October feedback

You seem to have enjoyed the lessons and are interested in the subject.  You have produced an outline of the history of video editing with some images.

However, the tasks are much more demanding and more effort is needed in completing the assignments.

Deadline of Friday 16^th October to get two assignments completed, neither of which are pass standard as yet.

The principles of video editing can be explained by discussing your own short films.

Development of film editing

Development of editing timeline.

Thomas Edison was the first to invent the light bulb, this gave inspiration on the motion picture camera. Edison was also inspiration for the kinetoscope made in 1888 which is the earliest form of film making device, it was more commonly known as the 'peep-hole viewer' meaning that there was strips of film that you could see frame by frame as they rotated just below the 'peep-hole'. You could only have 24 seconds per frame in film.

In 1895 the Lumiere brothers (light brothers) created a business by making cinematographe cameras, these are motion picture cameras  ' in camera editing' also serving as a projector, this was a good thing to introduce as more than one person could view at one time, from this they made a business as all this was new and more people wanted to have this experience.

1896 brought George Melies, a french man who was an illusionist and filmmaker, he made the iconic early film called 'a trip to the moon' this film gave inspiration, this was because he was the first to use more techniques such as dissolves etc this was also inspirational as it was the first to 'tell a story' this was because it was a scripted piece and was narrative, this meant as an audience you could enjoy the story as well as the editing and film production within the film, such as the edits of the rocket hitting and flying up to the moon.

  

 


 Moving on to Edwin Porter and American who made the 'Great Train Robbery' another iconic early film, this film was an long take meaning that it was not edited and the camera was in one position while filming. this progressed into it being a continuity edit as all the shots would  make sense together this is also known as a 'graphic match'.

 Another film that was made also used may other techniques that were new to most people, the film was called 'Freak's' and it was a film based on the abnormal people you'd find in old traveling circuses and fairs.
Some of the techniques they used were having actors/actresses/sets/costumes, these this were normally not used so they were new and this interested people, making the films more exciting and intriguing for more people, special effects, using scripts and storyboards, filming on location, slapstick, and tracking shots, and to produce colour in the film they'd colour each frame to produce a coloured section.

DW Griffith 1915:

Griffith began to explore the techniques of editing and the skills of camerawork. He also had innovations to create the first narrative film/s, using montage and using actors also.
DW Griffith also used parallel editing also (cross cutting) is the technique of alternating two or more scenes that often happen simultaneously but in different locations. If the scenes are simultaneous, they occasionally culminate in a single place, where the relevant parties confront each other. Griffith originally set all rules for narrative film making and these were copied by others along the line.

An example of parallel editing would be the editing in the film 'The Silence Of The Lambs'.

Sergei Eisenstein:

A pioneer in montage and film directing. in 1925 he directed a short named 'strike' in this film Eisenstein makes many metaphors with the way he has edited, there is a section at the end of the film when cattle are being slaughtered, this is a metaphor for the men being slaughtered in the same ways.
the montage in the film has been made to give the idea of  how choppy the film is in reality, this is to represent also the brutality of the revolution that was happening at the time, in my opinion the way Eisenstein has used the montage in this short is a good way to show how it was in the time setting of the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLuxXd5lFZc

In this film we produced we used the edit of montage to make a short of a girl(me) that was studying really hard for a test but got an F in the final grade. we used montage to have the separate scenes as a whole that made sense when it was edited together as one short.

Walter murch:
 An American film editor who edited in the form of montage which is
Walter also worked on the Godfather and the Godfather part 2. he also minipulated diajectic time and space.
1979 he won an Oscar for the sound mix in 'apocalypse now'.
Apocalypse now:
the starting of the clip we have sound before vision, this is to target the audience and get them questioning the noise they hear, moving on we start to see a helicopter start to fly past a tropical forest lifting a orange haze with it, as we see more of the helicopter we see that it is a war helicopter, in the forest we see we'd know that it would be the war in Vietnam.
The next shot we see the helicopter bombing the forest we see, this shows the horrors of the war and how bad the destruction was from how the forest was so easily destructed.
Murch used a 'dream sequence' or some would describe it as flash back, this meant he'd lay sections of film upon one another creating the illusion of them overlapping and being as one, this meant you as the audience could see the bits of film on top of each other but having the illusion of the dream the protagonist is having.
 We made our own short adjusting diajectic time and space which is how the film was made(city of god) it is a example of how we interpreted the film and creative work of city of god.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiXl_MfU6So 

City of god analysis:
 This film is an edit of MTV style editing, this would mean that continuity editing is present with an array of effects that are set to confuse the viewer.
In this film you can clearly see the break in story line at the end of the clip and how there are two stories within, this is the close frantic shots of the chicken and its point of view being at risk of death and being cooked. Also having the slower paced, wider shots of the young teenage boy at the end when there are the 360 shots of him and the environment around him.

One of the early shots we see are of a knife blade being sharpened and while the shot is focused on we also hear the noise of the sharpening, this is to signify the danger and how close you could be to injury in the poverty stricken favelas of Rio De Janerio.

 We also see many shots of the chicken itself, sometimes seeing other chickens getting cooked so we see the panic on its face, this would mean we see the story partly from the chickens point of view... giving a sense if how the chicken in this situation would feel and how it would be treated and it's actions due to this.

These 4 shots

are to show the chickens point of view in the film, this is impacting as it gives us a narrative to the short and this end shot is edited with continuity editing with another shot that turns to a 360 shot of two peoples point of view.

This 360 shot gives the audience the shots of two people/scenes at on particular time, this shows us that the narrative short itself has two different meanings or stories within the short.

 

we made our own MTV style edit in a short, this was called the chase based on the film 'city of god', this was to edit of montage edits and parallel edits, this all together made sense in the whole short, this one in particular that we made was about a student that hadn't done any of the homework that the teacher had sent so the teacher hunts her down, in the last scene we edited in a 360 shot showing both the teacher and student.

Research log (bibliography)

Secondary source.	Relevance to my project.
Www.cybercollege.com/tup050.htm	On this website I found out from one of the paragraphs that in continuity edits you can use few as 3 shots pieced together to make one narrative, this is by having them all make sense in a story like form so when having them put all together the audience can make sense of the narrative being shown.
Teach yourself media studies.	This book gave me information on the ways that continuity editing works and that the audience can guess a persons actions in a film by the previous scenes as in the edits the scenes in the film would all have to link and make sense in the final product.
Teach yourself font studies.	In this book it had information I used on the editing work of montage, as montage is the art of  juxtaposition in scenes to create symbolic messages.
Www.britannica.com/biography/Lumiere-brothers	This website gave me information on the lumiere brother and how they created what has made the building blocks to making cameras now.
Www.biography.com/people/thomas-edison-9284349	This website gave me information on Edison such as the inventions he created that have influenced all the modern cameras we see around today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._W._Griffith	Gaining more information on the filmmaker DW Griffith.

I skimmed and scanned the three secondary sources to find out more about continuity editing and montage.

I annotated these articles and found out that continuity editing you can use as few as 3 stages to create a story line, this is because they get arranged together as they all make sense in the end revealing a narrative. In montage I learnt that there are scenes that get juxtaposed in order to create symbolic meanings (juxtaposition is comparing opposites for effect)

The purpose of my research is to understand more about the work and editing continuity editing and montage in film producing.