Production Glossary
Film
Film, also known as a motion picture or movie, is moving or motionless images captured by a camera or created through animation. Film got its name from the medium on which its contents is recorded, film (also called film stock or photographic film). Each singular image is known as a frame. As the film progresses from one frame to the next, the impression of motion occurs. Persistence of vision, a function of the human eye which causes an “afterimage” to remain on the retina for roughly one twenty-fifth of a second, keeps the viewer from seeing the flicker between film frames.The future of film was influenced thousands of years before by the simple play. Plays set the norm for productions of any kind and included many of the same parts of film that exist today, such as scores, direction, actors, costumes, scripts, sets, storyboards, and audiences. The first step toward film as it is known today was the introduction of three devices that enabled a two-dimensional drawing to move. The 1860s saw the advent of the praxinoscope, zoetrope, and mutoscope. All three of these units could play a sequence of drawn images at a speed fast enough for the images to seem like they were moving.
When celluloid was finally invented (initially for still photography), Eadweard Muybridge became the first to produce a “motion picture”. By utilizing twenty-four cameras, he created a series of pictures of a horse running, an image that has become iconic in the history of film. The motion picture camera came about in the 1880s and led to the invention of a motion picture projector capable of playing the single reel on which the movie was held. Movies of this time period were single frame stationary shots depicting action with the absence of editing. The very first public viewing of a motion picture was held at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall on April 23, 1896.
Silent films were the popular norm for the last half of the 19th century, despite unsuccessful attempts to incorporate sound. These movies were rarely more than a form of visual art, but eventually filmmakers began to include a deliberate plot structure, utilizing multi-angle shots and camera movement. To drown out the noise of the projector, and to add suspense and emotion, theaters would employ musicians to play a score during the film. Brought about by theater owners, by the 1920s it became standard to include sheet music specific to the film being shown.
Aside from the introduction of sound, the second major improvement in film making was the addition of color, also referred to as “natural color”. This process meant that the color seen on film was recorded from nature, not added in later through hand coloring the black and white prints. Technicolor became the most sought after way to produce color in motion pictures. The highly saturated hues, as seen in The Wizard of Oz, are a trademark of that era.
The fall of the studio system marked the beginning of years of transformation in film production and variety. Wave after wave of genre flood through the history of film due to the number of film school graduates and independent filmmakers attempting to make their mark in the industry.
