The History and developments of Post Production

For many filmmakers the real art of making films is not in the photography but in the splicing together of film clips, in the editing.

Before Editing

Like almost every basic idea about movies, the idea of editing has its precursors. Flashbacks had existed in novels; scene changes were already part of live theater; even narrated sequences had been a part of visual culture from medieval altar triptychs to late nineteenth-century comic strips.

But the very earliest filmmakers were afraid to edit film shots together because they assumed that splicing together different shots of different things from different positions would simply confuse audiences.

"Primitive" Editing

However, filmmakers quickly discovered that editing shots into a sequence not only contributed to the audience's sense of tale, but also enabled them to tell more complex stories as a result. Primitive instances of editing in films like Rescued by Rover (Great Britain, 1904) and The Great Train Robbery (1903).

Early on the cuts were made in the camera, so that the cameraman would simply stop cranking at the exact end of a shot, and begin cranking again when it was moved somewhere else, or when something else was put in front of it. This kind of editing could allow for some early special effects. In movies he is making at the turn of the century, Georges Méliès stops the camera after detonating a magic puff of smoke in front of his actor, then begins the camera again after the actor has left the stage, making it seem as if the actor has magically vanished.

Griffith and Beyond

He did not invent any of the editing techniques he used, he made them emotionally and thematically significant. So much so that he influenced the art of editing worldwide. The Moscow Film School of the 1920s, for example, played his Intolerance (1916) over and over again in order to use Griffith's techniques for the films of its students. One of the most notable of the Soviet directors of this era was Sergei Eisenstein, who transformed the principles of classical editing into something more consciously intellectualized he called montage.

Though the idea of putting together shots to forward theme as well as action—one way of seeing montage—had occurred to other filmmakers before Griffith and the early Soviets, Griffith made it a regular practice and the Russian filmmakers theorized its meaning.

The first rigorous use of the term is by Soviet filmmakers like V.I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, who saw montage principally as a useful propaganda film tool. Montage was a way to put together a number of shots, more or less quickly, in a manner that pointed out a moral or an idea. In Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), a shot of a faceless, crowded group of men emerging from a subway on their way to work is followed by a shot of a herd of sheep being led to slaughter. There is one black ram in the middle of the herd. We immediately cut back to Charlie emerging in the midst of the crowd: the one black sheep in the fold.

In Editing, Sometimes Less Is More

Some filmmakers chose to minimize editing, seeing it as the "death of 1,000 cuts" for realism. For example, though some documentarists saw editing as a way to make their anthropological visions appear more interesting, others saw minimal intrusion as the more authentic way to go. Other documentary styles emerged in which editorial intervention was minimal, if never entirely absent.

Edwin S. Porter

Edwin S.Porter is generally thought to be the American filmmaker who first put film editing to use. Porter worked as an electrician before joining the film laboratory of Thomas Alva Edison in the late 1890s. Early films by Thomas Edison (whose company invented a motion camera and projector) and others were short films that were one long, static, locked-down shot. Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, so the first films simply showed activity such as traffic moving on a city street. There was no story and no editing. Each film ran as long as there was film in the camera. When Edison's motion picture studio wanted to increase the length of the short films, Edison came to Porter. Porter made the breakthrough film Life of an American Fireman in 1903. The film was among the first that had a plot, action, and even a close-up of a hand pulling a fire alarm.

Other films were to follow. Porter's ground-breaking film, The Great Train Robbery is still shown in film schools today as an example of early editing form. It was produced in 1903 and was one of the first examples of dynamic, action editing (the piecing together scenes shot at different times and places and for emotional impact unavailable in a static long shot). Being one of the first film hyphenates (film director, editor and engineer) Porter also invented and utilized some of the very first (albeit primitive) special effects such as double exposures, miniatures and split-screens.

