Film editing
Film editing is both a creative and a technical part of the post-production process of filmmaking. The term is derived from the traditional process of working with film which involves the use of digital technology; the film editor works with the raw footage, selecting shots and combines them into sequences which create a finished motion picture. Film editing is described as an art or skill, the only art, unique to cinema, separating filmmaking from other art forms that preceded it, although there are close parallels to the editing process in other art forms such as poetry and novel writing. Film editing is referred to as the "invisible art" because when it is well-practiced, the viewer can become so engaged that he or she is not aware of the editor's work. On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art and practice of assembling shots into a coherent sequence; the job of an editor is not to mechanically put pieces of a film together, cut off film slates or edit dialogue scenes. A film editor must creatively work with the layers of images, dialogue, pacing, as well as the actors' performances to "re-imagine" and rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole.
Editors play a dynamic role in the making of a film. Sometimes, auteurist film directors edit their own films, for example, Akira Kurosawa, Bahram Beyzai and the Coen brothers. With the advent of digital editing, film editors and their assistants have become responsible for many areas of filmmaking that used to be the responsibility of others. For instance, in past years, picture editors dealt only with just that—picture. Sound and visual effects editors dealt with the practicalities of other aspects of the editing process under the direction of the picture editor and director. However, digital systems have put these responsibilities on the picture editor, it is common on lower budget films, for the editor to sometimes cut in temporary music, mock up visual effects and add temporary sound effects or other sound replacements. These temporary elements are replaced with more refined final elements produced by the sound and visual effects teams hired to complete the picture. Early films were short films that were one long and locked-down shot.
Motion in the shot was all, necessary to amuse an audience, so the first films showed activity such as traffic moving on a city street. There was no editing; each film ran as long. The use of film editing to establish continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, is attributed to British film pioneer Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, made in 1898 and one of the first films to feature more than one shot. In the first shot, an elderly couple is outside an art exhibition having lunch and follow other people inside through the door; the second shot shows. Paul's'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' of 1896 was the first camera to feature reverse-cranking, which allowed the same film footage to be exposed several times and thereby to create super-positions and multiple exposures. One of the first films to use this technique, Georges Méliès's The Four Troublesome Heads from 1898, was produced with Paul's camera; the further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued in 1899-1900 at the Brighton School in England, where it was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James Williamson.
In that year, Smith made As Seen Through a Telescope, in which the main shot shows street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man observes this through a telescope. There is a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. More remarkable was James Williamson's Attack on a China Mission Station, made around the same time in 1900; the first shot shows the gate to the mission station from the outside being attacked and broken open by Chinese Boxer rebels there is a cut to the garden of the mission station where a pitched battle ensues. An armed party of British sailors arrived to rescue the missionary's family; the film used the first "reverse angle" cut in film history. James Williamson concentrated on making films taking action from one place shown in one shot to the next shown in another shot in films like Stop Thief! and Fire!, made in 1901, many others.
He experimented with the close-up, made the most extreme one of all in The Big Swallow, when his character approaches the camera and appears to swallow it. These two filmmakers of the Brighton School pioneered the editing of the film. By 1900, their films were extended scenes of up to 5 minutes long. Other filmmakers took up all these ideas including the American Edwin S. Porter, who started making films for the Edison Company in 1901. Porter worked on a number of minor films before making Life of an American Fireman in 1903; the film was the first American film with a plot, featuring action, a closeup of a hand pulling a fire alarm. The film comprised a continuous narrative over seven scenes, rendered in a total of nine shots, he put a dissolve between every shot, just as Georges Méliès was doing, he had the same action repeated across the dissolves. His film, The Great Train Robbery, had a running time of twelve minutes, with twenty separate shots and ten different indoor and outdoor locations.
