The Hybridization of Post-production

Abstract

In the beginning, editors did their jobs by looking at 35 mm film and holding it up to a light as they studied the frames, measuring lengths of film against their arms to gauge a shot’s running time. A great advance took place with introduction of the Moviola, the invention of Leiden-born electrical engineer Iwan Serrurier (1878–1953). In its first incarnation, the Moviola was an upright handcranked intermittent projection viewer that was used by Hollywood studio executives to view movies in their offices (Kirsner 2008). After discovering that there was an additional market for editing, Serrurier reworked the machine and in 1924 sold one to Douglas Fairbanks’ studio. With the new Moviola, an editor could study shots and the construction of scenes in motion to their heart’s desire on a small rear screen viewer. In November of that year, the Mitchell Camera Company built 12 machines for MGM. With the introduction of sound, the Moviola, with an optical sound reader, was used for syncing up image and track; it was so ubiquitously deployed that during the next half century, the word Moviola became a generic for an editing machine (Slide 2013).