This essay will attempt to further my understand of the development and principles of editing. In order to do so we will be looking at multiple aspects of the editing world. These include a brief history of the development of editing, convention & techniques, the purpose of editing etc. This will also provide a basic video tutorial on how to use premier pro CC along with some further exercises to help new users become accustomed to some of the additional features in the program. Note some of this will be covered in the video blog.
History
The hisory of editing is a long and engulfing tale, so in order to decrease the size of this essay I will summarised what I have researched in order to make things easier and far less boring. Though it was the Lumiere brothers who invented cinematography in 1895 it was Edwin S Porter who really introduced the idea of editing. He stated that filming does not have to be just a single image to count as the entire movie. He came up with the idea of cutting to different scenes to establish a different story in multiple locations. He proved the effectivness of his theory in 1901 in his movie "Terrible Teddy, The Grizzly King". It was later in 1908 that a Mr D.W. Griffith realised that you could implament the same cutting technique, but within the same scene. He used this effect in his movie "For Love of Gold", which portrayed the first continuity cut in recorded history. Griffith later discovered that he could use effects such as pace of editing and camera angles to manipulate the emotions of the audience alowing them to feel more involved. he put these effects to the test in his film "The ClansMan" in 1915, which included a number of effects such as still shots, panning shots, iris effects etc. In 1920 Lev Kulshove had developed a mental phenomenom that took into account the audiences perspective. He did this by taking two shots and putting them into a sequence, which would force the audience to look at the cenario in a certain way. I shall provide an example.
The first picture is the face of a man the second picture is a plate of food. By looking at these two images in this sequence you would normally assume that the man is hungry, however if we were to replace the second image (the plate of food) with a woman lying on a bed we could replace the current feeling with lust instead of hunger i.e. the man is hungry for food or he a lustful for the woman. The effect was named after himself and was hence forth known as the Kulshove effect. I believe this covers most of the important history of editing.
Conventions
There are a few conventions in the word of filming. One of the most important conventions would be the "180 Degree Line". This states that there is an imaginary line drawn between two subjects witch the camera is not allowed to cross during a cut. A example of this would be when two people are having a conversation. The camera must remain on one side of the line otherwise the viewer tends to become confused. If the camera man wishes to cross the line he must show the crossing on film instead of simly cutting during the edit.
Video example for further understanding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bba7raSvvRo
The rule of thirds- This is the idea that everything on screen has a specific place. These places are devided into 3 main location. The middle of the screen, the left of the screen and ofcourse the right of the screen. In order to picture this you would have to draw two verticle and horrizontal lines equadistant from the centre and sides of the screen. This then creates grid lines to help visualise the position of everything on screen. This is used to prevent there from being so much empty space in most shots, unless of course this is what the producer wishes to show the audience.
Video example for further understanding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSSOZxLnNyc
The final fundamental convention is the use of transitions. There are a number of transitions that can be used i.e. the cut away, cross cut, dissolve, blur etc. It is very important for editors to know how to use them. Usually everytime a transition is used it is to symbolise something about the scene or situation. Fast pace cut aways will usually signify a high energy action type scenario or a dissolve transition will signify a flash back of some sort. The idea is that every transition has its own properties and effects the audience in a number of ways in terms of their perspective on the matter.
Techniques
This part of the essay will give examples of a few editing techniques that are often seen in many films or tv shows.
Muliple points of view- This is when the editor uses multiple perspectives via camera angles to achieve the desired effect. The effect usually depends on what the scene is trying to portray in terms of emotions. Examples being the back and forth cuting during a conversation i.e. switching between the person talking and person responding.
Cross cutting- This is when the viewer is shown instances of what is happening in different locations at the same time. These different events are usually related in some way and eventually converge at one point. A good example of this would be in the "Batman, the Dark Knight" film when Batman was racing to save Harvey Dent. You had cuts between Batman on his motor bike and Harvey being tied up as well as a number of other events that are happening at the same time. Here is the video to clarify what I mean
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aJMo8sE2Pc
Finally I come back to the transitions. Both of the effects listed above use the cutaways transition, however there are number of other transitions that are used to signify certain events. As mentioned earlier a blur transition would be used to signify a flash back or story telling sequence. Another one would be the slow dissolve, which is usually used to signify that a long period of time has passed since the last scene.
This essay has taught me a number of new techniques and refreshed my understanding of the basics and essentials of what to do when editing. It has also provided me with new ideas allowing me to think outside of "The Box" in a way of speaking.
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