The first movies were single, static shots of everyday events. The Lumi re brothers screening of a train pulling into a Paris station was a sensation. They followed this with a staged comic scene. Georges M li s expanded this into staging complex tableaux. It wasn t until Edwin H. Porter and D. W. Griffith in the United States discovered the power of editing one shot next to another that the movies were really born. Griffith also introduced such innovations as the flashback, the first real use of film to manipulate time. Close-ups were used to emphasize the moment of impact; wide shots to establish context. The real discovery was that the shot is the fundamental building block of film, and that the film is built one shot at a time, one after the other.

Films and videos are made in the moments when one shot changes into another, when one image is replaced by the next, when one point of view becomes someone else s point of view. Without the image changing, you just have moving pictures. The idea of changing from one angle to another or from one scene to another, quickly leads to the concept of juxtaposing one idea against another. It soon becomes apparent that the impact of storytelling lies in the way in which the shots are ordered. Putting a certain shot after another shot has a different meaning if it is placed before the other shot. The classic example is the three shots of the burning building:

1. The building...