History of Editing

Editing as we know it today started off in the 1900s and mostly just consisted of cutting rolls
of film and rearranging them on their scope in front of a kinetograph. This was referred to as
cutting and sticking and it was the first type of editing to be widely used in the film industry.

The Great Train Robbery in 1903 was the first film to really push the boundaries of editing
for the industry, the director (Edwin Porter) used a film splicer to create cuts and crosscuts
which people had never seen before including the first montage. The montage then became
the signature editing technique of D. W. Griffith, popularising the montage and causing it to
become as prominent as it is today. In fact, D. W. Griffith took several editing techniques and
though about how he could use them emotionally and with thematic significance which
influenced the art of editing worldwide.

From this point onwards, filmmakers would experiment with longer and more complex
stories which led to the creation of several new genres, however the next milestone in film
would not come around until the Kuleshov Effect. This effect is named after Lev Kuleshov,
who used it in the early 20th century. He was interested with how film editing could influence
the emotional state of an audience. This is the effect of two shots being sequenced together
to add meaning to the scene. The understanding of this new effect allowed people to test
and try new narrative techniques by using the emotions of the viewers and has tied human
psychology into the film editing process.

Then in 1927, the first film to have fully synchronized dialogue came out, The Jazz Singer.
Another big breakthrough in editing had emerged and now the film industry would have its
sights set on the intricacies of sound design. Before this film there were attempts to
experiment with sound in film, but it mostly consisted of screening a film accompanied by a
live orchestra and whilst there had been elements of synchronised sound in select parts of
films beforehand, The Jazz Singer was the first feature film that was released entirely with
synchronized sound.

Things would advance slowly until 1956 where the Ampex VTR became available as the first
videotape recorder to the public. This replaced film stock and made recording footage,
cheaper and easier but, its ability to record and play back audio and video made editing
much easier as the film could now be backed up. This allowed editors to start getting
extremely experimental as they no longer had to worry about potentially messing up the
film and rendering it unusable. The Ampex VTR was not the end however as it laid the
groundwork for CMX systems in the 1970s. Now editors could freely edit copies of the
original footage in a non-linear way, allowing them to locate specific frames in seconds to go
change something, opening the way to even more flexibility with editing as it didn’t modify
the original footage.

Finally came all digital video editing in the late 80s with Adobe Premiere being the most
notable, still existing to this day, and the origin of modern video editing how we know it
today
So, what kind of editing techniques do we use today? Well, the cuts and montages of the
past still exist now. In fact, most of the techniques we use today are just continued from the
brilliant filmmakers of the past.

We still utilise the basic cut to transition from one shot to another, which is normally just
used for continuity editing, however we can utilise cuts in different ways as well to create
certain effects. Cross cutting is the act of cutting between two separate scenes back and
forth in order to showcase two series of events happening at the same time, creating the
sense that these events are happening at the same point in time within the story; we can
utilise a jump cut to suddenly cut away to something else which can be used to create
effects such as confusion or fear; we have L cuts where the audio continues as the visuals cut
to something separate; J cuts where the audio appears before the visual aspect cuts in; fades
and dissolves which can be used to slowly transition into a new scene from a previous one,
invoking the sense that time has passed; montages from all the way back in the early 1900s
are still used today to showcase a storyline over a large passage of time within just a few
minutes condensing important information into a more digestible timeframe or emotions
that would normally take years of building up towards with a small span of minutes.

Editing techniques are nothing more than cutting clips together in slightly different ways, but
these slightly different ways are one of the most crucial tools you can use for conveying a
message or emotion within your film.

We can see this extremely predominantly these days with the multitude of specific film
genres we have that always follow a similar formula and want to produce a specific set of
feelings from you. Take the western genre for example, this genre is all about creating
enjoyable films following mysterious and dangerous outlaws getting into trouble and having
western shootouts. It’s a simple but enjoyable genre and one of the key things you need for
an enjoyable western shootout is tension. The three-way standoff from “The Good, the Bad
and the Ugly utilises editing techniques to create this tension via a montage, one of the
oldest techniques developed. By using a series of cuts between the three characters staring
each other down and shots of their hands by their guns it channels the tension of the three
men about risking their lives on to the viewer, the viewer isn’t sure on who will be the first
to draw their weapon and neither are the characters. You can see this with any film genre
you watch, such as horror utilising jump cuts to create sudden scares, they will all have a
specific editing technique that they utilise in order to achieve their desired reaction.

In conclusion in a relatively short time span editing made a significant leap in significance,
going from something that people merely used to put two shots together into an important
emotional and storytelling tool for filmmakers, every technique we use in modern editing
was the result of somebody making a revolution in the past whether technologically or
creatively.