Film is a popular visual art form. For many people is the main entertainment and it rivals, in the preference lists, theater and music.
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about Film!
- Film is also called movie or motion picture
- It is also the Seventh Art
- Film is a visual art-form used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty or atmosphere
- It uses the means of recorded or programmed moving images, along with sound
- The word “cinema” is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry
- The word “cinema”, also, refers to the art form that is the result of it
- The term is short for cinematography
- The moving images of a film are created with four unique techniques
- The first one is by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera
- The second one is by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques
- The third is by means of CGI and computer animation
- And, finally, by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects
- Films were recorded onto celluloid film
- They were recorde through a photochemical process
- Then, film was shown through a movie projector onto a large screen
- Contemporary films are often fully digital through the entire process of production, distribution, and exhibition
- Films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack
- This is a graphic recording of the spoken words, music and other sounds that accompany the images which runs along a portion of the film exclusively reserved for it
- This soundtrack is not projected
- Films are considered as cultural artifacts created by specific cultures
- They reflect those cultures and affect them in some capacity
- Film is considered to be an important art form
- It is, also, a source of popular entertainment
- Film is a powerful medium for educating or indoctrinating citizens
- The visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication
- Some films have become popular worldwide attractions through the use of dubbing or subtitles
- Dubbing and subtitles is used as means to translate the dialog into other languages
- The individual images that make up a film are called frames
- In the projection of traditional celluloid films, a rotating shutter causes intervals of darkness as each frame is moved into position to be projected
- The viewer, though, does not notice the interruptions because of an effect known as persistence of vision
- In this effect, the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after its source disappears
- The perception of motion is partly due to a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon
- The name “film” originates from the fact that photographic film has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures
- Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture
- These terms include picture, picture show, moving picture, photoplay, and flick
- The most common term in the United States is movie
- In Europe, the most used term is film
- Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, and cinema
- Cinema is commonly used, as an overarching term, in scholarly texts and critical essays
- In the early years of the medium the word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen
- By the end of the 1880s, the introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the invention of motion picture cameras, which could photograph an indefinitely long rapid sequence of images using only one lens, allowed several minutes of action to be captured and stored on a single compact reel of film
- Some early films were made to be viewed by one person at a time
- A person could watch this film through a “peep show” device such as the Kinetoscope and the mutoscope
- Others were intended for a projector
- This projector was techanically similar to the camera and sometimes actually the same machine
- It was used to shine an intense light through the processed and printed film and into a projection lens
- With that technique these “moving pictures” could be shown tremendously enlarged on a screen for viewing by an entire audience
- The first kinetoscope film shown in public exhibition was Blacksmith Scene
- The film was produced by Edison Manufacturing Company in 1893
- The following year the company would begin Edison Studios
- It, later, became an early leader in the film industry with notable early shorts including The Kiss
- The Edison Studios would go on to produce close to 1.200 films
- The first public screenings of films at which admission was charged were made in 1895 by the American Woodville Latham and his sons
- In this screening, they used films produced by their Eidoloscope company, and by the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière
- In that screening ten of the French brothers own productions were shown
- Private screenings had preceded these by several months
- Latham’s screening slightly predating the Lumière brothers’ one
- The earliest films were simply one static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques
- Close to the turn of the 20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story
- The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots photographed from different distances and angles
- Other techniques such as camera movement were developed as effective ways to tell a story with film
- Until the advent of sound to film in the late 1920s, motion pictures were a purely visual art
- These innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination
- Rather than leave audiences with only the noise of the projector as an accompaniment, theater owners hired a pianist or organist or a full orchestra to play music that fit the mood of the film at any given moment
- A full orchestra was used at large urban theaters
- By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music to be used for this purpose
- This was the start of composing complete film scores for major productions
- The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I
- The film industry in the United States flourished with the rise of Hollywood
- This rise was typified most prominently by the innovative work of D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)
- In the 1920s, European filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, along with the contributions of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others, quickly caught up with American film-making
- They continued to further advance the medium
- These “pioneers” were in many ways inspired by the meteoric wartime progress of film through Griffith
- In the 1920s, the development of electronic sound recording technologies made it practical to incorporate a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects
- These sound effects could be synchronized with the action on the screen
- The resulting sound films were initially distinguished from the usual silent “moving pictures” or “movies” by calling them “talking pictures” or “talkies”
- The revolution they wrought was earth-shattering
- By 1930, silent film was practically extinct in the US
- The silent film was already being referred to as “the old medium”
- Another major technological development was the introduction of “natural color”
- This term meant color that was photographically recorded from nature rather than added to black-and-white prints by hand-coloring, stencil-coloring or other arbitrary procedures
- The earliest processes typically yielded colors which were far from “natural” in appearance
- Color replaced black-and-white film much more gradually than “talkies” replaced “silent film”
- The pivotal innovation was the introduction of the three-strip version of the Technicolor process
- This was first used for animated cartoons in 1932
- Then, it was used for live-action short films and isolated sequences in a few feature films
- The first feature lenght film to use this technique was Becky Sharp, in 1935
- The expense of the process was daunting, but favorable public response in the form of increased box office receipts usually justified the added cost
- The number of films made in color slowly increased year after year
- In the early 1950s, the proliferation of black-and-white television started seriously depressing North American theater attendance
- In an attempt to lure audiences back into theaters, bigger screens were installed, widescreen processes, polarized 3D projection, and stereophonic sound were introduced
- More films were made in color, which soon became the rule rather than the exception
- Thought, some important mainstream Hollywood films were still being made in black-and-white as late as the mid-1960s
- After the final flurry of black-and-white films had been released in mid-decade, all Hollywood studio productions were filmed in color
- Some exceptions were made only at the insistence of well-known filmmakers such as Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese
- The decades following the decline of the studio system in the 1960s saw changes in the production and style of film
- Various New Wave movements and the rise of film-school-educated independent filmmakers contributed to the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century
- Digital technology has been the driving force for change throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s
- Digital 3D projection largely replaced earlier problem-prone 3D film systems
- It has become popular in the early 2010s
Here you can read part 2…
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