Evolution of fims

Filmistan: Journey Through the Cinema.

When it comes to Cinema and Movies , It sets the Roll for our Little onces. So, Doing this exercise with my Students was not at all Difficult. It was lot more fun and exciting , So we Choose the best way to take on the Roller coaster Ride with some Visual Learning , and hence bid goodbye to Books and paper for a little while. It was totally a new experience for them to learn this Historic Evolution of Cinema through Quick Animated Videos.

This Made the series of learing Events fun filled and easy to me Memorised and because of the Fact that it included No writing and Paper Work , It boosted them more towards the learning of facts.

Below is the summarisation of our fun filled lesson  on Evolution of Films.

The word Films, itself fills one with lots of Excitement with a Rushof Drama, Romance, Action, Thriller and Suspence.

Cinema has come a long way since it first began in the 1800's. Read as we take you through the film eras that defined it.

Cinema has come a long way since it began in the 1800’s.Read as we take you through the film eras that defined it.

Early movie cameras were fastened to the head of their tripod with only simple levelling devices provided. These cameras were thus effectively fixed during the course of the shot, and hence the first camera movements were the result of mounting a camera on a moving vehicle. The Lumière brothers shot a scene from the back of a train in 1896.

Woah!! That really Interesting, at this point I had already come across many astonished faces in class.

Pre-Cinema

Cinema didn’t just happen; it developed from other art forms like Storytelling and Photography. It was inspired by what came before it, and so it is also important to mention its influences.

Shadows

Telling stories with shadows puppets have always been around but its the magic lantern shows that started in the 1600s that were crucial to the birth of cinema. Pictures painted on glass were projected by a lantern (just a candle and a lens) onto the wall. This lantern was an early version of today’s projectors.

The Moving Image

From the 1830s onwards, more and more people were finding ways to make still images appear to be moving. They all used the scientific concept of “persistence of vision”. This just means that the eye takes time to see, so if images flash in front of our eyes before they have the chance to properly see them, it appears as though they are in motion.

Eadweard Muybridge

Photographer Eadweard Muybrigde wanted to capture a horse in movement so he set up 24 cameras with trip wire. The result he produced in 1878 was a series of picture that made it seem like the horse was in movement when they were viewed in a peep show machine.This is what it looked like: The Horse’s Gallop (1878)

Etienne-Jules Marey

Shortly after Muybridge did it, Marey photographed a bird in movement using a single camera. The camera was in the form of a rifle and it took 12 pictures a second.

In 1885, George Eastman created the first celluloid roll film, which allowed inventor Thomas Edison and assistant William Dickson to invent the first camera to record movement in 1891. The Kinetograph produced film that could only been seen by one person at a time through a peep show machine.

The Silent Era

The Silent Era is marked as the birth of cinema when cinema was all about experimentation and pushing boundaries. All of the new discoveries of this era helped shape the eras that followed and the filmmakers and films that came after them.

Obviously named for its lack of sound, films from this era were in black and white and some of them were filmed on as little as a single reel of tape (averaging from a few minutes to just over an hour).

Key Filmmakers:

The Lumière Brothers (Auguste: 1862 – 1954, Louis: 1864 – 1948)

George Méliès (1861 – 1938)

Charlie Chaplin

D. W. Griffith

Charlie Chaplin

He used his iconic character The Tramp (with its tight vest, loose trousers, cane, moustache and top hat) to bring his vaudeville background to the big screen. He was able to successful make audiences laugh and cry by the way he acted.

The Talkies

Once the first Vitaphone film with sound) was released in 1927 (The Jazz Singer), everything changed. Filmmakers had to adapt to the new technology and actors had to adapt as well. Some actors had to quit because their voices did not match well with their image and the audience didn’t like them anymore. Others couldn’t find work because their acting was too over-the-top and theatrical (as it needs to be in silent films, but not in sound films).