From Black and White to Green Screen Magic

The Editing Journey

First you see him as a small boy and then in the blink of an eye he’s jumping buildings in New York. How does this happen?

Fast and Furious 7 began filming in 2014, that’s about 6 months of filming, over 5 hours’ worth of footage put into what – 137 minutes only!

What is editing?

This dear friend is the art of editing. The correcting, cutting and condensing of footage. But mind you it wasn’t always that smooth. When filming first started, it was a one process shot with no editing and no story! However, with the uprising of camera’s such as the ‘Cinematographie’ by the Lumiere Brothers in the 1890s, people realized that you can probably cut while filming and use more than one shot. Imagine their shock!

How was it before?

For some time, editing was performed through in-editing which meant cuts would only take place when a change of scene or action was needed. This simplicity went on until pioneers such as Robert W. Paul who invented the ‘Cinematograph camera no. 1’ which was the first camera to incorporate multiple exposures. And so, while this is regarded a milestone for editing, it is important to recognize that the understanding that more than one shot could be used also led to the development of other filming techniques such as close-ups. As noticed in many older films of 1902 and above, films were pretty stable from the same distance and usually on the actors and not the camera moved. So up until 1910, editing was mostly in-camera editing with few effects such as cross-cutting which was introduced by Georges Méliès. Most films created before this time did not contain much of a storyline as just the idea of moving images baffled the minds of many. Yet as film pioneers became more adventurous, different shots were now experimented on and transitions such as those dissolves found in Méliès 1903 film, ‘The Great Train Robbery’.

And then....

But, in appreciation of this period, it is from in-camera editing that prompted the invention of actual post-filming editing techniques that resonate to this day. The first post-editing technique that was used was the scissors method. And yes, as simple as it sounds, cutting of scenes was actually manually done by the editor cutting down and gluing back film on places where they wanted it to stop. This influenced a lot of work making it longer yet much more sufficient for the director and editor to get exactly what scenes they wanted. It also played a huge role on films as now they could begin to create storyboards and think more on the content of what they wanted to illustrate. Devices such as the Moviola created in Iwan Serrurier in 1924 were classic editing instruments that allowed the editor to view the film while editing and therefore making the cuts cleaner and more precise. Also referred to as ‘negative cutting’, this basic method was improved over the course of the 20^th century as further technological developments such as the invention of computers and software’s provided an opportunity for editors to now actually edit film digitally.

How is it now?

However, as technology develops from analogue to digital, editing has also massively changed making it much easier and more accessible to everyone. Whether it’s on your phone or on an editing software such as IMovie, almost all media is now edited or filtered before produced. With new inventions such as green screen to post-editing effects such as changing saturation or speed, film which is recorded for over a period of months is now manipulated to take movies to a new level. Furthermore, continuity editing ensures that the discontinuity of the editing process is smoothened into a much more logical and coherent storyline. In fact, currently with 4D, we can even visualize and feel the action in movies! How mind boggling!!!

Below is a YouTube video that edits century's worth of knowledge of the development of editing into a few minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uahjH2cspk 

 

 

Thanks for reading, hope this helps!!!