George Melies

George Méliès

Méliès accidentally created the edit when his camera jammed when he was in the process of filming street traffic in Paris. Something in his camera had jammed, the traffic carried on moving, and once he had fixed the camera, it began filming onto where the traffic had moved on to. He was astonished when he played it back and saw one part of the traffic being replaced by another.  This technique is called stop trick. The process involves something being filmed, the camera being stopped and the object leaving the shot so that when the camera is then turned on it creates the illusion that the object had disappeared.

The length of film was always very short and the only way to elongate it would be to put parts of film together. This solves the Lumiere Brothers problem mentioned previously. George Méliès discovered by sticking two different pieces of film together he could change scenes. By editing shots together, Méliès also realised he could form a narrative. In 1914, he directed Trip to the Moon. In this story, the edit points are between the scenes in order to link them together.