History of Film
What are movies?
Movies are a way of storytelling using a sequence of images. They first came about in the 19th century when the Edison Company successfully demonstrated a prototype version of the kinetoscope in 1891. However, this design only allowed one person at a time to view the moving images. The kinetoscope dragged on until 1894, once it became a commercial success and well established worldwide.
Who invented cinemas?
In December 1895, the Lumiére brothers (Louis and Auguste Lumiére) were the first to present projected moving images in front of an audience in Paris, France. They invented the revolutionary camera, projector and printer known as the Cinématographe. Their device was able to record, develop, and project film, which was a novelty to society back then.
The Rise of the Film Industry
In the beginning, films weren’t as long as the films we see today. They lasted only a few minutes or less. Movies were displayed at locations that consisted of a screen and a darkened room, primarily at fairgrounds and music halls. The film mainly showed short comedies, news events, or landmarks. The film industry began to rise by 1914 when several national film industries were established — the dominant sectors were Europe, Russia, and Scandinavia. By then, the narrative of a film was an important aspect. The industries continued investing more money into production as more people paid to see movies. The most significant growth occurred during the first World War when the American industry grew relatively substantial.
Colour
Colour was introduced into films through hand colouring, tinting, toning, and stencilling. By 1906, the British Kinemacolor process produced natural colour moving images for the first time, thanks to the principles of colour separation. This was shown to the public for the first time in 1909, primarily used for documentaries then. By 1932, the three-colour process was introduced and used in films for the first time.
Sound
When it came to synchronising audio to moving images, the first attempts were made using phonographic cylinders or discs. However, in 1927, the first full-length movie to successfully synchronise dialogue was The Jazz Singer (1927), which used the Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system – Employed a separate record disc consisting of a reel of film for the sound. As time went on, The Vitaphone system was seen as unreliable, resulting in them being replaced by an optical. These soundtracks were recorded photographically along the edge of films, initially designed for newsreels such as Movietone.
Cinema’s Golden Age
The cinema’s golden age began in the early 1930’s, where the majority of all feature-length movies were presented with synchronised audio. Furthermore, during the mid-1930s, many of those movies were also displayed in full colour. During this decade, the cinema became a top form of entertainment, causing people to attend cinemas around two times a week regularly. By then, additional facilities had been incorporated, such as cafes and ballrooms. These were mainly found in “Picture Palaces”, which were larger cinemas located in cities that could hold over 3,000 people in a single auditorium.
Aspect Ratio
During the invention of the Kinetoscope, Thomas Edison had used a 35mm film to record all footage – eventually becoming the industry standard by 1909. The footage consisted of a width-to-height relationship known as the aspect ratio. Footage was recorded with an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 1.33:1. Due to optical sound, the aspect ratio adjusted to 1.37:1 in 1932 when it was officially approved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science. This aspect ratio is also known as the “Academy ratio”.
Shot Dialogue
Shot Length
The shot length refers to the distance between the camera and the subject it’s currently shooting. These shots can either be described as “Wide” or “Tight” (far or near). Furthermore, they can be broken down into six main shots.
Wide Shot – Displays the whole subject and scene as if the viewer is watching a play on the stage.
Extreme Wide Shot – This shot is further wider than the usual wide shot, where the audience can watch the scene from a distance. This shot is typically used to establish a place/environment.
Medium Shot – This is a partial body shot of the subject, commonly from the knees or waist up. This shot is mainly used to show off a character.
Two Shot – This shot consists of two subjects within a single frame, typically used to show the closeness between two characters.
Close Up Shot – These shots are used to display a detailed area of the subject, usually used to highlight something important. These shots are used frequently to show the emotions of a character, similar to a portrait.
Extreme Close Up Shot – This shot is closer than the regular close up shot, where we can’t even visualise the entire detailed area anymore.
Angle
Camera angle refers to the vertical level of the camera when shooting its subject. Directors use a variation of camera angles to give their scene a particular effect.
