Motion Pictures

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Motion Pictures

The invention of motion pictures

Sound joins the image

Color comes to film

Later film history

Equipment

Producing a motion picture

What happens when the filming is finished

Special effects

Resources

Motion pictures, also called film, cinema or movies, are a series of images, recorded on strips of film, that create the illusion of continuous motion. A series of rapidly shown images appear to move because of a phenomena called the persistence of vision. The eye does not react instantly to changes in its field of vision. In fact, the eye continues to see (visualize) an image for one-tenth to one-twentieth of a second after it changes. So if a sequence of images can be shown at a rate of approximately 20 per second, it will appear as continuous motion to the eye. That is just what happens in a motion picture.

The invention of motion pictures

Many of the principles behind motion pictures were understood well before the invention of movies. In 1832, Simon Ritter von Stampfer (1792–1790) of Vienna, Austria, created the stroboscope. Images spinning on a disc were viewed through slits in a second disc. This displayed the images sequentially at a fast enough rate to simulate a couple seconds worth of motion. A primitive kind of slide projector called a magic lantern had been invented around 1640 in Rome, Italy, by German scholar Athanasius Kircher (c. 1615–1680). In 1853, these two inventions were combined by Austrian inventor and solider Franz von Uchatius (1811–1881), who used the magic lantern to cast stroboscopic images onto a wall. These were essentially cartoons, since they were animated drawings.

The invention of photography and improvement over the next several decades was another crucial ingredient. In 1877 photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), working with an engineer, created a sequence of 24 images of a running horse, taken by 24 cameras. Soon these photographs were being projected by a device like the stroboscope. With French scientist and chronophotographer Etienne Jules Marey’s (1830–1904) creation in 1882 of a camera that took bursts of sequential photographs, the basic building blocks for the creation of motion pictures had been invented. American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), aware of these innovations, decided to create the visual equivalent of the phonograph: a camera and projection system that reproduced vision the way the phonograph he was working on reproduced sound.

Edison’s assistant, Scottish inventor William Kennedy Dickson (1860–1935), succeeded in 1889. Dickson used a type of celluloid roll film developed for cameras, adding a series of perforations along the sides that held the film steady and moved it through a special camera. Once shot, the film was made into an endlessly running loop, and viewed through a magnifying glass. The device, called the kinetoscope, could only be viewed by one person at a time. It was not shown publicly until its patent came through in 1893.

Edison built a small motion picture studio in New Jersey, where his company created 50 ft (15 m) film loops. They were viewed at kinetoscope parlors at individual projectors. The first motion picture was of one of Edison’s assistants sneezing. Soon they were filming acts from variety shows. Not realizing the potential of his invention, Edison had not taken out foreign patents on it. Soon it was being copied—and improved upon—in England, Germany, and France. Robert W. Paul (1869–1943) in England built a projector that made the film pause as each frame was shown. This made the frames show for longer than the space between them, lessening the flicker of earlier projectors.

In France, Auguste Lumière (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948), brothers who manufactured photographic equipment, created their own projector and camera. They reduced Edison’s 48 frames-per-second to 16, and called their projector the cinématographe, from the Greek word for movement (kinema ) and drawing (grapheca ). Paul and the Lumière brothers projected their motion pictures onto a screen. This meant many people at once could watch a large image, and do so while seated. Not surprisingly, this motion picture experience proved more popular than Edison’s kinetoscope. Edison unveiled his competing projector in April 1896, creating a tremendous stir. Photography itself was still relatively new; motion pictures were an experience no one had a comparison for. Short films of dancers and breaking waves were enough to fill audiences with amazement.

Though the basic machinery for motion pictures had been invented, the inventors realized that people would not be satisfied for long with the sheer novelty of the experience. Motion picture equipment was like a computer without any software. To make the invention useful, its software—namely interesting motion pictures—needed to be created.

French theater director and magician Georges Méliès (1861–1939) became the first true master of cinematic techniques during the 1890s. He filmed theater acts, but changed them to fit the motion picture format, arranging objects and backgrounds for the camera. He invented special effects, doing things like stopping the camera, changing the scenery and turning the camera back on. He discovered the fade in and fade out, wherein the scene gradually goes dark or comes up from darkness, and used them as a transition between scenes. Méliès used painted cut-outs and backdrops in his studio to enhance the fantasy effect created by his trick photography.

His film A Trip to the Moon (1902) became the first internationally successful motion picture, and the first science fiction film. In such work, M´liès showed how much the new medium could do beyond showing real events passing in front of a camera. Following his example, others turned to telling stories with motion pictures, and they quickly became more sophisticated. The first Western, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, (1903) used a camera that moved with the action, rather than being fixed. It even included shots using a camera on a moving train. The popularity of these motion pictures spurred others to use similar techniques. Gradually the motion picture evolved its own visual language.

