The development and principles of film and video editing

Timeline of Film

1888
Thomas Edison invented a camera that worked smilar to how we view stop motion animation. We see a moving video, but all we are really seeing is hundreds of images moving so fast that we see motion. Thomas Edison's device also projected images. It was called the Kinetoscope. He was the first to patent this technology.

The Kinetograph

The Kinetoscope projected a moving picture through a viewing windows. It worked by shining light on frames on a spinning wheel. The light would pass through the holes of these frames and create an image.

1895

The Lumiere Brothers thought they could sell film technology to a new generation. Their camera was called the Cinématographe and often took long takes with no edits, since the cameras were so big and bulky and hard to carry. It also projected images. 

1903

Georges Melies creates the film A Trip to the Moon. George Melies has changed film forever in the ways he pushed boundaries, and created the origins of editing. He played with diagetic time and space and used it to tell a story. George was both a magician and worked in theatre to achieve the effects he used in his films.

It was in this year also than Edwin Porter created the film The Great Train Robbery. It used cross cutting, and was one of the first films to incorporate continuity editing.

1915

DW Griffith created the film Birth of a Nation. It was such an influential film, because it was filled with USA propaganda. It contained scenes involving the KKK and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

1925

Eisenstein created the first montage cut, a collection of action sequences cross cut together to emphasis an event happening  Eisenstein created the film Strike, a film about the Russian civil war. Like DW Griffith, this film is very propaganda based. Eisenstein also created the Odessa Steps scene, a montage of people running down the stairs, cross cut with a pram rolling down stairs slowly. Without the montage cutting, the scene is not interesting, but together they become much more.

Sergei Eisenstein

Lev Kuleshov was a filmmaker that proved editing can drastically change a film. He used what we now describe as the Kuleshov Effect. He used an emotionless shot of his face and placed it next to shots of various objects. People would then attribute them to each other. The emotionless face of Kuleshov was next to a shot of a plate of food, making him look hungry. Kuleshov was also next to a shot of a dead woman, which makes him look mournful. While the shot of Kuleshov had stayed the same, the shot he was next to had changed, which changed the overall meaning of the film. The Kuleshov Effect is the effect of deriving more meaning from two shots interacting than one shot on its own. Kuleshov made movies from 1910 to the 1920's