Eye-Level – This angle is also known as the neutral angle, where the camera is positioned at the subject’s eye level.
High Angle – The camera is positioned at a high level, aiming downwards at the subject, giving the audience the impression that the subject is smaller than it is.
Low Angle – This shot is the complete opposite of the high angle shot, where the camera aims upwards at the subject instead, giving the viewers the idea that the subject is larger and menacing.
Dutch Angle – The camera aims towards the subject at a tilted angle, making everything within the scene seem a bit strange.
Depth
The camera’s depth is treated the same way as the human eye; they both can’t focus on everything within their view, only focusing on the essential elements. Depth is controlled by the lens and focus of a camera, giving us the definition of depth of field, where the nearest or furthest subject within the scene appears acceptable sharp.
Deep Focus – This cinematography technique uses a large depth of field, where everything subject within the scene is in focus, from the closest subject to the furthest subject.
Shallow Focus – This technique is the complete opposite, using a small depth of field instead, where it only focuses on one subject within the scene. Directors use this technique to direct the audience’s eyes to the most important subject in the frame.
Rack Focus – This technique also uses a small depth of field to focus on the subject. However, this trick enables the focus to change mid-shot from one subject to another.
Tilt Shift – This technique uses fake shallow focus to selectively blur specific areas within the scene, creating an artificial depth of field for exciting effects. This can be done using either a particular lens or digital post-production.
Movement
Camera movements are essentials when making a movie. There are many motion techniques directors use to tell their stories.
Handheld – This is the simplest way to add movement. It only requires the cameraman to pick up the camera themselves and start filming. Holding the camera like this would give the cameraman more freedom whilst filming. However, they would also have less camera control, causing their footage to be shaky. These shots are typically used during chaotic scenes of panic, action, and urgency as they heighten the moment’s intensity.
Steadicam – These shots are similar to a handheld shot. Yet, they consist of a rig to help stabilise it, eliminating the shakiness in the footage and making it more fluid.
Pan – This shot requires the cameraman to mount the camera onto a tripod, where they can swivel the camera horizontally, left or right, using several controlled actions.
Tilt – This shot is the same as the pan shot regarding how it’s done. However, instead of swivelling the camera horizontally, the cameraman tilts it vertically, motioning upwards and downwards.
Zoom – This shot is captured by adjusting the focal length of the camera lens, from wide to tight quickly or from tight to wide slowly. This technique gives the illusion of moving closer or further away from the subject.
Dolly/Tracking shot – This shot requires the camera to be mounted on a moving dolly/track to motion alongside the subject, from left to right, back to front, or sometimes on a curve.
Jib/Crane Shot – This shot causes the camera to move upwards or downwards, eventually revealing a random subject. Directors create this shot by mounting the camera onto the end of a jib crane.
Dolly Zoom – This trick combines camera movement with rig movement to create an effect whereby the dolly goes towards or away from the subject whilst the cameraman zooms in the opposite direction. The subject remains the same size throughout, but the depth of the shot will change.
Editing
Editing has always been important to filmmakers. It helps their movies move at a good pace, suiting the story and establishing a proper engagement with the audience. However, many directors like having a few scenes play out for an extended period. These types of shots are known as Sequence shots. You would rarely see these shots as they could be challenging to execute. It only takes one participant to mess up and fumble everything. Therefore, directors use a variety of transitions to cut from one scene to another.
The most basic transitions are:
Cut – The most straightforward transition where it cuts from the end of one shot to the beginning of the next shot.
Dissolve – This transition slowly fades one shot into the next shot, sharing the same space for a few seconds.
Wipe – This transition causes the second shot to roll over onto the first shot, traditionally used to mark the end of one scene and the beginning of the next, or to mark the change of a location.
Fade in/Fade out – This transition is a common way to start or end a film, going to or from a black screen.
