Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin was and still is one of the very first super stars in film history. Chaplin started his career at the age of 13 on the theater stage. He was able to travel to the U.S to further his career, and he landed a movie deal with Mack Sennett to create a comedy film. Chaplin's biggest achievement was creating his tramp character, which skyrocketed him to stardom. The main thing that I admire about Charlie Chaplin is his style of comedy. He was able to recognize what was popular at the time and delivered what the people wanted. The most unique thing that I see in his work is how many films he managed to create with only a single characters. Not many other actors at the time were able to be a star based on just one character. Chaplin was, and still probably is, the most influential actors in movie history.

Nickelodeon to Movie Palace

Once films began showing to the public, people needed a place to watch the films and people needed to make money off the films, so the first solution was a place called a Nickelodeon. Literally meaning "nickel theater," a nickelodeon was a place where middle and lower class people could go and watch movies for only a nickel. Once nickelodeons were found all over the country, higher class people started to believe that they were gross and falling off. To evolve the idea of nickelodeon, the next step was the movie palace. Movie palaces were places that were much grander theaters, with the capacity to hold more people and a much fancier environment. These movie palaces gave more and more people a chance to see films in a much grander space. Without this evolution of theaters, we wouldn't have the theaters of today.

The Latham Loop

Before films became the art form that we know of today, film was a display of current technology. At the time, any moving image would stun audiences around the world. As the technology for film began to advance, more things needed to be implemented. When film started to use more and more actual film, filmmakers needed a way to make shooting easier. Because the film strips were very delicate, if the camera pulled on it too hard, it would tear and destroy the movie, pulled to slowly and softly the film would bunched up. In came the Lathams, a family that invented the very important Latham Loop. The Latham Loop was a very specific way of looping the film so it wouldn't tear during filming and playback. Without the Latham Loop, film would be a lot harder to produce.

Moving To LA

Once film started to get bigger and bigger as an art form, people started creating more ways to make their films. People were inventing new devices every day to make their films better, but Thomas Edison didn't want that to happen. At the time, Edison held over 1,000 patents, and a lot of them were things that related to the movie industry. If Edison found out someone was using his patented technology without paying him, he would send goons out to find and make the people pay what they needed to. Because of what Edison did to protect his patents, people wanted to get as far away from him as possible. This lead to many film makers to flee to California, a place very far away from Edison's home base of New Jersey. By moving to California, it allowed more people to make movies without Edison breathing down their neck.

Woman Pioneers

Mabel Normand was one of the first comediennes in film history, starring in 167 short films and 23 full length films. One of her biggest achievements was becoming her own director in some of her films. She was also one of the first big actors to start her career in the film industry, without prior experience in theater. Another thing she was known for was her comedic ability. At the time, some people said that she was a rival to Charlie Chaplin, one of the biggest comedians at the time. The way she fell from grace was due to multiple things. As she was directing her films, she was involved with multiple scandals, such as Fatty Arbuckle's Rape Trials and a murder of a close friend. With this mix of situations, it lead her to stop her film career and eventually her death at age 38.

George Melies

As film became a more artistic medium, people started to take advantage of how it can be used to tell stories. One of the first people to start this revolution of sorts was George Melies, a French magician getting his start in the film making business. His most famous work was his film, A Trip To The Moon, which spread around the world as the very first narrative film to be made. Not only did it inspire more people to become film makers, it gave Melies his sense of style. Big names like D.W Griffith said that he "owes him everything." His work was so influential because it gave a whole new meaning to what film was. Before Melies, films were just everyday scenes like a street or a park, but he turned that all on its head with his narratives. Without the influence of Melies, some of the most famous creators in film history wouldn't have gotten their start.

Tonight, Tonight

In the music video for Tonight, Tonight, The Smashing Pumpkins, they recreate different scenes from old films. The most recognizable film thats referenced is A Trip To The Moon, showing the characters of the music video traveling to the moon in an blimp. This references when the astronomers in the original film come up with the outrageous plan to shoot themselves out of a cannon in a bullet like contraption to reach the moon. Another reference to the film was when the two main characters of the music video land on the moon and have to battle aliens. These references are significant because it shows that the creators understand old styles of film and their stories, giving them the respect that they deserved.

Alice Guy-Blanche

Near the beginning of cinema, there was a super influential person thats almost never given the credit she deserves, and that person is Alice Guy-Blanche. Alice was the very first female film maker in history, with her credits being scene across over 1,000 films. One of her biggest accomplishments was creating a film with African American people and it not having outrageous stereotypes. These films were incredible at the time for multiple reasons, the main one being that she was a woman, and at the time most film directors were male. Being the significant figure she was, she changed the game in multiple ways while also giving a stark contrast between the films being made in America and the ones being made in France. Even though she was this huge influential figure at the time, she almost seems forgotten when we look back through film history.

Louise Le Prince

Louise Le Prince, a french inventor, was only recently discovered to be the father of the motion picture. Before his work was found, it was widely known that Edison and the Lumiere brothers started the movement of the motion picture. We now know that Prince was the first because of who he shot. In one of his films, a woman can be seen with her family. Historians were quick to learn that the woman had passed away before Edison or the Lumiere brothers were public about their inventions. The one thing that surprises me about Prince is why he didn't tell the public about his amazing invention. If he did, he could've been more popular and would've been recognized as the founder of the motion picture.

