Fire!
P and R: James Williamson. UK 1901

Attack on a China Mission
P and R: James Williamson. UK 1901

More about Brighton School:
Brighton & Hove

About James Williamson:
“His views on the proper use of the new medium were emphatic, personal and prophetic of the direction it would take. He was one of the chief pioneers of the film narrative, beginning with faked news items such as Attack on a China Mission (January 1901) in which he became the first filmmaker to cut from one shot to another for dramatic effect introducing a primitive form of the race against time. In Stop Thief  (October 1901) he introduced the movie chase of more than one shot (this one, a comic, had three); Fire! (October 1901), in which a family saved by an efficient crew of firemen, is the earliest film in which narrative action is moved along by a logical sequence of cutting from shot to shot. He recruited his actors from his family and friends, and acted in many of his own films.”
Martin Sopocy
Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema

Just some years later:

£100 Reward
R: James Williamson. P: Williamson Kinematograph Company. UK 1908

“James Williamson came into movie production and direction before the turn of the century, starting out with his own photo lab, where he developed other producers’ films. Like many in those first days of British production, he showed a conservative style of film making and a middle-class sensibility in which rich and poor could meet as equals, so long as they were both fond of dogs and babies. This is a late production of his; he would direct his last movie at the beginning of 1910 and live another quarter of a century. Let us hope that his technical inventions — he developed an inexpensive method of producing film titles about this time — kept him reasonably in the funds.”
IMDb (boblipton)

“£100 Reward was released in April 1908, and its twelve-scene narrative is elaborate both by the standards of Williamson’s other surviving films and in comparison with anything else made at the time. Although it is not a noticeable advance on Rescued By Rover in terms of technique, it nonetheless is an excellent showcase for Williamson’s directorial skills, as it tells a surprisingly involved but nonetheless logically constructed and completely comprehensible narrative without requiring a single intertitle other than the printed sign offering the title inducement (a substantial sum of money for 1908), which occurs onscreen as a natural part of the drama. Each scene is staged for maximum clarity: the bare cupboard revealing the young family’s poverty; the butler’s sling betraying the extent of his injuries during the earlier chase, and so on. It also offers a wealth of crowd-pleasing scenes, including a chase and a fight, plenty of suspense, and an ingratiating dog well to the fore of at least two-thirds of the scenes, including a brief subplot in which the young man tries to sell him to a passer-by.”
Michael Brooke
BFI screenonline

TRAUM UND EXZESS, S. 175 ff.