Purpose of Editing

Cut out bits you dont want

Special effects + animation
Create ILLUSION of films world + story
To create the film/TV shows NARRATIVE
Used to create MOOD or atmosphere
Keep film/TV show within required length (film: 2 hours, TV: 30 minutes or 1 hour)
Engaging the viewer (keeping them interested.)
Positions audience (usually with key character/protagonist. Sometimes established/placed at the beginning
of film by wide establishing shot)
TIME
PACE
- control TIME
- controlled by length/duration of shots
(e.g. action scene)
RHYTHM regular, repeated pattern
PARALLEL ACTION (cutting between people in different places but at the same time) CROSS - CUTTING
control SPACE
180 rule + 30 rule - move camera 30 or more for edit not to be a jump cut.
Continuity editing - keeps the action flowing
- if these rules are broken you notice the editing - it jumps or jars the image.

The sentence before cinema implies

that cinema has since taken over in
popularity

prior to the invention of cinema types

of storytelling where still done using
sequential images. the early cinema
was treated the same way as
watching a play in the theater

editing is practically
invisible to audiences and
most dont think it matter

editing allows disordered scenes to

become ordered

improvements to technology majorly impact

the art of editing. Until digital all editing was
linear, it was a tedious process that involved
fast forwarding and rewinding scenes. Digital
editing is non linear allowing for more
precise and instant control
Shows the importance of
rhythms and patterns as
well as editing in
storytelling

editing

treating the
camera as a
character

the idea of
cutting from the
location to
specific details

Pre Cinema
The magic lantern or Laterna Magica is an early type of image projector employing
pictures on sheets of glass. It was developed in the 17th century and commonly
used for educational and entertainment purposes. as you can see in the picture they
were mainly used for astrological predictions in lecture halls. In the 1660s, a man
named Thomas Walgensten used his so-called "lantern of fear" to summon ghosts,
this practice would later be refined and come to be known as phantasmagoria

The Phantasmagoria was modified from the preexisting magic lantern to project
frightening images such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts onto walls, smoke, or semitransparent screens, The projector Invented in France by a Belgian physicist in the late
18th century, it quickly gained popularity through most of Europe throughout the 19th
century. The projectors success was a result of its time as during the end of the 18th
century, partially due to the popularity of the gothic horror genre of novel, people had a
high interest in the supernatural, as such the phantasmagoria was created to satisfy these
occult fanatics. Johann Georg Schrpfer began using the magic lantern in sances, to
give the illusion of communication with ghosts and other phantasms

Innovation
Auguste Lumiere once said Cinema is an invention without a
future a useless gimmick, but since then film has evolved
expantaly. With No cuts and No edits there was No hope, movies
were seen as plays and moving pictures, nothing someone
couldnt see much better in person, however with the discovery of
editing film quickly evolved into the state we now know. The use
of film editing to establish continuity, involving action moving from
one sequence into another however was first used by Robert W.
Paul, and improved upon by filmmakers such as Georges Mlis
who was considered the father of special effects and Edwin S.
Porter who innovated editing by cutting/splicing scenes together
to tell a story with features like Parallel action involving Cross
cutting between 2 different scenes at the same time. Many
filmmakers were aware that Choice of Length of shots can affect
the feel and atmosphere of the film, as such elliptical editing was
used to cut out the parts of a film that no one wanted or
necessarily needed to see.

The Miller and the Sweep

-> camera is static
and too heavy to move
-> actors/ characters move
this would not have been that impressive to audiences as they saw it in
theatres all the time
accidentally are out of shot - as they are unaware of the edge of the
cameras frame
-> windmill as setting is chosen to show off the idea of film as moving image
impressive as audiences will never have seen this in the theatre
-> flour + soot are used to show off movement also
-> use of black+white is to keep audience visually interested
they chose to foreground these contrasting colours
-> no editing to help tell the story or to help create mood
only an edit at the beginning and the end.
-> editing to control time + space and create mood + narrative meaning HAS
NOT YET BEEN INVENTED.
technology is reason for lack of film.
1895 invention of cinema
- this film only 2 years later.
-> Smith only had theatre to compare to
come into frame and walk out of frame as they would have on stage in the
theatre
when all actors are out of frame (i.e. off stage) the film ends