As the public began spending money to see films, motion picture distribution networks sprang up. Middlemen bought films and rented them to theaters that did not want to buy them outright. In 1907, over 100 distributors did business in the United States alone. A Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) firm created the nickelodeon when it began charging patrons five cents to watch a series of short motion pictures. The formula proved so successful that nickelodeons spread throughout the country. By 1908, motion pictures were becoming a large and rapidly changing business. A group of filmmaking studios and distributors, along with Edison, formed the Motion Pictures Patent Company to regulate copyrights, patents, and royalties. The group tried to take over the motion picture industry, but by 1910 of about 9,000 U.S. theaters, only half were licensed. These theaters used films by independent filmmakers and distributors.

The Motion Pictures Patent Company kept its actors anonymous to prevent them from becoming personally important and therefore able to command higher salaries. But an independent studio, the Independent Moving Picture Company, lured away a star, revealed that her name was Florence Lawrence, and gave her publicity. This action started what became known as the star system, in which the primary actors were as, or more, important than whatever story was being told. Other stars followed, including Charlie Chaplin in the late 1910s. The importance of stars continues to this day. Some, such as Marilyn Monroe, have become mythic figures in modern culture.

By 1914. the Motion Pictures Patent Company collapsed as the more innovative independents grew. Motion pictures became longer and more ambitious. Film companies like Fox, Universal, Paramount, and MGM sprang up. Nickelodeons proved too small for the vast popularity of motion pictures, and were replaced by new theaters, some with thousands of seats and elaborate decor.

Sound joins the image

The ability to reproduce sound already existed in phonographs. Many tried unsuccessfully to link them to films. A workable system to join sound and motion pictures proved complex, and required a great deal of research money. American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), the largest corporation in the United States at the time, worked on the problem through its Western Electric branch. A 1924 sound-on-a-disc system was at first rejected by the motion picture studios as too expensive. However, Warner Brothers, looking for an advantage over its rivals, finally accepted it anyway, investing millions of dollars in theaters and sound equipment.

The first motion picture with sound, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, became a huge hit. Warner Brothers instantly became one of the biggest forces in the motion picture industry. Its success forced rival studios to adapt sound. The cost of doing this, coming at the beginning of the Great Depression (1929–early 1940s), left banks with a great deal of power in the film industry.

A rival sound system, developed by General Electric (GE) and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), put the soundtrack on the film itself, running it in a track next to the images. Since the pictures and their soundtrack were linked on the film, they could never get out of synchronization. This system was also easier to set up. After intense competition and many lawsuits over patent rights, this system beat the sound-on-a-disc system.

Sound remained difficult to record during filming because the recording equipment was large and noisy. In the late 1940s, new magnetic recording techniques allowed sound to be recorded onto tape. This smaller, quieter system allowed sound to be recorded right on the film set.

Color comes to film

In the earliest days of motion pictures, color film had not yet been invented. Some films were colorized by hand, but that soon proved impractical. Color film first came out in the mid-1930s. It used three layers of colored film to reproduce the visual spectrum. Because color film was expensive and required precise control of lighting, black and white film remained the standard until the mid-1950s. Color and black-and-white were both used until the late 1960s, when color became the standard. This was partly because many films were sold for television broadcast after appearing in theaters, and black-and-white films were much harder to sell for television.

Later film history

In the 1920s and 1930s, motion pictures became a big business in the United States, and most were produced like products on an assembly line. Often, Hollywood films did not have distinct personalities. They instead fit into genre types: western, musical, horror, gangster, and comedy. Exceptions, like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), were rare. In Europe, motion pictures remained a smaller scale business that was also seen as an art. In 1925, the London Film Society (England) was founded to promote motion pictures as an art form.

After World War II ended in 1945, the power of the Hollywood (California) studios declined. Partly, this came from a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that the studios had an illegal monopoly because they controlled the production, distribution, and showing of motion pictures. As a result, the studios were forced to sell their theaters. Foreign motion picture industries grew stronger, and started their own distribution systems, such as France’s annual Cannes Film Festival. France, Italy, Sweden, and Japan all produced important and successful motion pictures.

Perhaps more than anything else, the rise of television (TV) changed the motion picture industry. People who could view visual entertainment at home for free were less likely to travel to a theater and pay money to see a film. The motion picture studios initially resisted the showing of their films on TV. By the mid-1950s, however, many studios were selling and renting their films to TV networks. To lure consumers to theaters, filmmakers began using technology to make seeing a film in a theater a more exciting experience.

