History of Film Making

In this essay I will be discussing the history of film making, I will be talking about how it has
been developed. I will be looking at the technological advancements as well as significant
people that made a huge impact on the film industry. If you were to look at one of the first films
and compare it to a film in cinemas nowadays you will notice the huge difference in production
and I will be looking into the impacts of green screen and CGI special effects. I chose to look
into film as I think over the many years of its development it has started from black and white
pictures to green screen and cgi

History of film (moving pictures)

Firstly there was no singular person that invented film/cinema it was

actually invented in the USA by the Edison Company in 1891. They
successfully demonstrated their prototype for a machine called a
“kinetoscope” which was a little device in which it enabled a person to
view moving pictures for the first time. The Lumière brothers were the
first people to show the moving pictures to an audience that were
willing to pay to see them in December 1895 in Paris and this is where
the term ‘cinema’ originates from. When films were originally created,
they would last up to just over a minute or so, and they would be shown
publically at a fairground or a hall where they could set up a large
screen and darken the room in order to create that cinema-like experience for the paying
viewers. Most of these were actually silent films but most of them were accompanied by music
or a lecturer describing them. These public moving picture showings became newsworthy. By
1914, moving pictures had become a global thing, meaning that Europe, Russia and
Scandinavia were as important as America. The moving pictures became more dependent on
a narrative to help tell a story and make it flow and they were able to make the films longer in
terms of duration. After the growth of cinema popularity and more people started to pay to see
them they started to invest money in productions and distribution so that they would produce
better quality films.

The Development of Film (moving pictures)

An example is Hollywood California and their 2005 version of

King Kong looks completely different to the 1933 version of the
film. The development of CGI has allowed the film makers to
make King Kong look a lot more realistic and believable. The
original sound track is not very good and in the newer one the
sound effects of the ape are way more realist and believable.
There are other ways that films have changed, for example
James Cutting who is a psychologist at Cornell university has
been studying the evolution of moving pictures and presented
his findings to the public.he was sponsored by the Academy of
Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and James Cutting said ”all these things are working to
hold our attention better”.
Technological Advancements of film (moving pictures)

Technological evolution has been continuing since the introduction

of moving pictures aka cinema. Over time film makers have been
able to afford to experiment with film making to make better quality
productions which mean better quality stories. Film has advanced
and found different techniques to make the film quality better
meaning that they have upgraded and invented new apparatus to
aid them in their productions. Without most of the apparatus, film
makers wouldn’t have been able to create better quality productions.
Over time it has been said that you can only make a good quality
production if you know how to use the equipment properly. As
technology advanced film makers have invented better sound
recording equipment, better cameras, and easier was to edit film.
Although there is a wide range of technology used for film making, film makers don’t
necessarily have to use all of them in order to make a good quality production. What this
means is the production team can create a more complex film using different editing
techniques and camera movements.

Lumière Brothers

The Lumière brothers were French inventors who

manufactured photographic equipment and they created the
first motion picture camera and a projector called the
‘Cinèmatographe’ and this is where the term ‘Cinema’
originates from. Auguste Lumière, born 19th October 1862
and his brother Louis Lumière, born on the 5th October 1864
created a film in 1895 called “workers leaving the factory”
and is considered as being the first ever motion picture. Their
dad was a painter and the sons excelled in. science when
they were at school. luis worked on the problem of
commercially satisfactory film at just 18 years old, with his
fathers help he opened a factory for producing photographic plates which gained him a lot of
success, by 1894 the lumiere brothers were producing up to 15 million plates a year. That year
their father received an invitation to to see a showing of thomas edisons kinetic scope in Paris.
When he arrived back home he told luis and auguste all about the machine and how it worked.
Luis found the solution which was patented in 1895, at the time they showed less importance
to the machine than to improvements they had made in colour photography. On December 28
a showing at the Grand Café on the boulevard des capucines in paris brought wide publicity
and this was the beginning of cinema history.

After looking at a video showing some of early cinema and the first ever motion pictures that
were ever made, I have come to the realisation of how far cinema has progressed over the
many years in the making. From black and white. to colour and from props to cgi special effects
and green screen is really interesting in my opinion and cinema has a huge popularity and
films are watched everyday by a vast majority of people. In this video they show the different
pieces of footage that were created by the early film makers such as Thomas Edison. In this
video we see the first ever motion picture ever made and from watching it we can understand
how far film has progressed over the many years since it has started. In the video I learned
that the first ever motion picture was created by Thomas Edison he was the world's most
creative inventor of the 20th century. Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer was
known for his use of a lot of cameras and he created a device called a zoopraxiscope and it
projected motion pictures which predated a celluloid film strip. Eadweard successfully
captured the motion of a horse using up to 24 cameras which allowed him to create a motion
picture showing a horse running. And this event took place in june 1878.