Directed by G. A. Smith

The Miller and the Sweep was a very early example of

filmmaking, it had no edits/cuts, a static camera and an
incredibly simple plot as well as the early staple of constant
motion in the background, in this case with the windmill. The
entire film is treated in the same manner as a stage
production, as that was the closest thing to a motion picture
film at the time. The cameras borders were considered the
same as the ends of a stage and since the camera wasnt
easily moveable there wasnt much of an alternative. The
characters themselves are dressed in black and white
respectively, with the man in black being covered in white
flower by the end and the man in white being covered with
chimney suit, this was nothing more that a reenactment of a
preexisting routine, as the idea of film (which at the time had
no sound and was difficult to operate) having a story was an
afterthought, because the main attraction is still the windmill.

Technology 1904
Lighter weight camera: A box camera is a simple type of camera, the most common form being
a cardboard or plastic box with a lens in one end and film at the other. They were very popular
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The lenses are often single element designs meniscus
fixed focus lens, or in better quality box cameras a doublet lens with minimal (if any) possible
adjustments to the aperture or shutter speeds. Because of the inability to adjust focus, the small
lens aperture and the low sensitivity of the sensitive materials available, these cameras work
best in brightly lit day-lit scenes when the subject is within the hyperfocal distance for the lens
and of subjects that move little during the exposure, snapshots. During the box cameras, box
cameras with photographic flash, shutter and aperture adjustment were introduced, allowing
indoor photos

Linear Destructive Editing Systems

Hand held cutter

When Porter realised you could cut the film to further develop narrative and create the notion of 'meanwhile' in stories
via parallel editing, or cross cutting, to emotionally affect the audience, the cutter began to have an unseen role in
filmmaking.
Celluloid at this stage was held up to the light, cut in the appropriate place and then glued back together. The pieces of
film were studied over a light well, spliced, glued and then run in the projection room, this process being repeated
several times until the cut was acceptable.
Later desktop cutting devices like that shown in the images here were developed to make the process slightly easier.

Edwin Stanton Porter The Great Train

Robbery
-> scene 2 -40sec
-> see robbers get on train/outlaws get on train
-> following action

-> More action + fighting

Then special effect done through EDITING - swap real body for a
during can see it -> but its still pretty good..
throw dummy off train
Still real time filming..
following action - cut as they get off train..

-> scene 3 on the train

Another LONG SHOT
All shots so far influenced by theatre 40 secs..

-> perspective of tracks - slightly more interesting shot mies-enscene

-> cut to shot on top of train, following action, different

shot to previous 3 LESS THEATRE

-> next shot everyone being robbed again real-time - 40 seconds literally all people being robbed.. - robbery CUT BACK to engine
which they escape in - not possible in theatre
-> extreme long shot of train leaving
action match (match on action) from ELS if train cutting to MS if
train all happening in same time frame.. time flows from one scene
to next as action is followed

-> get some camera movement - in woods pans to show horses + follow the action
CROSS CUT TO PARALLEL ACTION i.e. cut to a different SPACE form protagonist in same time MEANWHILE guy tied up set
off alarm.
-> meanwhile + parallel action of posse dancing + then riding horses to find outlaws
-> parallel action encourages audience to anticipate/prediction that people (posse + outlaws) in 2 different places will meet
Last scene is a shootout
Final shot v. innovative as is MS + breaks fourth wall - i.e. looks at audience + shoots at them
Lots of different spaces controlled by editing + time controlled bit by following on from previous scene

Edwin.S. Porter: great train robbery (1903)

an edit is used during a fight on top of the train where the camera cuts, one of the people
is switched with a dummy and the dummy is thrown overboard, to a modern audience this
edit would be noticeable and seem kind of fake, but to the audience at the time this was
nothing short of witchcraft, they had never seen or even heard of special effects so even
the idea of using editing like this was revolutionary. A similar scene to this occurs towards
the end of the film when the 4th wall is promptly broken by one of the bandits who was
hijacking the train points his gun and fires at the audience, again to a modern audience
this might seem a bit nonsensical or even silly but when film was a new medium this kind
of 4th wall break was used to make the audience active participants and leave them with
an unparalleled and lasting experience