One technology was Cinerama, popular in 1952, in which three separate projectors showed their images on a large, nearly semicircular screen. Six speakers provided stereo sound. Though initially popular, this medium required large theaters and expensive equipment. It proved economically unfeasible. CinemaScope, invented in the 1920s but not exploited until the 1950s, used special lenses to squeeze a wide-screen image onto normal 35 mm film. Another lens, put onto the projector, unsqueezed the image. The result was a wide-screen image that required theaters to invest less than $20,000. CinemaScope proved popular, and films like A Star is Born were made using it. The compression and decompression resulted in a blurry, grainy image, however. A better solution for wide screen was to use 70 mm film, as in MGM’s Oklahoma. After the success of this film, most major studios created a version of the 70 mm process. Wide screen processes are still being developed, such as the OMNIMAX, which uses a special screen in the shape of a dome.

Equipment

Camera

In photography the exposure of film can be controlled by changing the amount of light entering the lens, or the amount of time the shutter remains open. The shutter speed in a motion picture camera is controlled by the fact that 24 frames must be shot per second. No exposure can be longer than 1/24th of a second. Motion picture cameras use a shutter that looks like a rotating propeller with two blades. The propeller can be made wider to decrease the percentage of time the lens is open, and thereby shorten exposures.

The pull-down mechanism, invented at the end of the nineteenth century, moves the film through the camera, holds it still in position for 1/24th of a second while the exposure is made, then moves the film to the next frame. It does this in perfect synchronization with the revolving shutter that exposes the film.

Early motion picture cameras were large and heavy. But, by the mid-1950s, technology developed during World War II lead to smaller, lighter cameras that even allowed cinematographers to hold the smallest cameras. This freed the cameras from a tripod, allowing for more innovative camera work. For moving camera effects, cameras can be put on platforms that are attached to rubber wheels or steel rails like railroad tracks. They can also be raised and lowered on cranes.

Projector

At the end of the process, every motion picture goes through a projector. From the advent of sound until the mid-1970s projectors changed little. The system a projector uses for moving the film is similar to that used by a motion picture camera. A pull-down mechanism moves the film through the projector, while a rotating shutter only emits light while a frame is in position. The primary problem in making a projector was to provide a light source bright enough to enlarge a film frame enough to fill a theater screen— as much as 300,000 times—yet small enough to fit inside a projector.

The solution found to this problem, the carbonarc lamp, was used until the 1970s. These lamps used two carbon rods with a small gap between them. A strong electric current jumped the gap, creating a strong white light. These lamps needed constant adjustment, however, as well as a ventilation system. Most were replaced in the 1970s and 1980s by lamps using the inert gas xenon.

The projector also reads the soundtrack through a separate reader placed immediately after the lens. The soundtrack can be a magnetic strip or light pattern that runs along the side of the film. This light pattern, called optical sound, was the only system of sound reproduction until advances in magnetic tape recording in the 1950s. While soundtracks are now recorded and edited with magnetic tape or digitally, optical sound is often used on motion pictures because it can be printed right along with the images, and because so many theaters only have optical-sound equipment.

To record optical sound, sound waves are translated into electrical impulses, which in turn control a light beam that creates a photograph on a piece of film. When the optical soundtrack is played back, it passes before a lamp that projects its patterns onto a photoelectric cell. These intensities of light are converted into electrical impulses, then sound, which is amplified and sent to the speakers.

Producing a motion picture

Motion picture production has three primary stages: pre-production, production, and post-production. Pre-production gets underway when financing is secured. It involves finishing a script, finalizing the cast and crew, deciding on how various shots will tell the story of the film, and figuring out locations. A detailed budget is created. Good pre-production work saves a great deal of time and money. It lays the groundwork for a smooth and efficient production.

In production, sets are built, locations are prepared and lit, and the actual filming takes place. Each aspect of film production can get intensely specialized. For example, there are many kinds of microphones, each with advantages and disadvantages. The sounds they pick up can be recorded onto many kinds of magnetic tape using a variety of tape recorders.

During filming, after optimal lighting has been determined, and other variables worked out, many shots are taken of each scene. To help quickly judge if shots were successful, a video image is often made simultaneously. It can be reviewed immediately, and decisions about how to change the next take of the scene can be made.

What happens when the filming is finished

The final phase of making a motion picture, post-production, begins after the film footage has been shot, and results in the finished product. Post-production consists of editing, sound mixing, and special effects.

Editing is the process of putting camera shots together in a way that tells the story in an interesting manner. A camera shot is a piece of continuously shot film without a break in the action. Most motion-pictures consist of hundreds or thousands of such shots. Each shot may be filmed many times. The editor compares these shots and chooses one. Shots and soundtracks are compared and combined on editing tables that allow the comparison of as many as six film and sound tracks. Digital editing systems first came out in the 1980s. Their use accelerated in the 1990s as computer technology rapidly improved. In digital editing a digital copy is made of all the shots for a motion picture. Using computers, editors can then try out various combinations of shots and edits. When a final version is selected, the editor can cut the actual pieces of film to create a motion picture that is put together just like the digital version.