Porter discovered important aspects of motion picture language: that the screen image does not need to show a complete person from head to toe and that splicing together two shots creates in the viewer's mind a contextual relationship. These were the key discoveries that made all non-live or non live-on-videotape narrative motion pictures and television possible—that shots (in this case whole scenes since each shot is a complete scene) can be photographed at widely different locations over a period of time (hours, days or even months) and combined into a narrative whole. That is, The Great Train Robbery contains scenes shot on sets of a telegraph station, a railroad car interior, and a dance hall, with outdoor scenes at a railroad water tower, on the train itself, at a point along the track, and in the woods. But when the robbers leave the telegraph station interior (set) and emerge at the water tower, the audience believes they went immediately from one to the other. Or that when they climb on the train in one shot and enter the baggage car (a set) in the next, the audience believes they are on the same train.

Sometime around 1918, Russian director Lev Kuleshov did an experiment that proves this point. (See Kuleshov Experiment) He took an old film clip of a head shot of a noted Russian actor and intercut the shot with a shot of a bowl of soup, then with a child playing with a teddy bear, then with a shot an elderly woman in a casket. When he showed the film to people they praised the actor's acting—the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the child, and the grief when looking at the dead woman. Of course, the shot of the actor was years before the other shots and he never "saw" any of the items. The simple act of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship.

Reference

I did the research on history of post production from the written sources from the internet and highlight the main points to answer the question.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_editing

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/movies-flicks-film/fade-brief-history-editing.html#axzz12N4sGPxD

Transition Types

Film transition

A film transition is a technique by which scenes or shots are juxtaposed. Most commonly this is through a normal cut to the next scene. Most films will also include selective use of other transitions, usually to convey a tone or mood, suggest the passage of time, or separate parts of the story. These other transitions may include dissolves, L cuts, fades (usually to black), match cuts, and wipes.

Dissolve (filmmaking)

In film editing, a dissolve is a gradual transition from one image to another. In film, this effect is created by controlled double exposure from frame to frame; transitioning from the end of one clip to the beginning of another.

In video editing or live video production, the same effect is created by interpolating voltages of the video signal.

In non-linear video editing, a dissolve is done in software, by interpolating gradually between the RGB values of each pixel of the image. The audio track optionally cross-fades between the clips. A dissolve effectively overlaps two clips for the duration of the effect. The lengths of the two scenes can be adjusted by trimming, which, if desired, can change the original durations of the scenes before the dissolve was added.

The cut and the dissolve are used differently. A camera cut changes the perspective from which a scene is portrayed. It is as if the viewer suddenly and instantly moved to a different place, and could see the scene from another angle. Obvious hard cuts may startle the viewer. For that reason, a dissolve is often used in continuity editing to "soften up" jump cuts or similar cuts.

L cut

An L cut, also known as a split edit, is an edit transition from one shot to another in film or video, where the picture and sound are synchronised but the transitions in each are not coincident^. This is often done to enhance the aesthetics or flow of the film as L cuts allow the audience to see context (either before or after) of speaking rather than simply the speaking itself. Without L cuts, a conversation between two people can feel like a tennis match.

L cuts are also used to hide transitions between scenes. They can be very effective in editing dialog scenes shot with a single camera using multiple takes. The ability to cut the picture/video separately from the sound/audio allows the sound from the various takes to flow smoothly, even though the picture cuts are at different places. In longer shots, this allows the editor to use the picture from one take with the sound from another take if the dialog reading is better.

The name of the cut refers to the shape of the cut pieces of the film- the audio track is cut somewhat after (or before) the last frame of video, resulting in roughly L-shaped film ends, as the video and audio parts of film are in tracks, one below, one above, on the film itself.

Example

A prominent example of an L cut occurs in the film The Silence of the Lambs when Clarice is leaving her first interview with Dr. Lecter. She has just been humiliated and remembers her father arriving home from work one day when she was a child; after he picks her up and spins her around, the camera pans over to a passing truck and tilts up to the sky. Then we hear Clarice's sobs and cut back to her outside the mental institution, leaning on her car and crying.

Match cut

A match cut is any cut that emphasizes spatio-temporal continuity. It is a cut in film editing from one scene to another in which the two camera shots' compositional elements match, helping to establish a strong continuity of action – and linking two ideas with a metaphor.