D.W. Griffith: Birth of a Nation (1915)

Griffith continued on from porter, innovating the craft of filmmaking even further beyond with the
invention of advanced editing techniques such as the first shot reverse shot, and parallel action in one
location. Griffith produced more than just spectacles, he produced stories, at a time when film was an
incredibly limited medium, using innovative techniques that are still used by filmmakers today such as
eyeline matches. Griffith used text panels to stimulate dialogue between his characters such as in the
highly controversial film Birth of a nation which went on to inspire the next generation of filmmakers

D W Griffiths link to film clip

The opening sequence to Birth of a Nation where Griffiths
establishes many new editing techniques including cross cutting
narratives within one location

Technology 1924
In-Camera editing: Moviola
The Moviola allowed editors to study individual shots in their cutting rooms, thus to determine more
precisely where the best cut-point might be. The vertically oriented Moviolas were the standard for
film editing in the United States until the 1970s.
It was a vertical stand up analog mechanical way to be able to edit film, where you can run the film
through the machine and it would hold on to it and you could cut it in different places and be able to
splice it together in a mechanical way.
Iwan Serrurier original 1917 concept for the Moviola was as a home movie projector to be sold to the
general public, very few were sold. An editor at Douglas Fairbanks Studios suggested that Iwan should adapt
the device for use by film editors. Serrurier did this and the Moviola as an editing device was born in 1924 with the
first Moviola being sold to Douglas Fairbanks himself.

Many studios quickly adopted the Moviola including Universal Studios, Warner Brothers, Charles
Chaplin Studios, Buster Keaton Productions, Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, and Metro-GoldwynMayer. The advent of sound, 65mm and 70mm film, and the need for portable editing equipment
during World War II greatly expanded the market for Moviola's products.

1940s Orson Welles Citizen Kane

By the time we get to Orson Welles, we had the development of the Moviola which came along in
1924. At this point in time Welles knows where he can shoot for the edit, collecting shots to put
together later. Our film language of continuity editing is clearly in place and it's now about the
creative manipulation of that in terms of editing sound and image together for effect - which is what
we get here when we get to Welles - and about manipulating the audience and controlling the rhythm
and pace of the film as well as controlling the space and time within the film.
We get to a stage with Welles that we have lots of movement with the camera because it was a
lightweight and sophisticated model as well as the film stock being a better quality and the
filmmakers having access to accessories like dollies which provides a more fluid camera movement.
We get a more dynamic story where time and place are controlled by the editing and pace of the
story as well as manipulating the atmosphere. The audience are manipulated by those things.
The opening of Citizen Kane is very slow and melancholy and there is lots of cross-dissolves,
multiple exposure and there is a delay in the slow revelation of the location. The audience can even
be placed inside of a snow globe, mistaking it for a cabin in the snow because of that extreme close
up and then we are pulled out again to reveal the snow globe, through the use of a fish-eye lens.
It is quite clear that what we get now is not just telling a narrative in a frame, its not just the story is
created by the editing and film is having a language of its own, what we get is that film is an art form
as well as a storytelling device.
Welles moves on with focus and depth of field because lens have been developed in a more
sophisticated way now and there is an artistry to it because weve got the basis of film grammar and
language, we have got the traditions of editing which have been there since 1911 and people are
playing about with them in an artistic way, finally showing film as an art form

Orson Welles Citizen Kane (1941)

Arguably one of the greatest films ever made, Citizen Kane, usings editing to create a mood and tell a story from the first few
seconds of the film. In the opening of citizen kane we see a gate with rusted sign that reads no trespassing showing not just
isolation but the passing of time, as the rust shows that the sign itself have been neglected and left to age. From the first gate
we then transition to another gate, which perhaps could symbolise the walls this man has built up to keep himself isolated and
disconnected, this is furthered as from there we transition to yet another gate this one with a giant K emblem on the front, and
a gothic looking house shrouded in fog way off in the distance with a single light coming from what seems to be a window, from
the size of the house and the caliber of the gate its fair for the audience to assume the man owning the house is quite wealthy,
and we know all this with no dialogue in only the first few minutes. The gondolas in the next scene could represent Karron, the
greek equivalent of the grim reaper who ferries souls down the river styx to the underworld, witch in an already eerie
environment might lead the sharper members of the audience to think death has some significance in this opening.

