More Inventions (V)
Motion pictures
Motion pictures are a big source of information and entertainment, millions of people watch movies on television or on video tape player. This is a major form of art because moviemakers express their ideas through their motion picture camera while other artist such as painters express themselves by using other mediums. This has now become a huge industry and costs several million dollars and has also been defined as the at form of the 20th century. Movies date back to only about 200 years and by the early 1900’s it had already developed distinct artistic theories and techniques although it started to receive scholarly attention only in the 1960’s.
Movies can also be used as teaching aids and documentaries which are non-fiction movies are particularly useful for this purpose.
How motion pictures are made
The cost and time that has to be invested in the production of a movie may vary greatly depending on the aim of the movie; for example the casting of a short feature film may take a few weeks while documentaries and long movie may take several years. The two key members of the casting are the directors and the producers and the latter have a great influence on the creative part of the film production. The shooting schedule, the equipment, personnel needs of the film and the budget in general is mainly controlled by the director.
Each film has its own particulars, some require travelling, other special effects but they all cover these five stages:
- development
- preproduction
- production
- post-production
- distribution
The history of motion pictures
Eadweard Muybridge, a British photographer working in California, made the first successful photographs of motion in 1877 and 1878. He took a series of photographs of a running horse.
For his project, Muybridge set up a row of cameras (first 12, then 24) with strings attached to their shutters. When the horse ran by, it broke each string in succession, tripping the shutters. Muybridge's achievement
influenced inventors in several countries to work toward developing devices to record and re-present movie images. Some of these were Thomas Armat, Thomas Alva Edison, C. Francis Jenkins, and Woodville Latham in the United States; William Friese-Greene and Robert W. Paul in Great Britain; and the brothers Louis Jean and Auguste Lumiere and Etienne-Jules Marey in France. Thanks to them, various types of motion-picture cameras and projectors were discovered in the mid-1890's.
A public screening of projected motion pictures was held on Dec. 28, 1895, in a Paris café by the Lumiere brothers. Edison, adapting a projector developed by Armat, presented the first public exhibition of projected motion pictures in the United States on April 23, 1896, in a New York City music hall.
Film screenings soon became a popular entertainment and a powerful means of communication although they were at first silent movies. However, with the introduction of sound motion picture techniques had to be readapted and directors had to learn how to take best advantage of sound. The first animated short film using synchronised sound was produced by Walt Disney in 1928. And nowadays we have a new generation of movie makers such as Lucas and Steven Spielberg who have brought motion picture to a new dimension.