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The History of Film and Movies

Film Copy Motion pictures have been around in one form or another since the 1860s. Perhaps the first genuine film was the zoetrope, a circular analogue animation device that show a moving image when the device was spun around. Some of the early film making machines were actually coin or hand operated and churned out a maximum of 10-15 pictures per second. By today’s standards this sounds very primitive, yet in the 19th century it would have seemed like magic. Later, artists like Charlie Chaplin wowed audiences with his ground breaking slap stick comedy in the new silent visual medium. Early films were, naturally, silent. The technology that allowed sound to coexist with moving pictures took a lot longer to arrive, though people had been trying to achieve it since the turn of the century. Once such speaking movies did come around, they were called ‘talkies’ and took the world by storm. The next step, once sound was fully established, was to have colour transform the medium, making even more realistic and life like the experience. However, it wasn’t until the end of World War II that films were regularly made in colour, due in the main to the expense. As times got easier and technology better, this became much more affordable. Dubbing is a process whereby foreign languages are made understandable to a domestic audience by means of a person talking over the original sound track in a transliterated way, so that the audience can understand what the actors are saying. Similarly, subtitles serve the same purpose as does dubbing, only instead of there being a spoken overlay to the soundtrack, there is a line of text at the bottom of the screen telling the viewer what the actors are saying. Films can be called movies, films, motion pictures, photographic pictures and the history of film is litter with other, less common terms. Film preservation was a very important issue before the digital age, due to the problem of film decay. Nowadays films are sometimes digitally produced and recorded, thus eradicating those earlier problems and creating a new set, though the majority are still recorded on film. Indeed, cinemas still use projectors and film reel very similar to those that were used back in the early part of the 20th century. The characteristics of modern movie making are special effects. CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) has taken over much of Hollywood, as the bounds of what can be achieved visually are stretched to perfection. Narratives are equivalent to storylines and constitute one aspect of all film making (except Howard the Duck). Analysing such elements, film critics might just review a film based on their own, naked understanding, or they might take on the mantle of psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory or structuralist film theory. Film criticism is also a niche field within journalism and serves to influence box office sales and rentals/purchases of DVDs. Film genres in modern film include action, comedy, horror, thriller, independent film and drama. Film crews are typically made up of many departments. These include:- Production Art Department Electrical Editorial Visual Effects Sound Music Art Wardrobe Camera Production Sound Grip Sets Props Construction Scenic Greens Hair and make-up The most popular movie studios include Warner Bros, Disney, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, United Artists, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount and RKO. An open content film uses either, open source methodology or open source software, or both. Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express are examples of commercial film editing software that both produce digital video. French new wave was a movement in the 1950s and 60s that attempted to break away from the classical methods of cinema throughout the earlier part of the 20th Century. The history of film is diverse and heterogeneous in terms of the genres and movement that have become popular.

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