Continuity Editing
When watching a film, you would think a usual scene would be filmed over the space of 5 minutes strictly by the edits. However, some scenes may take hours, days, or weeks to film, depending on the circumstances. To work around this, filmmakers developed a syntax whereby they would shoot various shots that mimicked the previous frame of the shot prior. This strategy causes the audience to believe everything is happening simultaneously. Good continuity editing would be invisible to the human eye.
However, these edits can be difficult to pull off and require multiple editors to analyse the scenes. There have been many movies where the audiences noticed the in-universe logic of a scene doesn’t match what shows up on the screen. These are known as continuity Errors.
Screen Direction
Directors use screen direction to establish continuous space in their films, helping the audience understand the relative location as there is a consistent direction of movement between each shot. The screen direction is usually the same direction the subject appears to be moving in.
Match on Action
This video editing technique cuts from one shot to another that matches the first shot’s action, allowing the movements from one shot to carry over to the next. If the subject(s) aren’t making any movements, directors will use the Eyeline technique, which is very similar. They would use the subject(s) eyes to indicate what the subject is seeing and where they are looking.
180 Degree Rule
This is a filmmaking technique that directors use as a basic guideline to help the audience keep track of the subjects in the scene. Directors use an invisible axis as the guide when shooting their shot, with the camera only positioned on one side. This is typically the case when multiple subjects face each other in one shot.
However, this rule has been broken many times in films. This is known as crossing the axis. You would notice this in movies when the camera is placed in multiple positions within one scene. Directors get away with breaking this rule as their subject’s eye line is fixed and their placement is made clear, resulting in a not jarring scene.
Mise En Scene
This is a French term, meaning “Placing on stage”, referring to everything placed on a stage or in front of a camera. This term broadly describes a film’s overall look and feel strictly from its visuals.
Decor
Before the director rolls the camera, they set a scene by deciding on a setting for their shot. This could be indoors, outdoors, composited on a greenscreen, etc. This tells a part of the story to the audience before the actors have come on stage yet. The objects used strictly for the set are known as set dressing. These objects could display the time of when the shot took place or represent the current state of a character. The objects that characters interact with are known as props. Props could highlight a character’s background or their intentions throughout the film. Moreover, costumes could also tell a part of the story to the audience before the camera rolls.
Lighting
Lighting is an essential factor to consider before filming a scene. It creates a visual mood, atmosphere, and sense of meaning for the audience. One of the most common setups directors use for their shots is the three-point lighting setup.
Three-point Lighting:
- Key Light – This light serves as the primary source of light.
- Fill Light – This light fills in the shadows created by the key light.
- Backlight – This light lights up the subject’s back, separating them from the background.
There are other variations of lighting setups used for particular aesthetics.
High-Key Lighting – This lighting setup results in the subject(s) appearing brightly lit with more fill light and softer shadows. This setup is often used in advertisements for food, cosmetics, and beauty products.
Low-Key Lighting – This lighting setup uses a hard light source to emphasise the shadows within the shot, using a weak key, weak fill, but a powerful backlight. This setup is ideal when directors create a dark mood for their scene.
Chiaroscuro – This lighting setup consists of a contrasting mix of strong highlights with deep shadows, creating tension between the light and dark elements. This baroque painterly effect first emerged during the renaissance, initially as a painting technique.
Hard Lighting – Movies filmed using the Chiaroscuro style usually take advantage of the Hard Lighting technique. This technique consists of bright, harsh key lights that create hard shadows, causing the scene to appear tough, angular, and unflattering.
Soft Lighting – This technique is the opposite of Hard Lighting. The lights diffuse through a filter instead, resulting in them wrapping around and sculping the subject without harming it. This setup is ideal for romantic scenes.
Colour
The use of colours has changed many times over the years in films. In the beginning, the default colours were black and white. These colours lasted decades because the technique had a certain simplicity to it, and colour processing used to be expensive back then.
Tinting – This effect caused an entire scene to bathe in a specific colour and was used for narrative effect.
Sepia Tone – This was one of the most famous forms of tinting during the monochrome era. It gave most of the director’s shots a “dusty” appeal.