Wider context

Match cuts form the basis for continuity editing, such as the ubiquitous use of match on action. Continuity editing smoothes over the inherent discontinuity of shot changes to establish a logical coherence between shots. Even within continuity editing, though, the match cut is a contrast both with cross-cutting between actions in two different locations that are occurring simultaneously, and with parallel editing, which draws parallels or contrasts between two different time-space locations.

A graphic match (as opposed to a graphic contrast or collision) occurs when the shapes, colors and/or overall movement of two shots match in composition, either within a scene or, especially, across a transition between two scenes. Indeed, rather than the seamless cuts of continuity editing within a scene, the term "graphic match" usually denotes a more conspicuous transition between (or comparison of) two shots via pictorial elements. A match cut often involves a graphic match, a smooth transition between scenes and an element of metaphorical (or at least meaningful) comparison between elements in both shots.

A match cut contrasts with the conspicuous and abrupt discontinuity of a jump cut.

Notable examples

A famous match-cut

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a famous example of a match cut. After an ape discovers the use of bones as a tool and a weapon, there is a match cut to a spacecraft or satellite in orbit. The match cut helps draw a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively.

Another match cut comes from Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) where an edit cuts together Lawrence blowing out a lit match with the desert sun rising from the horizon. Director David Lean credits inspiration for the edit to the experimental French New Wave. The edit was later praised by Steven Spielberg as inspiration for his own work^.

A match cut occurs at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. As Cary Grant pulls Eva Marie Saint up from Mount Rushmore, the cut then goes to him pulling her up to his bunk on the train. The match cut here skips over the courting, the marriage proposal, and the actual marriage of the two characters who had for much of the film been adversaries. Another Hitchcock film to employ the use of a match cut is Psycho. Right after Marion Crane is murdered in the infamous "shower scene", the camera shows blood flowing down the drain of the tub, then cuts to a shot of Marion's eye^.

German director Fritz Lang provided early uses of match cuts in his silent and first sound films. In Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, he shows a circular casino from above and cuts to a circle of hands at a seance happening the same night involving Mabuse and others. This not only smoothly transitions into the simultaneous scene, but also links the two activities as "decadent" pastimes of the rich in pursuit of excitement and fashionability. Lang reused the technique in M while cross cutting between the meetings of Schränker's criminal union and Inspector Karl Lohmann's homicide investigation squad. Schränker and Lohmann are matched both in movement and in dialogue (which is carried over the cut to form a coherent phrase) to illustrate their unlikely connection in a shared goal, to capture a serial child killer.

Jump cut

A jump cut is a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly. This type of edit causes the subject of the shots to appear to "jump" position in a discontinuous way. For this reason, jump cuts are considered a violation of classical continuity editing, which aims to give the appearance of continuous time and space in the story-world by de-emphasizing editing. Jump cuts, in contrast, draw attention to the constructed nature of the film.^[1] Although the term is sometimes used in a loose way, a cut between two different subjects is not a true jump cut, no matter how jarring.

Continuity editing uses a guideline called "the 30 degree rule" to avoid jump cuts. The 30 degree rule advises that for consecutive shots to appear "seamless," the camera position must vary at least 30 degrees from its previous position. Some schools would call for a change in framing as well (e.g., from a medium shot to a close up). Generally, if the camera position changes less than 30 degrees, the difference between the two shots will not be substantial enough, and the viewer will experience the edit as a jump in the position of the subject that is jarring, and draws attention to itself. Although jump cuts can be created through the editing together of two shots filmed non-continuously (Spatial Jump Cuts), they can also be created by removing a middle section of one continuously-filmed shot (Temporal Jump Cuts).

This cut from shot one to shot two makes the subject appear to "jump" in an abrupt way.

