HISTORY OF FILM

The history of film goes as far back as ancient Greece’s theatre and dance,
which surprised me very much as I thought it started a lot more recently. The
theatres and dance had many of the same elements in today’s film world. But
technological advances in film have occurred rapidly over the past 100 years.
This has happened in many ways which I’ll explain further on. Anyway, starting
in the Victorian era, many camera devices, projectors and film sizes have been
developed and mastered, creating the film industry we know today.

The Horse In Motion (1878)

The first ever ‘Film’ created was the
‘Horse in Motion’. This film was absolutely
a ground breaking motion photography
and was accomplished using multiple
cameras. After taking individual pictures
the creator then put them into a single
motion picture. It’s definitely something
that you could do today, using a few
cameras that are set to go off at an exact
moment. You could even do it on your phone using the burst mode in camera.
The main motive behind making this movie was to scientifically answer a
popularly debated question during this era: Are all four of a horse’s hooves
ever off the ground at the same time while the horse is galloping? This video
helped prove that they indeed were and, more importantly, motion
photography was born.
Heads Up by Boys' Life. (2013). What Was the First Movie Ever Made?. [online] Available at:
https://headsup.boyslife.org/what-was-the-first-movie-ever-made/ [Accessed 16 Dec. 2019].
How Film Has Evolved with Technology:

Today, the flexibility and immediacy of digital filming makes a lot of sense and
has evolved massively since even just a decade or two ago. While the
technology is still evolving, celluloid film is where it all started.

With Interstellar shot on Imax 65mm and projected in 70mm, and the new
round of Star Wars films committed to anamorphic 35mm, the continuing
impact of this well-developed technology should not be underestimated. This
basically means the quality of the image, how rich the colours are, how deep
the tones are and textural details that all attract passionate film makers like
Christopher Nolam, Steven Spielburg, Quentin Tarantino and JJ Abrams.
However the problem with this is that it is very expensive and has a high
demand.
In a culture that is continually looking for smaller, faster and more convenient
ways of doing things, we can often abandon a technology before it reaches
maturity. I think this is mainly because and soon as there is a slight upgrade
from what there was before, people want to share it straight away or make
money from a new design. This stunts the evolution however film is still
technically superior in some ways and dedicated craftsmen are still refining it.

Depth Sensors
Traditionally, 3D motion capture is an expensive investment, but the industry
have recently worked with a new format that seems to be revolutionising this
space.

In a short film called Miles, people in the industry worked with VFX
photographer Andrew Gant, who shot with a markerless motion-capture
device called the Depth Kit. Developed as a CGI-video hybrid, the software
repurposes the depth-sensing camera from the Microsoft Kinect to capture
and visualise the world as wireframe forms. Wireframe forms are a two-
dimensional illustration of a page's interface that will specifically focus on
space allocation and prioritization of content, functionalities available, and
intended behaviors. For these reasons, wireframes typically do not include any
styling, color, or graphics.
Examples of when this has
been used are to create an
object or person and their
movements which animators
can then create a very
realistic representation of
what they want to create.
Such as Avatar. Or in horror
or alien films creating
creatures.

By syncing the Depth Kit to the camera with

which many high end film makers and camera
men shoot with, Gant captured a 3D CGI
sculpture for every frame of film, essentially
giving us a file of 3D animation that perfectly
lined up to the film’s characters and action. Just
like this example of Yoda above. The thinking
and process behind the Depth Kit is really
indicative of how film-making is developing and
evolving. While not appropriate for every film, it
was perfect for Yoda, delivering powerful
flexibility that allowed the creators to explore
new ways of creating digital creatures and
characters.

International Student. (2019). History of Film. [online] Available at:

https://www.internationalstudent.com/study-film/history-of-film/ [Accessed 16 Dec. 2019].
Lumiere Brothers:
Lumière brothers, French inventors and
pioneer manufacturers of photographic
equipment who devised an early motion-
picture camera and projector called the
Cinématographe, this is where the name
cinema came from. Auguste Lumière, born on
October 19, 1862, Besançon, France and died
on April 10, 1954, Lyon. And his brother Louis
Lumière who was born on October 5, 1864, Besançon and died on June 6,
1948, Bandol, created the film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière in
1895. This in English meant “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”, which is
considered the first motion picture.

