their knowledge of editing. David was the distinctive partner of those American and European directors who created the ‘classical Hollywood’ style editing. One example of the film he used it in is The Birth of a Nation Intolerance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIetZSCEvek
the classical style uses different techniques including the Establishing shot, Shot reverse shot and the 180degree rule through temporal and spatial continuity to accelerate narrative.
Lev Kuleshov
Lev Kuleshov thought that editing was the unique essence of cinema. He thought that editing was like constructing a building. Brick by brick (shot by shot) the building (film) is erected. He made an experiment that was named the Kuleshov experiment. This experiment proved that montage can make the viewer reach certain conclusions about the action in a film. Despite the fact that some editing innovations such as cross cutting were used before him by some Hollywood directors before him, he still made a mark because he was the first to use it in soviet Russia. Like most filmmakers, he was inspiration from others in his job description. He studied the techniques that filmmaker David Griffith and Mark Sennett had introduced such modernization as cross cutting in editing and montage into Russia cinema. Kuleshov was not very open about this career path that he had taken when he started to experiment with editing techniques. His main focus was to put two shots together to inspire a new meaning.
Technology development:
3d cinema uses 3d presentation techniques. Some of those techniques include stereoscopic capture, multi-view capture, or 2d plus length, and a 3d display. You can be able to produce a 3d film in several ways. There is just only one basic demand which is to array balancing images that are penetrated separately according to the right and left eye. In order to manifest this, two strategies have been used and these strategies are making the viewer wear glasses or splitting the images directionally into the viewer’s eyes using a light source when projecting.
Editing techniques
There are four main techniques used in editing which are:
Over the shoulder shot: over the shoulder shot are just as simple as the name itself which is just taking a shot with the actors shoulder in the foreground, It has to be out of focus. Over the shoulder shot are very time consuming because they are hard to right, it is that way because you need to make sure that not too much or less shoulder is in the cameras frame. A serious film maker is bound to be clear in this technique because it is important in many cases narrative wise. From a narrative point of view, over the shoulder shot are built to give a feeling of intimacy
Colour
A very distinctive difference that is recognizable between old and new films nowadays is that most of the old films were shot black and white (without colour). To create color, you had to manipulate the celluloid. Color film goes almost hand in hand with when moving pictures were established.George Albert Smith was the inventor of the great machine called the kinemacolor. From 1908 to 1914 kinemacolor was used commercially. Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture. George was influenced by the work that was done by Edward Raymond Turner and Norman Lascelles Davidson. This device was launched in 1908 by a man called Charles Urban in his company (Urban Trading. Co.) From then on the process was known as kinemacolor.
Digital
Digital cinematography is the process of capturing motion pictures as digital images, as opposed to the historical use of motion picture film. Digital capture may come in different form but usually occurs in video tape, hard disks, flash memory and many others devices that have the capability to of recording digital data by using a digital movie camera or video camera. Throughout the years, digital technology has steadily improved. All Hollywood movies are usually partly or fully shot digitally. There is no fair technical distinction that separates the images taken in digital cinematography to videos. Digital cinematography is a term used in situations whereby digital acquisition is restrained for the sake of film acquisition; an example is when a feature film is being shot. Slum dog millionaire was awarded the Academy for Best Cinematography and also became the first movie to be shot mainly in digital.
Continuity
Continuity in film is a scheme of editing used to keep in place continuous and neat narrative action through going by a set of rules. There are certain sets of rules that should be followed in continuity editing and these involve.
. Establishing shot
. Shot/ reverse short
. 180 degrees
. 30 degrees rule
. Cross cutting
. Match on action
.Eye line match
. Restabilising shot
If the editing/cutting is done properly and accordingly, there are clear gains. The anecdotes will have a clear construction. The shot sequences will flow smoothly into Each other. The film will also be easy to watch.
Establishing shot: Nowadays stabling shots are used to provide context and the geography of the scene they usually work well. Film editors depend on establishing shots to do very significant things in a film that impact and possibly bring the film to life and that no other shot can do. It’s the only shot that can show the spectators/ audience the setting of the film, what aspects are involved and more convoluted practice and cutting-edge details in a single shot. There is an order of a shot progression. Wide to narrow. You start from full shot then you medium and the close up. Other film makers prefer to start on a medium shot. Some filmmakers prefer sticking with the medium shot for the whole scene. When you are doing a close up shot you have to consider your audience because you might be able to visualise a certain scene but your audience cant. All the questions they might have about a scene can be answered using an establishing shot because they might have questions about the time and space, weather or the location etc.