He used cross-cutting editing method to show simultaneous action in different places. These early film directors discovered impor
Sound effect
A sound effect is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, video games, music, or other media. These are created with foley. In motion picture and television production, a sound effect is a sound recorded and presented to make a specific storytelling or creative point without the use of dialogue or music; the term refers to a process applied to a recording, without referring to the recording itself. In professional motion picture and television production, dialogue and sound effects recordings are treated as separate elements. Dialogue and music recordings are never referred to as sound effects though the processes applied to such as reverberation or flanging effects are called "sound effects"; the term sound effect ranges back to the early days of radio. In its Year Book 1931 the BBC published a major article about "The Use of Sound Effects", it considers sounds effect linked with broadcasting and states: "It would be a great mistake to think of them as anologous to punctuation marks and accents in print.
They should never be inserted into a programme existing. The author of a broadcast play or broadcast construction ought to have used Sound Effects as bricks with which to build, treating them as of equal value with speech and music." It lists six "totally different primary genres of Sound Effect": Realistic, confirmatory effect Realistic, evocative effect Symbolic, evocative effect Conventionalised effect Impressionistic effect Music as an effectAccording to the author, "It is axiomatic that every Sound Effect, to whatever category it belongs, must register in the listener's mind instantaneously. If it fails to do so its presence could not be justified." In the context of motion pictures and television, sound effects refers to an entire hierarchy of sound elements, whose production encompasses many different disciplines, including: Hard sound effects are common sounds that appear on screen, such as door alarms, weapons firing, cars driving by. Background sound effects are sounds that do not explicitly synchronize with the picture, but indicate setting to the audience, such as forest sounds, the buzzing of fluorescent lights, car interiors.
The sound of people talking in the background is considered a "BG," but only if the speaker is unintelligible and the language is unrecognizable. These background noises are called ambience or atmos. Foley sound effects are sounds that synchronize on screen, require the expertise of a foley artist to record properly. Footsteps, the movement of hand props, the rustling of cloth are common foley units. Design sound effects are sounds that do not occur in nature, or are impossible to record in nature; these sounds are used to suggest futuristic technology in a science fiction film, or are used in a musical fashion to create an emotional mood. Each of these sound effect categories is specialized, with sound editors known as specialists in an area of sound effects. Foley is another method of adding sound effects. Foley is more of a technique for creating sound effects than a type of sound effect, but it is used for creating the incidental real world sounds that are specific to what is going on onscreen, such as footsteps.
With this technique the action onscreen is recreated to try to match it as as possible. If done it is hard for audiences to tell what sounds were added and what sounds were recorded. In the early days of film and radio, foley artists would add sounds in realtime or pre-recorded sound effects would be played back from analogue discs in realtime. Today, with effects held in digital format, it is easy to create any required sequence to be played in any desired timeline. In the days of silent film, sound effects were added by the operator of a theater organ or photoplayer, both of which supplied the soundtrack of the film. Theater organ sound effects are electric or electro-pneumatic, activated by a button pressed with the hand or foot. Photoplayer operators activate sound effects either by flipping switches on the machine or pulling "cow-tail" pull-strings, which hang above. Sounds like bells and drums are made mechanically and horns electronically. Due to its smaller size, a photoplayer has less special effects than a theater organ, or less complex ones.
The principles involved with modern video game sound effects are the same as those of motion pictures. A game project requires two jobs to be completed: sounds must be recorded or selected from a library and a sound engine must be programmed so that those sounds can be incorporated into the game's interactive environment. In earlier computers and video game systems, sound effects were produced using sound synthesis. In modern systems, the increases in storage capacity and playback quality has allowed sampled sound to be used; the modern systems frequently utilize positional audio with hardware acceleration, real-time audio post-processing, which can be tied to the 3D graphics development. Based on the internal state of the game, multiple different calculations can be made; this will allow for, for example, realistic sound dampening and doppler effect. The simplicity of game environments reduced the required number of sounds needed, thus only one or two people were directly responsible for the sound recording and design.
As the video game business has grown and computer sound reproductio
Green-light
To green-light is to give permission or a go ahead to move forward with a project. The term is a reference to the green traffic signal, indicating "go ahead". In the context of the film and television industries, to green-light something is to formally approve its production finance and to commit to this financing, thereby allowing the project to move forward from the development phase to pre-production and principal photography; the power to green-light a project is reserved to those in a project or financial management role within an organization. The process of taking a project from pitch to green light formed the basis of a successful reality TV show titled Project Greenlight. At the Big Five major film studios in the United States and the mini-majors, green-light power is exercised by committees of the studios' high-level executives. However, the studio president, chairman, or chief executive is the person who makes the final judgment call. For the largest film budgets involving several hundred million U.