George Méliès is known as the father of the jump cut as a result of having discovered it accidentally, and then using it to simulate magical tricks; however, he tried to make the cut appear seamless to complement his illusions. Contemporary use of the jump cut stems from its appearance in the work of Jean-Luc Godard (at the suggestion of Jean-Pierre Melville) and other filmmakers of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. In Godard's ground-breaking Breathless (1960), for example, he cut together shots of Jean Seberg riding in a convertible (see right) in such a way that the discontinuity between shots is emphasized and its jarring effect deliberate. In the screen shots to the right, the first image comes from the very end of one shot and the second is the very beginning of the next shot — thus emphasizing the gap in action between the two (when Seberg picked up the mirror). Recently the jump cut has been used in films like Snatch, from Guy Ritchie, and Run Lola Run, from Tom Tykwer. It is frequently used in TV editing, in documentaries produced by Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel (NatGeo), for example.

The jump cut has sometimes served a political use in film. It has been used as an alienating Brechtian technique (the Verfremdungseffekt) that makes the audience aware of the unreality of the film experience, in order to focus the audience's attention on the political message of a film rather than the drama or emotion of the narrative — as may be observed in some segments of Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.

In informal contexts the term jump cut is sometimes used to describe any abrupt and noticeable edit cut in a film. However, technically this is an incorrect usage of the term. A famous example of this is found at the end of the "Dawn of Man" sequence in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A primitive ape discovers the use of bones as a weapon and throws the bone into the air. When the bone reaches its highest point, the shot cuts to that of a similarly-shaped space station in orbit above the earth. This edit has been described as a jump cut, including on the box of the DVD release of the film, but it is more correctly a graphic match because the viewer is meant to see the similarity between the bone and the space craft and not the discontinuity between the two shots.

The jump cut was an uncommon technique for television until shows like Homicide: Life on the Street popularized it on the small screen in the 1990s. It was also famously used in a campaign commercial for US President Ronald Reagan's successful 1984 reelection bid.

Fade (filmmaking)

Fade, as it relates to film, is the process of causing a picture to gradually darken and disappear, or reverse. Often known as a "fade out" or a "fade in".

Wipe

In film editing, a wipe is a gradual spatial transition from one image to another. One image is replaced by another with a distinct edge that forms a shape. A simple edge, an expanding circle, or the turning of a page are all examples.

It is often acknowledged that using a wipe, rather than a simple cut or dissolve is a stylistic choice that inherently makes the audience more "aware" of the film as a film, rather than a story. For example, George Lucas is famous for the sweeping use of wipes in his Star Wars films, which help evoke a kinship to old pulp science fiction novels and serials; he was inspired by a similar use of wipes by Akira Kurosawa (as can be seen in The Hidden Fortress).

The very earliest examples of a wipe are seen as long ago as 1903 in films like Mary Jane's Mishap by George Albert Smith.

Wipes also can be used as syntactic tools, but are often frowned on. Some examples are:

An iris wipe is a wipe that takes the shape of a growing or shrinking circle. It has been frequently used in animated short subjects, such as those in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon series, to signify the end of a story. When used in this manner, the iris wipe may be centered around a certain focal point and may be used as a device for a "parting shot" joke, a fourth wall-breaching wink by a character, or other purposes.

A star wipe is a wipe that takes the shape of a growing or shrinking star, and is used to impart a sense of "extra specialness" or "added value." An example of the "star wipe" can be seen in the Guiding Light opening sequences of the 1980s. This convention was considered overused during that time period and is now generally thought to be somewhat out-of-date. The use was parodied in Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.

A heart wipe is a wipe that takes the shape of a growing or shrinking heart, and is used to impart a sense of "love" or "friendship." The heart wipe is still used in wedding, graduation, and bar mitzvah videos, among others, as it has now passed from stylistic into the realm of standard convention, though many people consider it tacky.

A matrix wipe is a patterned transition between two images. The matrix wipe can be various patterns such as a grid, stars, etc.

A clock wipe is a wipe that sweeps a radius around the center point of the frame to reveal the subsequent shot, like the sweeping hands of an analog clock. Because of this similarity, it is often used to indicate that time has passed between the previous shot and the next shot.