Sound editing benefited from the explosion of recording technology associated with the music business. The advent of the multiple track magnetic recorder gave sound editors the ability to mix sounds together with a great deal of control and creativity. They could fade in a background sound like a rain storm in the same way that their counterpart in the music business might fade in a guitar solo. By the late 1970s, sound editors could use up to 16 separate tracks of sound, and each could have electronic effects added to it. In the 1980s, digital sound offered even more control.

Because the sound is initially recorded on a separate tape, it has to be synchronized with the film. An electronic timing pulse is used which controls the speed of the motors for the soundtrack and film mechanisms. Recording and editing the soundtrack can be almost as complex as filming the visuals. It has many components including dialogue, music, ambient sounds, and sound effects. The sound of a door slamming, for instance, is usually recorded separately in a sound studio, and may actually be the sound of a hammer striking a piece of metal.

Special effects

Special effects have always been one of the chief attractions of motion pictures. Special effects are generally created through animation, miniatures, or matte shots. Animation is any process whereby frames are shot individually. This can range from cartoons to sequences in which objects appear to move because the camera was stopped, the object was moved a little, and then another frame was taken. Computer-based special effects in which an object or face changes into another are also rendered one frame at a time.

Illusions of reality are created by paintings, miniatures, and false backgrounds. Miniatures are small models used for everything from the cities stepped on in Godzilla films to the space ships and buildings used in science fiction films. One of the most common special effects is a false background. In many motion pictures, the scenes of characters in a moving car are shot in a studio, using another film being projected onto a screen behind the action as a background. In older films, this projector was set behind a translucent screen and projected its images onto it from behind the action. This is called rear projection. The motion picture camera and the projector were synchronized so that a frame was projected just as the camera recorded a frame.

This system did not work well with color film. It proved difficult to keep the amount of light on the subject and the background the same, and to give them the same color. So a new system, called front projection, was invented. In front projection, the false background is projected at the same angle from which the camera is shooting. A one-way mirror is placed in front of the camera. The projected image reflects off the mirror onto the action. The camera sees through the clear side of the mirror. Because the camera sees from the same angle as the projected image, the actors’ shadows, cast onto the background, are blocked from view by their bodies.

Slow and fast motion are accomplished by changing the rate at which frames are shot. Because film is projected at 24 frames per second, anything shot at a greater rate appears slowed down when projected at 24 frames per second. Anything shot at a slower rate seems to move faster than normal when projected. These special effects have applications to motion pictures and to science. They make it possible to watch a flower growing and opening in 20 seconds, or to watch an explosion that takes 10 seconds instead of one. Watching actions slowed down is often an advantage to those studying the behavior of people or animals.

The combination of computer technology with motion picture technology has given filmmakers the ability to create increasingly elaborate special effects. Animation and graphics can be created entirely by computer. These computer-generated images can then be combined with live-action footage through a process called analog image synthesis. Using a video camera, images on film are scanned into a computer. Once in the computer, the images can be easily manipulated, and then converted back into film. Films such as Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park made extensive use of this technology to create the illusion of dinosaurs interacting with people onscreen.

A similar process called digital compositing uses the computer-scanning technique to manipulate live-action footage as well as animation. With it, a film-maker can make it appear that an object or face changes into another. These effects are rendered one frame at a time. Computer technology has also advanced the area of puppetry, models, and miniatures. Miniature replicas are made of larger-than-life models. The two are then connected to a computer that plots their movements so that when the miniature

KEY TERMS

Editing —The process of putting various shots together to create the narrative structure of a motion picture.

False background —A background either created by projecting an image onto a screen behind the foreground action, or by using a matte.

Matte shot —A shot that uses masks to combine different images onto one piece of film.

Persistence of vision —A phenomena of the eye, which continues to register an image for a short time after it disappears. This makes motion pictures possible.

Pull-down mechanism —A device that pulls each frame of film into position, holds it steady while it is exposed, then quickly moves the film into position for the next exposure.

Shot —A single, uncut piece of film with continuous action.

is moved in a particular way, the full-size model moves in the same way. Innovations such as these ensure the continued development of motion picture technology.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first century, independent film-makers, along with large corporate movie production companies, have used different production styles to make motion pictures. Digital technology has made it possible to make less costly and simply-made motion pictures. On the other hand, advanced technologies have made it possible to make very elaborate and complicated films that were impossible to make in the past. Modern digital projectors and video cameras are increasingly being used in the 2000s, especially with regards to ease of editing. However, in the mid-2000s, most motion pictures are still made on film.