S. dollars, the chief executive officer or chief operating officer of the studio's parent conglomerate may hold final green-light authority
Videography
Videography refers to the process of capturing moving images on electronic media and streaming media. The term includes methods of video post-production, it could be considered the video equivalent of cinematography. The advent of digital video recording in the late 20th century blurred the distinction between videography and cinematography, as in both methods the intermittent mechanism became the same. Nowadays, any video work outside commercial motion picture production could be called videography; the arrival of computers and the Internet in the 1980s created a global environment where videography covered many more fields than just shooting video with a camera, including digital animation, web streaming, video blogging, still slideshows, remote sensing, spatial imaging, medical imaging, security camera imaging, in general the production of most bitmap and vector based assets. As the field progresses, videographers may produce their assets on a computer without involving an imaging device, using software-driven solutions.
Moreover, the concept of sociability and privacy are being reformed by the proliferation of cell-phone, surveillance video, or Action-cameras, which are spreading at an exceptional rate globally. A videographer may be the actual camera operator or they may be the person in charge of the visual design of a production. In social sciences, videography refers to a specific research method of video analysis, that combines ethnography with the recording of sequences of interaction that are analysed in details with methods developed on the basis of conversation analysis. One of the best known application is in workplace studies. Event videography Institute of Videography Underwater videography Video production Wedding videography Knoblauch H, Tuma R Videography: an interpretive approach to video-recorded micro-social interaction. In: Margolis E. Pauwels L; the Sage Handbook of Visual Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 414–430
Soundtrack
A soundtrack written sound track, can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, television program, or video game. In movie industry terminology usage, a sound track is an audio recording created or used in film production or post-production; the dialogue, sound effects, music in a film each has its own separate track, these are mixed together to make what is called the composite track, heard in the film. A dubbing track is later created when films are dubbed into another language; this is known as a M & E track containing all sound elements minus dialogue, supplied by the foreign distributor in the native language of its territory. The contraction soundtrack came into public consciousness with the advent of so-called "soundtrack albums" in the late 1940s. First conceived by movie companies as a promotional gimmick for new films, these commercially available recordings were labeled and advertised as "music from the original motion picture soundtrack", or "music from and inspired by the motion picture."
These phrases were soon shortened to just "original motion picture soundtrack." More such recordings are made from a film's music track, because they consist of the isolated music from a film, not the composite track with dialogue and sound effects. The abbreviation OST is used to describe the musical soundtrack on a recorded medium, such as CD, it stands for Original Soundtrack. Types of soundtrack recordings include: Musical film soundtracks are for the film versions of musical theatre; the soundtrack to the 1937 Walt Disney animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first commercially issued film soundtrack. It was released by RCA Victor Records on multiple 78 RPM discs in January 1938 as Songs from Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and has since seen numerous expansions and reissues; the first live-action musical film to have a commercially issued soundtrack album was MGM’s 1946 film biography of Show Boat composer Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By. The album was issued as a set of four 10-inch 78-rpm records.
Only eight selections from the film were included in this first edition of the album. In order to fit the songs onto the record sides the musical material needed editing and manipulation; this was before tape existed, so the record producer needed to copy segments from the playback discs used on set copy and re-copy them from one disc to another adding transitions and cross-fades until the final master was created. Needless to say, it was several generations removed from the original and the sound quality suffered for it; the playback recordings were purposely recorded "dry". This made these albums boxy. MGM Records called these "original cast albums" in the style of Decca Broadway show cast albums because the material on the discs would not lock to picture, thereby creating the largest distinction between `Original Motion Picture Soundtrack' which, in its strictest sense would contain music that would lock to picture if the home user would play one alongside the other and `Original Cast Soundtrack' which in its strictest sense would refer to studio recordings of film music by the original film cast, but, edited or rearranged for time and content and would not lock to picture.
