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Editing and Montage Film

Decent Essays

“Once I understood that editing is crucial to how a film is made, I was hooked. Imagine: placed in your hands is fantastic raw footage that 250 people have created during shooting. You and the director are then allowed to sculpt this raw material into something that has structure, rhythm and pace, that builds characters, that creates dramatic peaks and lows and that hopefully has a good ending. Editing is an incredibly rewarding profession.
Film editing is described, when typed in to google as “the activity of selecting the scenes to be shown and putting them together to create a film” `but it is much more than just that. If done well it is invisible but also has the ability to control a film, even control the viewer watching the film. The process of editing film has been around nearly as long as film itself. After the cinema of attractions, people realised a narrative story could be constructed by splicing ends of celluloid together to tell a story. The most famous early example of this is The Great Train Robbery (1903) directed by Edwin S. Porter. Before Porters film the cinema of attractions consisted of single shot films of streets and crowded areas, projected later that day so that the people could see themselves on the big screen.
As the 1900’s marched on so did editing and montage. The Great Train Robbery had established that it was possible to create a narrative by cutting film. The next decade would build on that and establish rules which apply to films today. One

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