Seminole Cinema: SEHS Film



IB Film: Year One, Week 3.2Edison, Lumiere, and the Motion PictureDiscovering True Filmed MotionBy this point in film history, two of the three main ingredients for motion in film were in place: persistence of vision had been documented and understood and still photography had been invented and refined.All that was missing was motion.As mentioned a few lessons ago, Eadweard Muybridge had invented sequential photography and had even found a way to create a semblance of motion. But true motion picture cameras, single cameras that could shoot sequential images, had still not been perfected.This would all change in the early 1890s.In America, England, and France inventors were fast-tracking the creation of the mechanical devices needed to photograph and project motion pictures.Thomas Edison in America, along with his team of bright young inventors, exploited George Eastman's new flexible film base (celluloid) and developed both a camera and projection system (the Kinetoscope).Image shows the first camera and projection system, the KinetoscopePublic DomainImage shows the Cinematograph - Lumière brothers movie camera in 1895.Public DomainIn France, the Lumiere brothers, Louis and Auguste, patented a device called the Cinematographe that could both film and project moving images.?Different Approaches to FilmingIt is interesting to note the different approaches taken by Edison in North America and the Lumiere brothers in France.Edison and company built one of the world's first motion picture studios, which they called 'The Black Maria'.Filming in the earliest days required a great deal of light, so this studio was built on a giant turntable and had a hinged roof that could open in order to allow the entire building to follow the sun.Inside the studio, Edison's large and heavy camera sat on one end and anything they wanted to film was brought in and set up under the open roof.Some of these early films included?The Kiss?( the first patented motion picture ),?Turkish Dance,?Ella Lola, and?Boxing Cats.By 1895 projected moving images were being screened regularly in America and Europe and the age of motion pictures had begun.The first film studio, Thomas Edision's 'Black Maria'Public Domain, via Wikimedia CommonsMeanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Lumiere brothers were perfecting their Cinematographe camera/projector.This light and portable device allowed the brothers to film outside, and as a consequence, their earliest films have a completely different look than Edison's.While Edison and company were filming circus strongmen and exotic dancers, the Lumiere brothers were filming trains, factory workers, and snowball fights.Institut Lumière - CINEMATOGRAPHE CameraVictorgrigas - Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)Edison was as good a businessman as he was an inventor, and he quickly devised a way to exploit this new?medium.This device was the Kinetoscope and for 1 penny (the price soon inflated to 1 nickel) a customer could press their?face to a viewer, and get a peep at a short loop of film.Edison was convinced the single viewer concept was a money maker and for a time it was, but others realised that full projection of images for a mass audience was the way to go.While Edison seemed perfectly satisfied with the single viewer Kinetoscope, William Dickson, one of his former employees, was working hard to develop a functional film projector.?The problem was that any loop of film longer than 30 seconds or so tended to snap.?So Dickson and a father and son team called the Lathams got together and figured out that leaving a little bit of slack would allow longer spools of film to be projected without breaking.?This idea when combined with a?gate?system similar to that used on the film cameras, resulted in a viable projector and ushered in the era of the movie theatre. ................
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