In reality, soundtrack producers remain ambiguous about this distinction, titles in which the music on the album does lock to picture may be labeled as OCS and music from an album that does not lock to picture may be referred to as OMPS. The phrase "recorded directly from the soundtrack" was used for a while in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to differentiate material that would lock to picture from that which would not, but again, in part because many'film takes' consisted of several different attempts at the song and edited together to form the master, that term as well became nebulous and vague over time when, in cases where the master take used in the film could not be found in its isolated form, the aforementioned alternate masters and alternate vocal and solo performances which could be located were included in their place; as a result of all this nebulo
History of film
Although the start of the history of film is not defined, the commercial, public screening of ten of Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895 can be regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures. There had been earlier cinematographic results and screenings but these lacked either the quality or the momentum that propelled the cinématographe Lumière into a worldwide success. Soon film production companies were established all over the world; the first decade of motion picture saw film moving from a novelty to an established mass entertainment industry. The earliest films were under a minute long and without recorded sound. During the 1890s films started to consist of several shots; the first film studios were built in 1897. The first rotating camera for taking panning shots was built in 1898. Special effects were introduced and film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, began to be used. In the 1900s, continuity of action across successive shots was achieved and the first close-up shot was introduced.
Most films of this period were what came to be called "chase films". The first successful permanent theatre showing only films was "The Nickelodeon" in Pittsburgh in 1905; the first feature length multi-reel film was a 1906 Australian production. By 1910, actors began to receive screen credit for their roles, opening the way for the creation of film stars. Regular newsreels soon became a popular way for finding out the news. From about 1910, American films had the largest share of the market in Australia and in all European countries except France. New film techniques were introduced in this period including the use of artificial lighting, fire effects and low-key lighting for enhanced atmosphere during sinister scenes; as films grew longer, specialist writers were employed to simplify more complex stories derived from novels or plays into a form that could be contained on one reel and be easier to be understood by the audience – an audience, new to this form of storytelling. Genres began to be used as categories.
During the First World War there was a complex transition for the film industry. The exhibition of films changed from short one-reel programs to feature films. Exhibition venues began charging higher prices. By 1914, continuity cinema was the established mode of commercial cinema. One of the advanced continuity techniques involved an accurate and smooth transition from one shot to another. D. W. Griffith had the highest standing among American directors in the industry, because of the dramatic excitement he conveyed to the audience through his films; the American film industry, or "Hollywood", as it was becoming known after its new geographical center in Hollywood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, gained the position it has held, more or less since: film factory for the world and exporting its product to most countries. By the 1920s, the United States reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total. During late 1927, Warner's released The Jazz Singer, with the first synchronized dialogue in a feature film.
By the end of 1929, Hollywood was all-talkie, with several competing sound systems. Sound saved the Hollywood studio system in the face of the Great Depression; the desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas. The onset of American involvement in World War II brought a proliferation of films as both patriotism and propaganda; the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood in the early 1950s. During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was threatened by television and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some film theatres would bankrupt and close; the 1950s was considered a "Golden Age" for non-English cinema. Roundhay Garden Scene is an 1888 short silent film recorded by French inventor Louis Le Prince, it is believed to be the oldest surviving film in existence, as noted by the Guinness Book of Records. The film Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon by French Louis Lumière is considered the "first true motion picture".