This film is called Citizen Kane, made by

Orson Welles.
“I don't think any word can explain a man's
life,” says one of the searchers through the
warehouse of treasures left behind by
Charles Foster Kane. Then they show the
famous series of shots leading to the close
up of the word “Rosebud” on a sled that has
been tossed into a furnace. It’s paint curling
in the flames. The audience will know that
this was Kane's childhood sled, taken from
him as he was torn from his family and sent
east to boarding school.
Rosebud is the emblem of the security,
hope and innocence of childhood, which a
man can spend his life seeking to regain. It is
the green light at the end of Gatsby's pier,
the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what. The bone tossed
into the air in 2001. It is that yearning after transience that adults learn to
suppress. “Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he
lost,” says Thompson, the reporter assigned to the puzzle of Kane's dying
word. “Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything.” True, it explains nothing,
but it is remarkably satisfactory as a demonstration that nothing can be
explained. “Citizen Kane” likes playful paradoxes like that. Its surface is as
much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding. I have
analysed it a shot at a time with more than 30 groups, and together we have
seen, I believe, pretty much everything that is there on the screen. The more
clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery.

Orson Welles:
Orson Welles, in full George Orson Welles was born May 6, 1915, Kenosha,
Wisconsin, U.S. and died October 10, 1985, Los Angeles, California. He was an
American motion-picture actor, director, producer, and writer. His innovative
narrative techniques and use of photography, dramatic lighting, and music to
create a much stronger dramatic line and to create mood made his Citizen
Kane (1941) which he pretty much did everything in, such as wrote, directed,
produced, and acted in, turned out to be one of the most-influential films in
the history of the art and films.
At some point, anyone interested in cinema, and how film storytelling has
developed out of the average kind of setting and equilibrium, has to tackle
Orson Welles’s movies. His 1941 feature debut Citizen Kane, with its
kaleidoscopic innovations in style, has often been voted the greatest film ever
made. It’s enough to make you curious, what makes his style of movies so
good?
Then there’s the matter of getting to grips with everything Welles made
afterwards. At first glance, this seems simple, there are only 12 or 13 finished
feature films that show his directing credit, depending on whether or not you
count the theatrically released TV documentary ‘Filming Othello’ (1978). But
you’ve also got certain films featuring Welles as actor in which the creative
style is so strong that fans have made a name for the style of acting/movies to
be called Wellesian, some examples of these are ‘Journey into Fear’, 1943 and
‘Jane Eyre’, 1944. So much so that there can be little question that Welles’s
presence on set was to be honest, an inspiration to the actual director.
Bauer, P. (2017). Lumiere brothers | Biography, Inventions, Movies, & Facts. [online] Encyclopedia
Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lumiere-brothers [Accessed 16 Dec. 2019].

Recent Films that effected the film industry:

Avatar: 2009
For better or worse, James Cameron’s
Avatar was the most technologically
significant film of the 21st century. In the
works for 15 years before it was released,
Avatar and James Cameron had a mission
to change cinema, and change cinema
they did. Popularizing 3D and this being
almost solely responsible for nearly every
cinema around the world to convert from analog projection to digital
projection, Avatar transported viewers into its fully CG world and by the time
they came out everything was different. It was so realistic that even though
the characters (Avatars) were quite obviously not real, they seemed real and to
many people seemed like they could be real and this could be happening
somewhere.

Much has been made of the mind-bending visual effects in Interstellar. But the
methods created by the film’s Oscar-nominated visual effects team may have
more serious applications than wowing movie audiences—they could actually
be useful to scientists, too. A new paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity tells
how the Interstellar team turned science fiction towards the service of
scientific fact and produced a whole new picture of what it might look like to
orbit around a spinning black hole.

Director Christopher Nolan and executive producer (and theoretical physicist)

Kip Thorne wanted to create a visual experience that was immersive and
credible. When they began to construct images of a black hole within an
accretion disk, they realized that existing visual effects technology wouldn’t cut
it—it created a flickering effect that would have looked bad in IMAX theaters.
So the team turned to physics to create something different.