Task 6 - Creating a Montage

In school, we had to film a montage of sorts, and since the weather was being English and bad, we decided to film a montage where three of the group studied before an exam and then getting the results.

Jessica decided to film this time, which is why it's not as steady as it normally is during our other videos.

Task 5: Montage

There are several different meanings for the word "montage" in different regions of the world:
-French film
-Hollywood cinema
-Early Soviet filmmaking

Initially, montages were firstly used in Hollywood movies to compress a large amount of time into a small, quick series of clips to give you an idea of the passage of time and what has changed. Montages are used to shorten, maybe several months of training into just a few minutes of various methods that may have been used during the training or what the main character/s that were training were experiencing during that time.

In French film practice, 'montage' simply means 'assembly' or 'to edit' in French. The term simply identifies the process of editing in French film. It is just the use of frames to create a video sequence, unlike the Hollywood version which shortens down time. This is just the basic French word for editing film clips to create a full film.

In early Soviet filmmaking in the 1920s, 'montage' had a different meaning to French and Hollywood terms. Film makers started juxtaposing shots to create new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone.

Lev Kuleshov did an experiment in 1920 when he was a young Soviet film maker.
He took an old head-shot picture of a noted Russian filmmaker and inter-cut the shot with different images that made the people being experimented on think of a meaning out of nowhere. This proved that people would find or create meaning out of two things put together even when they were not shown the real meaning.

Sergei Eisenstein also made a video which showed two different videos cut together that were used to give the audience an idea of what was happening to the strikers by using a cow butchery.

Hollywood cinema still uses its version of montage to remove large amounts of time such as when there are characters who are training for something, but to keep the audience entertained and interested, filmmakers remove all of the background story during the training time so that it becomes a quick and short but informative as it shows the struggles of that character through quick glimpses of them and their surroundings as they near the end of their training.

Summary:

French montage -  to edit

Hollywood montage - to condense large amount of time

Soviet montage - to reveal a deep/hidden meaning

In my class we were also assigned into groups again (everyone partnered with the same people that they chose for the in-camera editing task) and we had to film our own montage scenes.

My group had filmed a short video of several scenes, but we stuck to our semi-comedic semi-serious videos and filmed out the quick scenes. As a result, there wasn't much to edit as we had cut out a lot of the editing just simply by filming such short clips.

The story of the video was that three characters, all students, had to study for an exam. Each of them were experiencing a different amount of stress, one was completely relaxed and seemed as if he didn't care, the second was slightly tense, but he felt as if he was ready and understood everything and the third (me) was the person who was experiencing the most amount of stress as he didn't pay much attention in classes and didn't understand half the stuff he wrote down.

Then as the exam day came, they all received their exam papers and got on with the exam, again, all showing different emotions during the exam, shown by their body positions.
We then all were given our results and it was kind of a confusing scene for some people because the person who tried the hardest revising got the middle-best grade, the person who revised a lot but didn't understand much of it received a "?" and the person who revised the least got the best mark, to which we all then filmed our responses (since I am the groups camera-man but was acting, Jess, the groups Director was filming and it wasn't the smoothest thing in the world) and the following scene was all of our expressions and emotions when we left school.

Task 4 - From Analogue To Digital

When editing was first invented, it was done using the "Analogue" method. This meant that editing was done by splicing the celluloid roll and sticking it back together.
Traditionally, films were made up of images printed on to acetate negatives which was the celluloid material back then. After splicing and sticking the frames together, the film was made up of roughly 24 frames per second.

The Moviola was invented in 1924 by Iwan Serrurier. It was the first device created that could allow a person to edit the film and view it at the same time and was also the first machine that was used for feature-length motion picture editing.

Video Editing
Before digital technologies became available for editing movie clips easily, magnetic tapes were used to store the information, instead of hard drives. These magnetic tapes are hardly used nowadays, if they even are anymore, due to them not being able to hold a lot of data on them and how easy it is to edit clips stored on hard drives now. The magnetic tapes are called VHS and VHSC tapes. The machine mechanically put clips together to form a sequence and everything had to be done in a linear fashion: meaning that you couldn't add a clip in near the end of the movie then go back to the start to add something else, everything was done from beginning to end in order. This type of editing is called linear editing.

Digital Editing
Digital media is a form of electronic media where is stored in digital form (opposed to analogue, digital is stored as bits, or binary, 1's and 0's which tell the computer what everything is, what everything looks like and how that thing is supposed to work).
Digital editing is the use of computers to manipulate the digital data stored on the hard drive. Compared to previous methods of editing movie clips, digital editing is the best, fastest and most efficient way of editing. Editing in any order, which is what digital editing allows you to do, is called non-linear editing. Programs that allow you to edit videos on a computer include Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Sony Vegas Pro, Final Cut and many many others. 

                                 

Task 2/3 - In-Camera Editing

For this task we did a bit of research on some films that involved the old editing method of "in-camera" editing. This method of editing was accidentally founded by George Melies when he was filming a street and  his camera stopped recording for a second. When he watched over what he had recorded that day he found that the effect was as if people just vanished into thin-air.

For the task we had to film something on our school grounds. We were told it should consist of a minimum of two actors/actresses and we were to think of a story.

After this we collected our camera and tripod and went outside to film our first practice footage. Our group consisted of 4 people: Me, Jess, Jordan and William.

