Influence of Technology on Motion Pictures Industry

Influence of Technology on Motion Pictures Industry is
Influence of Technology in the growth of Motion Pictures
The progress filmmakers have made in creating and using the latest technology has drastically influenced the film industry and the cinematic experience. This has caused films to evolve over the years with each progressing idea, technology, and technique, allowing filmmakers to bring their vision to life more accurately and more convincingly to the big screen. The development of technology has affected an extremely wide array of areas concerning film, including the production process, the way films are viewed, how the films are distributed, and even how they are promoted. These new innovations are advancing so quickly now that the traditional cinema-going experience may find itself having to compete with online streaming of filmed entertainment.
In the pioneering days, three different processes had to be combined to create the first ‘movies’. The first process was to work on and enhance the ‘gadgets’ that made little drawings seem to come alive with motion. The second necessary step was to combine these gadgets with the science of photography. The third step was to project the moving photographs onto a wall. Edison didn’t think it worthwhile to project his movies onto a screen, as he and many others believed movies were merely a fad that would soon die out.
With the age of inventions and the path laid, man was spurred on to continue developing such mechanisms. New ideas brought about better cameras that captured more realistic photographs to animate, and improved lenses and bulbs to send out quick flickers of light to trick the eye further and create smooth moving motion. ‘Moving photographs’ then moved onto celluloid strips. In the early stages this equipment was limited due to technological setbacks and experimentation.
Film history from 1895 to 1906
The first eleven years of motion pictures show the cinema moving from a novelty to an established large-scale entertainment industry. The films themselves represent a movement from films consisting of one shot, completely made by one person with a few assistants, towards films several minutes long consisting of several shots, which were made by large companies in something like industrial conditions.
Film history from 1906 to 1914
By 1907 there were about 4,000 small “nickelodeon” cinemas in the United States. The films were shown with the accompaniment of music provided by a pianist, though there could be more musicians. There were also a very few larger cinemas in some of the biggest cities. Initially, the majority of films in the programs were Pathé films, but this changed fairly quickly as the American companies cranked up production. The program was made up of just a few films, and the show lasted around 30 minutes. The reel of film, of maximum length 1,000 feet (300 m), which usually contained one individual film, became the standard unit of film production and exhibition in this period. The program was changed twice or more a week, but went up to five changes of program a week after a couple of years. In general, cinemas were set up in the established entertainment districts of the cities. In other countries of the Western world the film exhibition situation was similar. With the change to “nickelodeon” exhibition there was also a change, led by Pathé in 1907, from selling films outright to renting them through film exchanges.
Evolution of various technologies
Multi-reel films
It was around 1912 that the actors in American films, who up to this point had been anonymous, began to receive screen credit, and the way to the creation of film stars was opened. The appearance of films longer than one reel also helped this process. Such films were extremely rare, and almost entirely restricted to film versions of the life of Christ, which had reached three reels in length in the first few years of cinema. They were always shown as a special event in special venues, and supported by live commentary and music. A unique addition to this style of presentation was The Story of the Kelly Gang, made in Australia in 1906. This was a four-reel version of the career of this famous (in Australia) outlaw, and was incomprehensible without explanation. More multi-reel films were made in Europe than in the United States after 1906, because the MPPC insisted on working on the basis of one-reel films up until 1912. However, before this, some MPPC members got around this restriction by occasionally making longer stories in separate parts, and releasing them in successive weeks, starting with Vitagraph's The Life of Moses in five parts (and five reels) at the end 1909. In other countries this film was shown straight through as one picture, and it inspired the creation of other multi-reel films in Europe.
With the increased production required by the nickelodeon boom, extra artificial lighting was used more and more in the film studios to supplement diffuse sunlight, and so increase the hours that film could be shot during the day. The main sources used were modified arc lights made for street lighting. These were either hung on battens suspended forward of the actors from the roof or mounted in groups on floor stands. The addition of a metal reflector round the arc source directed a very broad sweep of light in the desired direction. Large mercury vapor tube lights (Cooper-Hewitts) were also used in racks placed in the same way. Arc lights had been used to produce special lighting effects in films like the light from a lamp or firelight before 1906, but this now became more common.
Animation
The technique of single frame animation was developed in 1907 by Edwin S. Porter in The Teddy Bears and by J. Stuart Blackton with Work Made Easy. In the first of these the toy bears were made to move, apparently on their own, and in the latter film building tools were made to perform construction tasks without human intervention, by using frame-by-frame animation.
Sound Era
Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome (Eyman, 1997). In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the "Vitaphone" system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. The sound film was invented by the Hungarian Dénes Mihály in 1918. During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this process was actually accomplished first by Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film The Photo-Drama of Creation. This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking pictures", or "talkies", were the future.
Videotapes
During the 1980s, audiences began increasingly watching movies on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the movie studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of movies on home video became a significant "second venue" for exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the movie companies.
New special effects and DVDs
The early 1990s saw the development of a commercially successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Titanic (1997), independent films like Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video. Filmmakers associated with the Danish film movement, Dogme 95, introduced a manifesto aimed to purify filmmaking. Its first few films gained worldwide critical acclaim, after which the movement slowly faded out.
3D
Recently there has been a revival in 3D film popularity the first being James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss which was released as the first full-length 3-D IMAX feature filmed with the Reality Camera System. This camera system used the latest HD video cameras, not film, and was built for Cameron by Emmy nominated Director of Photography Vince Pace, to his specifications. The same camera system was used to film Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2003), Aliens of the Deep IMAX (2005), and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005).
Most recently on August 28, 2009 The Final Destination was released in Real D, 3D and D-BOX.

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