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Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. The term film editing is derived from the traditional process of working with film, but now increasingly involves the use of digital technology. The film editor works with the raw footage, selecting shots and combining them into sequences to create a finished motion picture. Film editing is described as an art or skill, the only art that is 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 often referred to as the "invisible art"〔Harris, Mark. ("Which Editing is a Cut Above?" ) ''New York Times'' (January 6, 2008)〕 because when it is well-practiced, the viewer can become so engaged that he or she is not even aware of the editor's work. On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art, technique, and practice of assembling shots into a coherent sequence. The job of an editor isn’t simply 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, story, dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors' performances to effectively "re-imagine" and even rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole. Editors usually play a dynamic role in the making of a film. Sometimes, auteurist film directors edit their own films, for example Akira Kurosawa 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, music, and (more recently) visual effects editors dealt with the practicalities of other aspects of the editing process, usually under the direction of the picture editor and director. However, digital systems have increasingly put these responsibilities on the picture editor. It is common, especially on lower budget films, for the assistant editors or even the editor to cut in music, mock up visual effects, and add sound effects or other sound replacements. These temporary elements are usually replaced with more refined final elements by the sound, music, and visual effects teams hired to complete the picture. Film editing is an art that can be used in diverse ways. It can create sensually provocative montages; become a laboratory for experimental cinema; bring out the emotional truth in an actor's performance; create a point of view on otherwise obtuse events; guide the telling and pace of a story; create an illusion of danger where there is none; give emphasis to things that would not have otherwise been noted; and even create a vital subconscious emotional connection to the viewer, among many other possibilities. Editors can completely control how the audience feels emotionally throughout a film. ==History== Early films were short films that were one long, static, and 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. 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 then follow other people inside through the door. The second shot shows what they do inside. 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. This technique was first used in his 1901 film ''Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost''. 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 ''Seen Through the Telescope'', in which the main shot shows street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, and then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. Even 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, then there is a cut to the garden of the mission station where a pitched battle ensues. An armed party of British sailors arrive and defeat the Boxers and 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, and many others. He also experimented with the close-up, and made perhaps the most extreme one of all in ''The Big Swallow'', when his character approaches the camera and appears to swallow it. These two film makers of the Brighton School also pioneered the editing of the film; they tinted their work with color and used trick photography to enhance the narrative. By 1900, their films were extended scenes of up to 5 minutes long. Other filmmakers then 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, and even 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.〔Originally in ''Edison Films'' catalog, February 1903, 2-3; reproduced in Charles Musser, ''Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 216-18.〕 He put a dissolve between every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and he frequently had the same action repeated across the dissolves. His film, ''The Great Train Robbery'' (1903), 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 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.〔Arthur Knight (1957). p. 25.〕 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.〔Arthur Knight (1957). pp. 72-73.〕 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「film editing」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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