Shot / Reverse shot: People having a conversation (dialogue) or interaction between one another is often taken using different shots from different angles. All these shots and angels are done with the 180degrees rules in mind. The 180 degrees are sometimes called the ‘shot’ and ‘reverse shot’ or the reverse angle. Customarily, this shot takes you back and forth continuously between the players, with one or two master shots for occasional punctuation or other fictional purposes. A shot reverse shot is very flexible; it can be filmed randomly but can then be put together in the correct order afterwards. When doing this shot they must be certain that the right amount of shots are taken to make the ‘shot reverse shot’ arrangement work.
180 degeres rule:
The 180 degeree rule ensures that the camera should stay the same side of an imaginary line .this is the rule that aclomplishes the continuity of the film. An example is if a person is running from left to right then the upcoming shot must be from the same side of the camera and this means that that the frame has to enter from left to right. The same tequnique applies to sport events like athletics.it is never good to break the rule. The only time you can ever break the rule is if you are doing it for effect.breaking the rule usually results in confusion for the audience, and they are most likely to be this way if there are scenes of chase because it creates more tension. You always have to remember that the camera should stay on one side of the imaginary line. Other results of breaking this rule are: audience might lose focus on the main point, they might get confused and they might miss the most important part of the film and disengage.
Montage
Montage is a French word for putting together. Montage is a technique for selecting; editing and piecing together separate sections of film or video to form a continuous whole. Sergei Einstein was one of the first historical filmmakers to pioneer the use of montage. He also did experiments to link shots to evoke/ arouse emotions.
Metric Montage
Metric montage sounds very numerical. Metric montage introduces the length of the shots relating to one another. Besides the information that abides in the shots, if the shorts are shortened it impacts the time the audience have to grasp the information they have given in each shot. This boosts the strain coming from the scene. If close ups are used using shorter shots, deep progression is used. It creates intensity.
Rhythmic Montage
Rhythmic montage usually comes after metric montage when listing the types of montages there are. A rhythmic montage involves content that is resolute by the length of the arrangement of the shot. Not only that, the action within the frame determines the content. The physical length of a shot may help create a pattern or rhythm to the montage; nonetheless, you also consider the pace of the action within the frame. There are two things that may conflict which are the montage rhythm and the movement rhythm within a frame, so that develops tension. This is an example of a rhythmic montage:
The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
An example of rhythmic montage is the famous 'Odessa steps sequence' in The Battleship Potemkin (1925). This particular sequence is of a baby carriage rolling down a series of stairs in the midst of warfare. The sound of soldiers marching and gunpowder filled the air and there was nothing anybody could do to stop the carriage. The duration of each shot created tension along with the unsynchronized marching of the soldiers' feet
Tonal montage
Tonal montage is matching your shot with a music piece that goes with it. For example: a dark shot having dark music or a loud shot having loud music. Tonal montage was also part of Eisenstein’s theory of montage. This type of montage finds its strength on the emotional principal of the shot. Each time a tonal shot is edited, an assertive feeling that is being portrayed is reflected, and is edited to boost the emotional experience in the audience. Overall, the tonal montage draws from the same thread for one sequence, creating one whole emotional tone throughout the sequence.
For example, the death scene in The Battleship Potemkin uses the tonal montage to create its poignancy. By editing long shots of the water, the sea-gulls, the boats, the haze, one solemn tone is created with the use of these eclectic fear.
Over tonal montage/ associational montage
This type of montage comes from combining all of the previous montages which are( Metric, Tonal, Rhythmic montage).each bit from each type of montage is copied and established into assisting inducing an effect from the audience. In some form, the audience should feel emotionally connected. If the audience succeed in feeling a flood of emotions, that means the film has successfully created an over tonal montage. This is an example of over tonal montage.