Early Film Scavenger Hunt

My personal favorite silent film is the French film A Trip To The Moon. This is my favorite silent film because of its early showcase of practical special effects. In the film, astronomers gather to create a plan to land on the moon. They eventually come up with the plan to create a giant bullet and cannon to shoot the astronauts into space. The most famous part of the film is the Man In The Moon, being represented by the moon with a huge face. The most amazing part of the film is how they used their limitations to their advantage. They we able to cut the film in certain ways to make it looks like the ship actually landed on the moon and making different things move in certain ways by using editing. The most common videos that I found about A Trip To The Moon, are explanation videos and recreations of the film in different mediums. Without this film, modern special effects wouldn't exist.

Early Films

After going through the list of old films, there are many similarities between them. Because of their age, all of the films have seen a decline in quality, such as age marks and low resolution. Another thing that most of them have in common is that they're just normal people doing normal things. I believe that filmmakers shot these films because they needed to show off their technology. As most of them don't have a story, it would be easier to just showcase someone doing normal things just to show off the technology. Some of them had pure entertainment intentions, but most of them were simply showcases of how film could evolve into something else. These early films differ from modern films because of how they were presented. In the beginning, these films were only shown to one person through a kinetoscope. Now, films are shown in large theaters to many people at the same time, making films more of a social experience. Without these early films, we wouldn't have modern films.

Muybridge

In the beginning of motion pictures, there were multiple people making breakthroughs in research. One person who made outstanding contributions was Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge's biggest contribution to the world of film was how he photographed a horse running. Until his discovery, people believed that when a horse ran, all of there legs would stretch out above the ground. Muybridge set up a series of cameras that went off with a trip wire, and as the horse ran, they took sequential pictures. By putting these images together, he proved that all of the horses legs do leave the ground, but they're tucked under the horses body. After his discovery, Muybridge continued to photograph animals and people further pushing the medium of photography and film.

Chronography

In the beginning of the world of animation and film, photography was everything. When looking at Marey's photos, we can see the beginnings of movement. Marey created a device called the photographic gun, allowing him to point at a subject and take 12 photos a second. When the photos were developed, each frame would be put side by side, showing how the subject was moving across the background. By showing each of these pictures side by side, it conveyed to the viewer that the object was in motion. Through the discovery of the photographic gun, people learned more and more about how motion was shown through pictures. Without the invention of the photographic gun, we would know less about how motion can be shown on a 2D plane.

The Invention Of Photography

Without the invention of photography, filmmaking wouldn't exist because of the groundwork it set for displaying images. In 1725, a German professor made a huge discovery in the world of capturing images. With the previously known camera obscura, he combined those methods with displaying the light on silver salt pewter plate. This led to one of the first images, that being of a letter, onto a piece of paper using light. After this discovery, Louis Daguerre exposed Iodized silver salt onto a metal sheet, showing a faint image of where the light was coming from. This cut the exposure time down from 8-10 hours to only around 10-20 minutes, letting more and more people "take photographs." The next piece of photo technology allowed for the used to expose the image on sensitive paper. Once the paper was soaked in hyposulphite, it produced a much clearer image than the inventions before. Without these pieces of photo technology, we would never be able to put images together to create movies.

The Phantasmagoria

Near the beginning of motion pictures, there was a device known as a magic lantern. A magic lantern was a device that would shine a light through a painted piece pf glass, showing a drawn picture on a screen or wall. This was the beginning of what people came to be known as a Phantasmagoria. This was a special stage where people saw eerie things such as skeletons and ghosts on the wall. In these shows they promoted to resurrect the dead and bring demons into the world of the living. At the time, the world was very centered on the belief of demons and the afterlife, making the shows all the more creepy. The Phantasmagoria was the beginning of a huge genre, the horror film.

Early Humans

Before we found ancient caves, historians believed that the beginning of film and animation began in the 1800's. However, a recent discovery has proved everything we knew about modern moving images wrong, In France, old cave paintings from thousands of years ago were discovered and changed the whole scene of animation and film history. If a fire was made at a certain location in the cave, the images would come to life, moving with the flickering of the fire. These huge sprawling paintings covered whole caves, describing stories and history that was yet to be found. These images were most likely used to tell stories to younger children and warn them about certain animals. In order to make these paintings, primitive humans used mixes of different material that would create paint and would use their hands and simple tools to create these pictures. With all of these images, our understanding of film and human history has changed dramatically.

Spring Semester Goals

In the beginning of the fall semester, I set some simple goals for myself to achieve in that first semester. The first goal that I set for myself was to learn to how operate a camera, and I think I achieved my first goal. In the beginning, I had no idea how to even turn on a camera, so learning so much about them in the first parts of the year was very beneficial to my start of the year. The second goal I set for myself was to learn more about Premiere Pro. I've always been interested in video editing, so learning more about it let me feel more in control of what I was creating. My last goal was to learn what a real film set felt like, and through our practice sets I've learned more than I thought I would. Without being diligent in this class, I wouldn't have learned all of these important skills.