1950s Steenbeck
Flatbed
The Steenbeck company was founded in 1931 by Wilhelm
Steenbeck in Hamburg, Germany. Since then, the name
Steenbeck has become widely known in the film editing
community as a result of his invention the steenbeck flatbed.
Picture and sound rolls load onto separate motorized disks,
called "plates." Each set of plates moves forward or backward
separately, or locked together to maintain synchronization
between picture and sound. A prism reflects the film image
onto a viewing screen, while a magnetic playback head reads
the magnetic audio tracks.
It did make editing easier but it was still a linear and destructive
editing system .

1970s Video Editing -

linear but non destructive editing

A system for editing Quad tape "by hand" was developed by the 1960s. It was really just a means of synchronizing the
playback of two machines so that the signal of the new shot could be "punched in" with a reasonable chance at success.
One problem with this and early computer-controlled systems was that the audio track was prone to suffer artifacts (i.e. a
short buzzing sound) because the video of the newly recorded shot would record into the side of the audio track. A
commercial solution known as "Buzz Off" was used to minimize this effect.
For more than a decade, computer-controlled Quad editing systems were the standard post-production tool for television.
Quad tape involved expensive hardware, time-consuming setup, relatively long rollback times for each edit and showed
misalignment as disagreeable "banding" in the video. However, it should be mentioned that Quad tape has a better
bandwidth than any smaller-format analogue tape, and properly handled could produce a picture indistinguishable from
that of a live camera.

Trainspotting
For years the 30 degree rule had remained unbroken, however in the movie trainspotting Danny Boyle decided to break
it, this was done to instil a feeling of spontaneous discomfort in the viewer between all of the awkward looking jump cuts
this is because prior to this we see Spud taking speed so the jump cuts are used to simulate the effects of speed to
some extent, most importantly when it cuts back to the people interviewing him they appear completely normal as a
contrast to Spuds crazy spontaneous state of being

Shot 1: this shows Spud from a

medium close up, starting a
sentence (pre jump cut)

Shot 2: this shows Spud from a

long shot, continuing his
sentence (post Jump cut)

Shot 3: this shows the

interviewers acting calm and
normal as a contrast

CGI/Saving Private Ryan

The world of film was forever changed with the introduction of CGI, things previously thought to be impossible
where now possible and everywhere, there seemed to be no limit to the possibilities, CGI was first used in
movies in 1973's Westworld, though the first use of 3D imagery was in its sequel, Futureworld (1976), which
featured a computer-generated hand and face created by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. There are various
types of CGI such as green screens, motion capture and 3D graphics were employed, the first the example Im
going to be focusing on will be the omaha beach scene from the movie Saving Private Ryan. The scene would
feature a whole army's worth of soldiers using only six people who would perform all the actions and then be
CGI implanted into the scene over and over again

The Bolsheviks
The Tsar was overthrown in 1917 and that left people poor and confused. Majority of Russia was illiterate and
the higher powers decided that the use of cinema would help to boost the morale of the country while
speaking to the people. In fact, they were actually commissioned to Consolidate and Communicate, and this
is one of the earliest examples of using film for mass communication.
Through these circumstances, the worlds first film school was established, with the purpose of creating films in
favour of the Bolshevik party. It was labelled explicitly as using propaganda for the agitation of the public
Russian filmmakers Kuleshov and Pudovkin and the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin were obsessed with D W
Griffiths Intolerance as they saw it as a major film that could help educate the new Soviet Union. The
filmmakers being incredibly poor at the time with no money to produce new content so they reused
and reorganised shots of DW Griffiths extremely long Intolerance to create new narratives, editing,
guiding thoughts and emotions of the audience which later became known as relational editing.

The Kuleshov effect and

Soviet montage
The Kuleshov effect was described as the emotional connection between and audience and what's on screen, the first
example of this was showing the same shot of a man looking at something and changing what he was looking at in order to
instill a different emotional/psychological reaction, for example: the same shot of a man looking at 3 different things, a bowl
of soup, a dead body and attractive young woman and for each of them the audience had a different emotional thought,
when looking at the soup he must be hungry, when looking at this dead body he must be grieving, when looking at the
attractive woman he was called lustful, yet it was the exact same shot every time, this shows that the audience can interpret
things different ways with select visual aids depending on the order in which they see them.