We had an idea that was closely tied-in with George Melies' film of the vanishing lady, except we didn't have any props to use. To substitute for not having anything we came up with the idea that one of the groups actors had magical powers that could make people vanish out of thin-air. We couldn't add any special effects into the film that we made as we were tasked with only editing inside the camera, but we did our best to exaggerate what would have happened with Jordan's powers.

I didn't take any pictures of recordings of our group whilst we were making that film as we were short on time and this was our first film that we possibly ever made, so we had to get used to the camera and how to set up the tripod.

I think that it turned out quite well for our first clip. The things that went well for us was the timing. It was near alright but we could have done better. The acting was very basic and stale but we aren't experienced in that section and we will hopefully improve with time. The recording went well but we noticed that there were several times when the camera had shifted a bit in the recording making it very obvious that we made some changes to our "set". Another error we noticed was that I started to record a bit earlier than I was supposed to as the viewer can clearly hear Jessica's voice in several scenes.

Task 1 - Developments In Editing From 1895 - 1915

Editing went from being non-existent in the first ever film made by the Lumiere Brothers in 1895 to being quite advanced at the time and continuously improving.

There are competing claims to the world's first film between the "Lumiere Brothers" and "Le Prince". A wikipedia page on the world's first films released says that Le Prince created his film in 1888, a movie that lasts only 2.11 seconds and the Lumiere Brothers created their film in 1895.

The first film (titled Sortie d'usine and made in 1895) featured a camera focused on the entrance of the Lumiere Brother's factory and had people exiting the factory. The camera was stationary and the movie featured nothing else.

George Melies created the second film in 1896. He was previously a magician who found potential in film production, so he got himself a camera, made a small scene and created a studio and then filmed "The Vanishing Lady". Since he experimented when making this film, it was one of the most advanced films for quite a while. It featured in-camera editing where the camera is paused at a certain point in the film and something in the scene is changed, added or removed. The problem with this is that it requires great skill and timing to make sure that the actors don't move when the camera is paused and that there is as little a jump between the cut as possible. The celluloid was also painted on to add colour to the movie. This was done to the film "The Great Train Robbery" in the scene where the robbers celebrate after successfully stealing the money from a train.

The next film, made by G.A. Smith in 1898 and titled "The Miller and The Sweep" featured a comedic short where a miller exits his mill and bumps into a chimney sweep. They both get dirty and start to fight, at which point the sweep runs away and the miller follows. A few seconds later a mob from possibly a nearby settlement or workplace start to follow as well. Advancing from the previous films, G.A. Smith introduced a little bit of story with a mix of comedy. The camera is still stationary and there are no scenes, but we see the miller getting closer to the camera and people entering and leaving the frame.

George Melies also made the film "An Impossible Voyage" (1904) which was the first colour film back then as it was all painted. It featured special on-set effects such as smoke and an explosion as the train crashed on the alien planet and some set movements such as the sun and clouds being moved by people behind the set.

The next film, by G.A. Smith in 1899, is titled "The Kiss in The Tunnel" features 3 scenes and a moving camera as well as a story. The film starts with a train nearing the camera and then the camera moves towards a tunnel. As it gets nearer the scene changes to a set which was decorated as the inside of a train carriage. There we see two actors, a man and a woman both reading a newspaper, presumably. Then after some messing around, the man kisses the woman 3 times. At the time, this was a very intense scene and many people were shocked that this happened. Then the movie changes to the third and last scene where the camera is moving out of the tunnel. It is quite obvious now that these are filmed at different locations at different times, but these were very basic editing techniques but people back then probably couldn't tell the differences apart.

Edwin Porter joined the film industry at this stage by creating the film "The Life of An American Fireman" in 1903. The film featured a woman in a burning house on the second floor in her bedroom. She quickly faints from either shock or fear. She was seen waving her arms at her bedroom window, either signalling the firemen outside of her house or trying to break it open somehow. We then see the top of a ladder land on the window sill outside and the window being smashed open by a fireman shortly afterwards. He grabs her and takes her outside where she wakes up and informs him about her child. The fireman rushes back into the building and rescues her child as well. This was filmed from two stages.

Charles Pathe then entered the film industry with his revolutionary film "The Horse That Bolted" or "The Runaway Horse" made in 1907. The film was featured a lot of cross-cutting between the horse running away from the people chasing it and the people chasing the horse (plus the worlds worst mother, constantly tipping her baby pram over).

D.W. Griffith made a revolutionary film soon after called "The Birth of A Nation" (1915). It was the first film that was over 3 hours long that had a storyline and multiple editing techniques. It featured parallel editing, jump-cuts, close-ups and shots of actors outside of the confines of a stage.
One sequence in the film lasted several minutes and consisted of jump-cuts and cross-cutting. It was the first time that such a thing was done and it changed how films were recorded after it.

Welcome Post

My name is David.  At the time of typing this, I am 16.

This is a blog for my progress with coursework for Media BTEC in Sixth Form.

Things that I like that relate to Media include watching films when I have nothing to do, playing games, listening to music and watching Youtube.

I don't have a favourite game, film or song but I have ones that I like more than others.

The games that I enjoy playing most are in RPG, MMORPG, FPS/TPS, RTS, MOBA, Adventure and Action genres. Some games that fall in these genres are games like The Elder Scrolls series, Splinter Cell, GTA, Planetary Annihilation, Smite, FFXIV: A Realm Reborn.

I don't watch films all that often so the genres that I like are Action and Comedy. There are probably more but I don't really know many =T

My most favourite music genre is most definitely "Melodic Dubstep". Mostly because of its soft-ish sounds and energetic beat.