Colour Grading – A film’s colour is selectively adjusted so that the scene has a distinctive appearance. This technique can change the mood of a scene by adjusting various attributes.
Saturation – The intensity of the colours found within a scene. Filmmakers would increase the saturation of a scene to make it feel brighter and more exciting. In contrast, filmmakers would decrease the saturation of a scene to make it appear washed-out and desolate.
Space
The usage of space within a frame and how everything is composed in it makes a scene unique.
Balance – Gives weight to the frame, keeping a symmetrical balance throughout the shot.
Deep Space – Films intend to use deep space if important elements are positioned close to and far from the camera. Deep space is used to draw the audience’s attention, stressing how far away the elements are from each other.
Shallow Space – This is the opposite of deep space. In Shallow space, the image appears to be flat due to the little depth, or no depth, within the scene, emphasising the slight distance between the subject and the background.
Offscreen Space – This is a creative method that directors use to convey information to the audience. In offscreen space, the scene draws attention to something outside of the frame, causing the audience to become aware that something is occurring offscreen.
History of Animation and VFX
1609 – The Magic Lantern – A Machine that projected images onto a screen in front of an audience, engaging the illusion of moving images.
1800 – Zoetrope – A device that produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of still drawings.
1914 – The first character animation – “Gertie”, the dinosaur.
1928 – The introduction of music and sound in animation – Steamboat Willie’s Mickey Mouse.
1929 – The wall street crash (Black Thursday) – Led many people to watch animation even more as it was the only affordable form of entertainment at the time.
1933 – King Kong – Claymation was used to create realistic creatures in a live-action film (Stop motion animation).
1937 – The first full-length animated feature film with technicolour was created = Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
1958 – The 7th Voyage of Sinbad – Stop motion animation.
1963 – Jason and the Argonauts – The skeleton battle (Stop motion animation).
1970 – Artists utilised animation for advertisement purposes.
1985 – Young Sherlock Holmes – The first photo-real CGI character (the Stained-Glass Knight).
1986 – Steve Jobs and co-founders created Pixar – CGI animation was born.
1988 – Animation appealed to the older audience once cinemas showed the first anime movie – Akira.
1989 – The Abyss – 75 second screen time of the liquid water tentacle.
1991 – The Terminator 2: Judgement Day – The liquid metal cyborg.
1993 – Jurassic Park – Revolutionised computer graphics as it brought real photo dinosaurs with skeleton textured skin and detailed muscles to the screens. Artists converted the 3D character(s) real-life movements into computer keyframes.
1995 – Casper – The first computer-animated title character.
1995 – Animation became the most significant form of entertainment for children worldwide.
1995 – Disney Pixar’s Toy Story – First 3D animated featured length movie to be designed entirely through the computer.
1996 – Dragonheart – The dragon’s face was modelled after the actor (Sean Connery).
1999 – Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace – The beginning of a computer-generated fairy-tale trilogy.
2001 – Final Fantasy – Square Pictures created the first hyper-real, fully computer-generated feature film based on the original designs.
2002 – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – Famous for the visual effects on the CGI character Gollum.
2002 – Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones – Massive VFXs improvements from the first instalment due to the CGI character Yoda.
2003 – The Matrix Reloaded – The artist used a technique known as the Universal capture, which produced the 3D recording of the actor’s performance, which could be played back from different angles and under other lighting conditions.
2005 – King Kong – Famous for having the most VFX shots within a single film. Whereas the original King Kong movie used stop motion, this version used motion-capture performance for the title character, consisting of 132 sensors on the actor’s face.
2006 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest – Famous for the computer-generated character Davy Jones as critics believed they were watching a live-action performance with the actor wearing prosthetic make-up.
2007 – Beowulf – Artists used an advanced motion capture technique to convert live action into digital animation.
2008 – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Famous for scanning the actor’s face and digitally ageing it with the Mova Contour technology and transferring it onto a digital head.
2009 – James Cameron’s Avatar – Was created mainly using CGI and broke box office records.