Film as an art form has drawn on several earlier traditions in the fields such as storytelling, literature and visual arts. Forms of art and entertainment that had featured moving and/or projected images include: shadowgraphy used since prehistoric times camera obscura, a natural phenomenon, used as an artistic aid since prehistoric times shadow puppetry originated around 200 BCE in Central Asia, Indonesia or China magic lantern, developed in the 1650s, preceded by some incidental and/or inferior projectors stroboscopic "persistence of vision" animation devices Some ancient sightings of gods and spirits may have been conjured up by means of mirrors, camera obscura or unknown projectors. By the 16th century necromantic ceremonies and the conjuring of ghostly apparitions by charlatan "magicians" and "witches" seemed commonplace; the first magic lantern shows seem to have continued this tradition with images of death and other scary figures. Around 1790 this was developed into multi-media ghost shows known as phantasmagoria that could feature mechanical slides, rear projection, mobile projectors, dissolves, l
Filmmaking
Filmmaking is the process of making a film in the sense of films intended for extensive theatrical exhibition. Filmmaking involves a number of discrete stages including an initial story, idea, or commission, through screenwriting, shooting, sound recording and reproduction and screening the finished product before an audience that may result in a film release and exhibition. Filmmaking takes place in many places around the world in a range of economic and political contexts, using a variety of technologies and cinematic techniques, it involves a large number of people, can take from a few months to several years to complete. Film production consists of five major stages: Development: The first stage in which the ideas for the film are created, rights to books/plays are bought etc. and the screenplay is written. Financing for the project has to be obtained. Pre-production: Arrangements and preparations are made for the shoot, such as hiring cast and film crew, selecting locations and constructing sets.
Production: The raw footage and other elements for the film are recorded during the film shoot. Post-production: The images and visual effects of the recorded film are edited and combined into a finished product. Distribution: The completed film is distributed and screened in cinemas and/or released to home video. In this stage, the project producer selects a story, which may come from a book, another film, true story, video game, comic book, graphic novel, or an original idea, etc. After identifying a theme or underlying message, the producer works with writers to prepare a synopsis. Next they produce a step outline, which breaks the story down into one-paragraph scenes that concentrate on dramatic structure, they prepare a treatment, a 25-to-30-page description of the story, its mood, characters. This has little dialogue and stage direction, but contains drawings that help visualize key points. Another way is to produce a scriptment. Next, a screenwriter writes a screenplay over a period of several months.
The screenwriter may rewrite it several times to improve dramatization, structure, characters and overall style. However, producers skip the previous steps and develop submitted screenplays which investors and other interested parties assess through a process called script coverage. A film distributor may be contacted at an early stage to assess the market and potential financial success of the film. Hollywood distributors adopt a hard-headed no approach and consider factors such as the film genre, the target audience and assumed audience, the historical success of similar films, the actors who might appear in the film, potential directors. All these factors imply a certain appeal of the film to a possible audience. Not all films make a profit from the theatrical release alone, so film companies take DVD sales and worldwide distribution rights into account; the producer and screenwriter prepare a film pitch, or treatment, present it to potential financiers. They will pitch the film to actors and directors in order to "attach" them to the project.
Many projects fail to enter so-called development hell. If a pitch succeeds, a film receives a "green light", meaning someone offers financial backing: a major film studio, film council, or independent investor; the parties involved negotiate a sign contracts. Once all parties have met and the deal has been set, the film may proceed into the pre-production period. By this stage, the film should have a defined marketing strategy and target audience. Development of animated films differs in that it is the director who develops and pitches a story to an executive producer on the basis of rough storyboards, it is rare for a full-length screenplay to exist at that point in time. If the film is green-lighted for further development and pre-production a screenwriter is brought in to prepare the screenplay. Analogous to most any business venture, financing of a film project deals with the study of filmmaking as the management and procurement of investments, it includes the dynamics of assets that are required to fund the filmmaking and liabilities incurred during the filmmaking over the time period from early development through the management of profits and losses after distribution under conditions of different degrees of uncertainty and risk.
The practical aspects of filmmaking finance can be defined as the science of the money management of all phases involved in filmmaking. Film finance aims to price assets based on their risk level and their expected rate of return based upon anticipated profits and protection against losses. In pre-production, every step of creating the film is designed and planned; the production company is created and a production office established. The film is pre-visualized by the director, may be storyboarded with the help of illustrators and concept artists. A production budget is drawn up to plan expenditures for the film. For major productions, insurance is procured to protect against accidents; the nature of the film, the budget, determine the size and type of crew used during filmmaking. Many Hollywood blockbusters employ a cast and crew of hundreds, while a low-budget, independent film may be made by a skeleton crew of eight or nine; these are typical crew positions: Storyboard artist: creates visual images to help the director and production designer communicate their ideas to the production team.
Director: is primarily
