Transcript Movies

Movies
Thomas Edison
The Creation of
Motion Pictures
A weird and wonderful tale of
unrelated things coming together
That’s gun cotton
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Soak cotton in nitric and sulfuric acid
Let dry
Wash in water
Let dry
Light it and get…
It’ll make sense later
Franz Uchatius
Projector - 1853
Ludwig Doebler
Aristotle
Pinhole camera
Ibn Al-Hathem (Alhazen)
Joseph Nièpce
World’s first photograph
Louis Daguerre
Daguerrotype of Lincoln
William Henry Fox Talbot
Photograph of Lincoln
Ludwig Doebler (again)
Uchatius’ projector
Eadweard Muybridge
The Horse Bet - 1872
Muybridge’s disk
The Zoopraxiscope - 1879
John Wesley Hyatt - 1863
Why is Hyatt important?
Hyatt, a printer, combined camphor,
alcohol and gun cotton, compressed it
into billiard balls
 The material was called “celluloid”
 Great stuff, except
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They had an
unfortunate tendency
to explode – after all,
they were made of
gun cotton.
Hannibal Goodwin
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Took the celluloid
invented by Hyatt
and turned it into
sheets
George Eastman
Took Goodwin’s
celluloid sheets
and turned them
into strips
 These strips are
called film
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Etienne Jules Marey
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Added sprocket holes
to the edge of film in
order to pull it through
the projector
The first movie
projector using strips
of pictures instead of
disks
Thomas Alva Edison
Edison put together all the parts
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Parts and ideas he got from others
Uchatius’s idea of passing pictures rapidly in front
of a light and through a lens, creating the appearance
of moving pictures, which was taken by Doebler as
stage show, attracting the attention of Muybridge,
who told Edison about it
 Hyatt’s celluloid, turned into sheets by Goodwin,
and then into strips as film by Eastman
 Marey’s sprocket holes on the edge of the film
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Edison’s parts
 The
light bulb for a light source
 Marketing the whole idea, selling his
Edison’s Kinetoscope – 1894
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Movies were short films of regular life
Two men boxing
 A girl dancing
 Personal lives, such as
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Lumière Brothers
Lumière’s program
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La Sortie des usines Lumière (quitting time at
the Lumiere factory)
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Le Repas de bébé (a Lumiere child eating)as
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L’Arroseur arrosé (a boy playing a practical joke
on a gardener)
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L’Arrivée d’un train en gare
Arrivee d’un train en gare
All this was fine, but soon
the novelty wore off.
More was needed.
George Méliès
Méliès - 1902
Melies and others followed the
Lumieres and showed movies in
theatres. They were called
“Nickelodeons” – odeon from the
Greek for theatre, and nickel for
what patrons paid to watch the
movies.
Edison jumped on the
bandwagon.
Edison’s projecting kinetoscope
The Great Train Robbery - 1903
Again, the novelty soon wore off.
The time had come for longer
films – two and three reelers
instead of one-reelers, like D.W.
Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”
You may have noticed
something
No sound
Edison tried adding sound by
combining his kinetoscope and
his kinetophone, showing the
film while playing the sound.
The major problem was
synchronization
Remember the telephone –
How sound could be converted to
electrical impulses
Changing the amplitude of an
electrical current can cause a
light to brighten or dim in direct
relation to the amount of
electricity.
Danish researchers –
Discovered selenium would
generate an electrical signal in
direct relation to the amount
of light shining on it.
Exposing film to the flickering
light created by sound, then
putting it on one side of the film
created the sound track.