Directly referencing to Eisenstein's work, the Odessa Steps sequence of the baby carriage rolling down the stairs in Battleship Potemkin exemplifies an over tonal montage as viewers are hit with a ton of emotions: horrification, fury, wretchedness and fear.
Task 1: The Development and principals of editing
Note: The text in red is taken from reliable primary sources.
History of editing
Editing is one of the most significant things in the history of films because it has a very big impact on the film side of things. I am going to look at some of the most significant history makers in editing.
The Lumiere brothers were one of the first editors to creating history for filming.
They invented cinematography. Cinematography was a device that was well known. It did three things. It recorded, captured and also projected motion pictures one of the brothers, Auguste dropped his art and pursued a career in photographic processing because he saw the benefits it had money wise. Because of this he set out to do a business in manufacturing and he also supplied photographic equipment. His brother Lois joined him in the process and he was examining the equipment. When Louis joined his father there \they flourished. There was a discovery in this process, a discovery that accelerated the progress of photography. He designed a dry plate process in 1881 which gave his fathers business a great boost. This dry plate process was mostly known as an ‘Etiquette Bleue’. The showing of generally 10 short films that lasted around twenty minutes in total was held in the boulevard de capucines in Paris. It was the first public demonstration of their cinematographe device. This device then functioned as a camera. Their work mostly contained moving images from of everyday life looking back; the Lumiere brothers had a strong belief that cinematography would be a medium without a future because they thought that people would get bored of looking at screen because they could simply go to the place/street where the shorts were being filmed. Nonetheless, the train pulling into the station film arrangement reportedly had the audience ducking and screaming because it was so realistic to the point that they believed that that the train was about to mulch through.
These are some pictures of the cinematography machine:
The Lumiere Brothers have been credited with over 1,425 different short films and had even filmed aerial shots years before the very first airplane would take to the skies.
Edward S Porter
Edward Porter was born April 21 1870 and died April 30, 1941. When porter was to refurbish make improvements to Edison Company’s motion picture equipment, he served as cameramen and a few other things. He did the simple one shot (Kansas Salon Smashers):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPzUSfYxzBU
and many others. But this wasn’t the end; the progress quickened and films with special effects started appearing (The Finish Of Bridget McKeen in 1901):
There are also multi scene anecdotes that are inspired by politics and contemporary events. One of these multi scenes film is Sampson Schley Controversy which was also made in 1901:
Porter also filmed the extraordinary Pan-American Exposition by Night (1901):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6WmPL98s4M
which used time-lapse photography to produce a circular panorama of the exposition’s electrical illumination, and the 10-scene Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), a narrative that simulates the sequencing of magic lantern slides to achieve a logical, if elliptical, spatial continuity.
In the early 1900s porter continued to pursue film and was now practicing continuity editing. When you are selecting one shot films and arranging and rearranging them into 15-minutes programs to be able to have them for screen presentation is very much similar to the just taking isolated shots and putting them to make single shots. Porter found his inspiration from other film makers. The one film that really influenced his work was Georges Méliès (A Trip to the Moon). Porter also did The Great Train Robbery film in 1903 which was a huge success for him and it also is affirmed to be the first narrative film to have accomplished such continuity of action. . The film depicts the robbery, the formation of a posse, and its pursuit and elimination of the gunmen. The Great Train Robbery comprised 14 separate shots of noncontinuous, nonoverlapping action and was a major departure from the frontally composed, theatrical staging used by Méliès and most other filmmakers. The film ended with a startling close-up of one of the outlaws firing his gun at the camera.
David Griffiths
David Griffiths is mostly referred to as the father of narrative cinema. He created a few techniques such as parallel editing. Parallel editing is a technique used to alternate two or more scenes. These scenes often happen together but in different places. It may happen that the scenes are simultaneous; they periodically culminate in a single location, where the applicable parties go head to head with each other. In the short film (The Lonedale Operate (1911)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYQ3947Owr4
David expands the technique by using parallel editing to arouse anxiety. Griffiths inspired and influenced many filmmakers. He was highly praised by Kuleshov and other soviet filmmakers and greatly altered their knowledge of editing. David was the distinctive partner of those American and European directors who created the ‘classical Hollywood’ style editing. One example of the film he used it in is The Birth of a Nation Intolerance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIetZSCEvek
the classical style uses different techniques including the Establishing shot, Shot reverse shot and the 180degree rule through temporal and spatial continuity to accelerate narrative.