The most common uses of the wipe effect is the "Invisible Wipe" where a camera follows a person into another room by tracking parallel to the actor. As the wall passes in front of the camera, the editor has the option of using a wipe to be able to choose any other matching take of the same scene. It is also commonly used in quick camera pans in action sequences, to make a cut invisible. Such wipes can be impossible to see in the finished film. A good example of this wipe can be seen in the movie Das Boot when director Wolfgang Petersen uses it to pan between two occupied u-boat pens, even though they had only one u-boat for filming.

Some extremely effective (and expensive) wipes were used in the otherwise very low-budget Laurel and Hardy short film Thicker than Water. For each of the scene changes in this film, either Laurel or Hardy or both of them would seize a curtain or some other object at the edge of the frame and move it across the screen. The opening frames of the next scene were optically printed onto this object, so that—when the object entirely filled the screen—the movie had "wiped" the last shot of the previous scene and begun the first shot of the next.

Reference

I did the research on transitions types from the written sources from the internet and highlight the main points to answer the question.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_transition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolve_(film)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_cut

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fade_(filmmaking)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_cut

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipe_(transition)

Editing styles and conventions

Especially for Hollywood, editing is all about conveying as much information about the plot, characters, and mood as an audience can stand. Variouscutting techniques were initially created in orderto get an audience efficiently from one chunk ofinformation to another in a way that looks likecause and effect. Some of the most-often usedmethods for creating order through editing are determined by the content of where you begin and where you end. They include (but are not limited to) the following:

Short Cuts

One editor describes her best editing moment in terms of "creative geography": "In Aces High I made battle scenes out of nothing. I made them out of footage from The Blue Max, Darling Lili, stock material, our own full-size flying planes, 20-foot miniatures that were electronically controlled, little baby miniatures that were flown, and real live people on the ground firing guns in machines that rocked about and had clouds rush past them."

• Cutting to continuity.
• Parallel editing or crosscutting.
• Match on action.
• Eyeline match.
• Flashback and flash forward.

Cutting to Continuity

Cutting to continuity involves taking out all the inessential moments in a conventional action. Editing takes out the dead, boring moments in a film. Imagine having to watch all 31 miles of celluloid shot for Lawrence of Arabia! When James Bond travels from London to The Bahamas, do you really want to watch the whole trip: snoring for eight hours on the plane, brushing his teeth in the airport bathroom, renting an Aston Martin at Avis, and so on? Cutting to continuity just includes Bond's leaving M's office, boarding a plane, leaving the Jamaica airport, and driving his car down an ocean-side road. All this activity takes just a few seconds. Wouldn't it be great if we could cut all the boring bits out of our own lives?

Parallel Editing

Parallel editing, or crosscutting, is of two kinds: parallels in space and parallels in time. Parallel spatial editing includes those crosscuts between the bandits and the posse: We go back and forth between two temporally simultaneous events happening in different spaces. Parallel temporal editing includes for example flashbacks and flash forwards, when someone begins narrating the story of her childhood, as when Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy) tells the story of her younger alter ego Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson) in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991).

Match on Action

Match on action occurs when an action that begins in one shot is continued or completed in the next. In an exterior shot Julia Roberts opens the front door to a house. In the next shot the camera, now indoors, photographs her entering the foyer and closing the door.

Eyeline Match

An eyeline match occurs when a character looks in a particular direction and the film cuts to the object at which he is looking. The scientist looks into a microscope. We cut to a super close-up of a virus expanding on a slide at an exponential rate. The logical opposite of this sequence is the reaction shot sequence, in which we see an action, and then cut to the reaction—say, a comic double take on David Spade's face as we cut away from something very clumsy or stupid that Chris Farley has just done.

Flashback

A flashback occurs when the film cuts from the film's present (most often our own present as well) to a moment before that present. The structure of Citizen Kane (1941) is a series of flashbacks from a journalist in 1941 interviewing various people who knew Kane in his youth, to sequences in which we see recollections of that youth in the minds of his friends and lovers. Flash forward of course works in the opposite way: We cut from the prehistoric opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to a future of interplanetary travel.

