Edwin Stanton Porter (April 21, 1870 – April 30, 1941) (middle name is listed as Stratton in the Internet Movie Database)[1] was an American early film pioneer, most famous as a director with Edison Manufacturing Company.[2][3] Of over 250 films created by Porter, the most important films include Life of an American Fireman (1903) andThe Great Train Robbery (1903).
- touring projectionist
- Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope.
- traveled through the West Indies and South America
- showing films at fairgrounds and in open fields
- In 1899 Porter joined the Edison Manufacturing Company
- he took charge of motion picture production at Edison's New York studios, operating the camera, directing the actors, and assembling the final print.
- he began by making trick films and comedies for Edison
- his early films was Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, a satire made in February 1901 about the then Vice President-elect, Theodore Roosevelt.
- he took ideas from others, but rather than simply copying films he tried to improve on what he borrowed. In his Jack and the Beanstalk (1902) and Life of an American Fireman (1903) he followed earlier films by France's Georges Méliès and members of England's Brighton School, such as James Williamson.
- Porter created dissolves, gradual transitions from one image to another.
- the technique helped audiences follow complex outdoor movement In Life of an American Fireman.
- The Great Train Robbery (1903)
- The one-reel film, with a running time of twelve minutes, was assembled in twenty separate shots, along with a startling close-up of a bandit firing at the camera. It used as many as ten different indoor and outdoor locations and was groundbreaking in its use of "cross-cutting" in editing to show simultaneous action in different places. No earlier film had created such swift movement or variety of scene.
- In 1905 it was the premier attraction at the first nickelodeon
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