Lev Kuleshov
Lev Kuleshov thought that editing was the unique essence of cinema. He thought that editing was like constructing a building. Brick by brick (shot by shot) the building (film) is erected. He made an experiment that was named the Kuleshov experiment. This experiment proved that montage can make the viewer reach certain conclusions about the action in a film. Despite the fact that some editing innovations such as cross cutting were used before him by some Hollywood directors before him, he still made a mark because he was the first to use it in soviet Russia. Like most filmmakers, he was inspiration from others in his job description. He studied the techniques that filmmaker David Griffith and Mark Sennett had introduced such modernization as cross cutting in editing and montage into Russia cinema. Kuleshov was not very open about this career path that he had taken when he started to experiment with editing techniques. His main focus was to put two shots together to inspire a new meaning.
Technology development:
3d cinema uses 3d presentation techniques. Some of those techniques include stereoscopic capture, multi-view capture, or 2d plus length, and a 3d display. You can be able to produce a 3d film in several ways. There is just only one basic demand which is to array balancing images that are penetrated separately according to the right and left eye. In order to manifest this, two strategies have been used and these strategies are making the viewer wear glasses or splitting the images directionally into the viewer’s eyes using a light source when projecting.
Editing techniques
There are four main techniques used in editing which are:
Over the shoulder shot: over the shoulder shot are just as simple as the name itself which is just taking a shot with the actors shoulder in the foreground, It has to be out of focus. Over the shoulder shot are very time consuming because they are hard to right, it is that way because you need to make sure that not too much or less shoulder is in the cameras frame. A serious film maker is bound to be clear in this technique because it is important in many cases narrative wise. From a narrative point of view, over the shoulder shot are built to give a feeling of intimacy
Colour
A very distinctive difference that is recognizable between old and new films nowadays is that most of the old films were shot black and white (without colour). To create color, you had to manipulate the celluloid. Color film goes almost hand in hand with when moving pictures were established.George Albert Smith was the inventor of the great machine called the kinemacolor. From 1908 to 1914 kinemacolor was used commercially. Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture. George was influenced by the work that was done by Edward Raymond Turner and Norman Lascelles Davidson. This device was launched in 1908 by a man called Charles Urban in his company (Urban Trading. Co.) From then on the process was known as kinemacolor.
Digital
Digital cinematography is the process of capturing motion pictures as digital images, as opposed to the historical use of motion picture film. Digital capture may come in different form but usually occurs in video tape, hard disks, flash memory and many others devices that have the capability to of recording digital data by using a digital movie camera or video camera. Throughout the years, digital technology has steadily improved. All Hollywood movies are usually partly or fully shot digitally. There is no fair technical distinction that separates the images taken in digital cinematography to videos. Digital cinematography is a term used in situations whereby digital acquisition is restrained for the sake of film acquisition; an example is when a feature film is being shot. Slum dog millionaire was awarded the Academy for Best Cinematography and also became the first movie to be shot mainly in digital.
Continuity
Continuity in film is a scheme of editing used to keep in place continuous and neat narrative action through going by a set of rules. There are certain sets of rules that should be followed in continuity editing and these involve.
. Establishing shot
. Shot/ reverse short
. 180 degrees
. 30 degrees rule
. Cross cutting
. Match on action
.Eye line match
. Restabilising shot
If the editing/cutting is done properly and accordingly, there are clear gains. The anecdotes will have a clear construction. The shot sequences will flow smoothly into Each other. The film will also be easy to watch.
Establishing shot: Nowadays stabling shots are used to provide context and the geography of the scene they usually work well. Film editors depend on establishing shots to do very significant things in a film that impact and possibly bring the film to life and that no other shot can do. It’s the only shot that can show the spectators/ audience the setting of the film, what aspects are involved and more convoluted practice and cutting-edge details in a single shot. There is an order of a shot progression. Wide to narrow. You start from full shot then you medium and the close up. Other film makers prefer to start on a medium shot. Some filmmakers prefer sticking with the medium shot for the whole scene. When you are doing a close up shot you have to consider your audience because you might be able to visualise a certain scene but your audience cant. All the questions they might have about a scene can be answered using an establishing shot because they might have questions about the time and space, weather or the location etc.