In this flash forward from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick seems to be saying that the object and the technology have changed, but that the aggressive fascination with flight has not.

Cutting for Chaos

With some notable exceptions, Hollywood tends to use editing to create order for its audiences because order is more entertaining. But sometimes filmmakers create a meaningful and interesting chaos, purposely confusing their audiences, sometimes in order to make intellectual connections, sometimes in order to assault the viewer's emotions with an unexpected, sometimes offensive image. We have briefly discussed (""Film Directing") the opening sequence of An Andalusian Dog, which contains a cut from a cloud passing over the moon to a man cutting open a woman's eyeball, and this silent (with music track) 1929 black-and-white French/Spanish production still has the ability to make audiences blanch. The film's apparently arbitrary connection between shots suggests absolutely meaningless connections between various places and between different times.

The Manner of Cutting

Cuts are also defined by the manner in which you get from one shot to another, as well as by the content. Here are some of the most frequently used and discussed edits:

• A cut is the simplest kind of edit. The shot just ends, with no editing effect added.
• At the next level, fade-in and fade-out simply mean, respectively, going from black to an image, and vice versa.
• A dissolve is an edit in which, while one picture fades out, another fades in to replace it.
• A jump cut occurs when an edit is not smooth, when, for example, five seconds of a character's movement is removed from a film every 10 seconds so that his movements look jerky and unreal. The photography sequence near the beginning of Blow-Up (Great Britain, 1966), when Thomas, a photographer, becomes aroused while photographing a model is a marvelously kinky example of this effect.

Montage

Montage is a confusing term because, like love, it means different things to different people. In Hollywood it most often simply means a number of shots edited quickly together in order to form a brief impression of a character, place, or time. The Madonna musical number "Back in Business" in Dick Tracy (1990) underscores a visual montage of several quick shots of gangsters engaged in various illegal rackets: gambling, robbery, and so on. This montage simply conveys the idea that a lot of illegal activities are going on in a compressed time.

Reference

Did research on styles and conventions and borrow some notes from the internet

Sources

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/movies-flicks-film/cutting-for-content.html#axzz12NjCzKNR

How Editing Manipulates Time

Manipulating Time

Screen time: a period of time represented by events within a film

(e.g. a day, a week).

Subjective time. The time experienced or felt by a character in a

film, as revealed through camera movement and editing (e.g. when

a frightened person's flight from danger is prolonged).

Compressed time. The compression of time between sequences or scenes, and within scenes. This is the most frequent manipulation of time in films: it is achieved with cuts or dissolves. In a dramatic narrative, if climbing a staircase is not a significant part of the plot, a shot of a character starting up the stairs may then cut to him entering a room. The logic of the situation and our past experience of medium tells us that the room is somewhere at the top of the stairs. Long journeys can be compressed into seconds. Time may also be compressed between cutaways in parallel editing. More subtle compression can occur after reaction shots or close-ups have intervened. The use of dissolves was once a cue for the passage of a relatively long period of time.

Long take. A single shot (or take, or run of the camera) which lasts for a relatively lengthy period of time. The long take has an 'authentic' feel since it is not inherently dramatic.

Simultaneous time. Events in different places can be presented as occurring at the same moment, by parallel editing or cross-cutting, by multiple images or split-screen. The conventional clue to indicate that events or shots are taking place at the same time is that there is no progression of shots: shots are either inserted into the main action or alternated with each other until the strands are somehow united.

Slow motion. Action which takes place on the screen at a slower rate than the rate at which the action took place before the camera. This is used: a) to make a fast action visible; b) to make a familiar action strange; c) to emphasise a dramatic moment. It can have a lyric and romantic quality or it can amplify violence.

Accelerated motion (under-cranking). This is used: a) to make a slow action visible; b) to make a familiar action funny; c) to increase the thrill of speed.

Reference

Did research on Manipulating Time and borrow some notes from the internet

Sources

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8332514/Manipulating-Time