With the development of movies by Thomas Edison, the way people thought and heard of far away places forever changed. Movies brought real, moving images from different places to the general public. The movies would generally be of people walking or doing ordinary things. These recordings of actual events are called ‘actualities.’ Other movies told short stories or ‘novelties.’ Whichever way the movie was made, they brought a different perspective to people.
The process of editing a movie is a difficult task. The movie must be managed in a chronological manner, so that the movie makes sense. The movie “Life of an American Fireman” is about a lady and a baby being rescued from a burning building. In editing this movie, we must take into account the recordings from both the cameras. One of the cameras point of view is from the outside of the building, and the other is from the inside. With different cameras, the different recordings must be brought together, and edited so the public watching the movie gets the different points of view from the cameras in a sequential manner. We have to put them in the correct order of occurrence so that we can see the event from both the outside and inside view in the proper order. The final version of the movie edited switches from the outside to the inside view and then back to the outside view. From this switching of the scenes by the cameras, we are able to see what happens on the outside of the building and on the inside of the building while maintaining the correct order of occurrence of the events.
The movie that we edited, “Life of an American Fireman,” is not a good example of a natural way of showing a movie. This movie has two different cameras in two different places, with obviously two different viewpoints. This is not a natural way to show a movie because we cannot be in two places at once. It gives us a better picture of what is happening, but it is not natural. We can only see an image from one place at one time. If the movie was recorded just from the outside, then it would have been natural. We could have imagined ourselves across the street, watching the event live.
The more ‘natural’ way to tell a story is like the movie “The Burning Stable,” which was made by the Edison company in 1896. This is the most natural way to tell a story because we see the movie as if we were at the location watching the scene unfold with our very own eyes. The movie uses a single camera with no special effects, such as cuts and zooms. Only one camera records the action. This way of watching a movie is more natural. The reason this is more natural is because our eyes do not have special powers to stop a scene, cut it out, and start to record it from another time. Our eyes also cannot zoom in and out of the event we are watching. So, watching the movie from one point of view without any cuts or zooms, allows us to easily believe that we are actually witnessing the event live.
Since the time of Edison, movies have evolved dramatically. They now have special effects and outrageous graphics that ‘blow our mind away.’ They have developed from actualities and novelties to mind provoking hours of entertainment.