Shot / Reverse shot: People having a conversation (dialogue) or interaction between one another is often taken using different shots from different angles. All these shots and angels are done with the 180degrees rules in mind. The 180 degrees are sometimes called the ‘shot’ and ‘reverse shot’ or the reverse angle. Customarily, this shot takes you back and forth continuously between the players, with one or two master shots for occasional punctuation or other fictional purposes. A shot reverse shot is very flexible; it can be filmed randomly but can then be put together in the correct order afterwards. When doing this shot they must be certain that the right amount of shots are taken to make the ‘shot reverse shot’ arrangement work.
180 degeres rule:
The 180 degeree rule ensures that the camera should stay the same side of an imaginary line .this is the rule that aclomplishes the continuity of the film. An example is if a person is running from left to right then the upcoming shot must be from the same side of the camera and this means that that the frame has to enter from left to right. The same tequnique applies to sport events like athletics.it is never good to break the rule. The only time you can ever break the rule is if you are doing it for effect.breaking the rule usually results in confusion for the audience, and they are most likely to be this way if there are scenes of chase because it creates more tension. You always have to remember that the camera should stay on one side of the imaginary line. Other results of breaking this rule are: audience might lose focus on the main point, they might get confused and they might miss the most important part of the film and disengage.
Montage
Montage is a French word for putting together. Montage is a technique for selecting; editing and piecing together separate sections of film or video to form a continuous whole. Sergei Einstein was one of the first historical filmmakers to pioneer the use of montage. He also did experiments to link shots to evoke/ arouse emotions.
Metric Montage
Metric montage sounds very numerical. Metric montage introduces the length of the shots relating to one another. Besides the information that abides in the shots, if the shorts are shortened it impacts the time the audience have to grasp the information they have given in each shot. This boosts the strain coming from the scene. If close ups are used using shorter shots, deep progression is used. It creates intensity.
Rhythmic Montage
Rhythmic montage usually comes after metric montage when listing the types of montages there are. A rhythmic montage involves content that is resolute by the length of the arrangement of the shot. Not only that, the action within the frame determines the content. The physical length of a shot may help create a pattern or rhythm to the montage; nonetheless, you also consider the pace of the action within the frame. There are two things that may conflict which are the montage rhythm and the movement rhythm within a frame, so that develops tension. This is an example of a rhythmic montage:
The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925)
An example of rhythmic montage is the famous 'Odessa steps sequence' in The Battleship Potemkin (1925). This particular sequence is of a baby carriage rolling down a series of stairs in the midst of warfare. The sound of soldiers marching and gunpowder filled the air and there was nothing anybody could do to stop the carriage. The duration of each shot created tension along with the unsynchronized marching of the soldiers' feet
Tonal montage
Tonal montage is matching your shot with a music piece that goes with it. For example: a dark shot having dark music or a loud shot having loud music. Tonal montage was also part of Eisenstein’s theory of montage. This type of montage finds its strength on the emotional principal of the shot. Each time a tonal shot is edited, an assertive feeling that is being portrayed is reflected, and is edited to boost the emotional experience in the audience. Overall, the tonal montage draws from the same thread for one sequence, creating one whole emotional tone throughout the sequence.
For example, the death scene in The Battleship Potemkin uses the tonal montage to create its poignancy. By editing long shots of the water, the sea-gulls, the boats, the haze, one solemn tone is created with the use of these eclectic fear.
Over tonal montage/ associational montage
This type of montage comes from combining all of the previous montages which are( Metric, Tonal, Rhythmic montage).each bit from each type of montage is copied and established into assisting inducing an effect from the audience. In some form, the audience should feel emotionally connected. If the audience succeed in feeling a flood of emotions, that means the film has successfully created an over tonal montage. This is an example of over tonal montage.
Directly referencing to Eisenstein's work, the Odessa Steps sequence of the baby carriage rolling down the stairs in Battleship Potemkin exemplifies an over tonal montage as viewers are hit with a ton of emotions: horrification, fury, wretchedness and fear.
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