Intellectual montage a way of creating intellectual meaning through the juxtaposition of shots. The use
of "intellectual montage" contributes in creating an intellectual meaning through the juxtaposition of two shots or more
which collide to produce another one which "becomes purely conceptual" . An example of the use of intellectual montage
from Battleship Potemkin where after the battleship bombs Odessa (shots 1&2) Eisenstein cuts to a shot of a statue of a
sleeping lion made of stone (shot 3) then he cuts to a shot of a stone lion that appears to sit or wake up (shot 4), before
finally cutting to a shot of an upright stone lion (shot 5). the five shots give the impression that the lion has arisen from it
s sleep. (Eisenstein, 1925). This is an example of the filmmaker using images to represent a revolutionary movement".

The idea or the concept behind this sequence that Eisenstein builds here is the idea that the
lion is a visual metaphor of the bombarded people and that they are now ready for
revolution.

Pudovkins 5 editing
techniques
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Contrast: contrast editing is meant to show a distinctive difference between two

shots allowing the audience to compare the two scenes in their minds
Parallelism: parallelism shows two things with some relationship or connection
Simultaneity:
Symbolism:
Leitmotif: a recurring theme associated with a specific character

1960s Hitchcock
1960 Hollywoods use of Montage Editing - Psycho Alfred Hitchcock 1960
Clip 1. 1960 Hitchcock
In this seven minute video the master of suspense explains his ideas on editing. He
says he prefers to call the cutting or editing of a film an assembly and he describes
his film as a mosaic.
He describes montage editing as an assembly of lots of little bits of film of various
sizes. He acknowledges
D W Griffith as inventing cutting to condense time (ellipsis editing) but says that, for
him, montage editing goes much deeper than just a films cinematic content.
In this, his most famous scene, Hitchcock uses a montage of 78 short duration shots in
45 seconds
including of the womans naked torso (even though we never see all of her body), her
head, her hand, the killers hand, her eyes, her blood and the iconography includes:
the shower curtain, the shower with water spraying out, the plug hole, shadows on the
shower curtain, a huge carving knife. He also uses a graphic match by positioning a
shot of her eye replaced in the next shot by her eye then one dissolves into the other
to suggest that her life is literally, going down the drain.
Clip 2
The actual shower scene - lasts 3mins 20 seconds.

Jaws
Jaws had one of the first movie trailers seen on
television which used a montage of shots and its
formula has been copied many times over, it was a
promotional technique used to build viewer interest
and excitement while also not giving away too
much of the film, meant to entice rather than
inform. Universal spent $1.8 million promoting
Jaws, including an unprecedented $700,000 on
national television spot advertising. The media blitz
included about two dozen 30-second
advertisements airing each night on prime-time
network TV between June 18, 1975, and the film's
opening two days later.

Training
montage
Training montages have a diverse range of purposes,
beyond extending the runtime of a film, they act as an
active form of elliptical editing, condensing a long period
of time into about 4 minutes. the key point of the training
montage is to show progression, for example let's say at
the beginning of the montage Rocky struggles to run up
some unnecessarily long steps by the end of the
montage he should be able to complete this task with
ease. In addition to the progression and elliptical
elements this montage in particular features parallel
action with Rocky training out in nature and Ivan Drago
training in a high tech facility and using steroids, every
action taken by one of them has a contrasting action
being taken by the other.

Hip Hop music

video
in a similar way to training montages are meant to show, A
music video or song video is a short film integrating a song
and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes.
Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a
marketing device intended to promote the sale of music
recordings. There are also cases where songs are used in
tie in marketing campaigns that allow them to become more
than just a song.

Parody
Montages can lend themselves very well to parody and
comedy in general, parody also known as spoof, send-up,
take-off or lampoon), in use, is a work created to imitate,
make fun of, or comment on an original work, its subject,
author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or
ironic imitation. Parody often takes an aspect of something
and exaggerates it, bringing it into a comedic light, for
example this parody Too many cooks by adult swim is a
parody of sitcom intros, and their overall cheesiness.