Audience interaction with the moving image

The first ‘moving pictures’• The principle of the camera obscura can be demonstrated

with a rudimentary type, just a box with a hole in one side. Light from only one part of a scene will pass through the hole

and strike a specific part of the back wall. • Camera = Latin for “room”

Obscura = Latin for “dark” • The earliest mention of this type of device was by the Chinese

philosopher Mo-Ti (5th century BC).

Moving Photographs

• Eadweard Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was an English-born photographer, known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion

pictures that pre-dated celluloid film strip still used today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Muybridge_race_horse_animated.gif• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Muybridge_Buffalo_galloping.gif

The Zoopraxinoscope (1878 introduced by Eadweard Muybridge)

1885 - American inventors George Eastman and Hannibal Goodwin each invent a sensitized celluloid base roll

photographic film to replace the glass plates then in use. 1888 - Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince creates the first

motion picture films created on paper rolls of film. 1889 - American inventor George Eastman's celluloid base

roll photographic film becomes commercially available.

Kinetoscope (W.K-L. Dickson-Thomas Edison)The Kinetoscope The 35 mm film travelled continuously over a bank of rollers, each picture being viewed briefly through a narrow slot in the

revolving shutter

Kinetoscope Parlor, circa 1895

The cinématographe is a film camera, which also serves as a film projector and developer. It was invented in the 1890s and usually credited

to Auguste and Louis Lumière

The development of Cinema

• The Nickelodeon was an early 20th century form of small, neighborhood movie theaters in the United States in which admission was obtained for a nickel. By 1907, one estimate (based on basic business economics) was that an average of over two million people attended the nickelodeons daily. The popularity of these affordable, entertaining, and highly profitable venues was such that their numbers mushroomed to approximately 8,000 in the U.S. by 1908.

The Nickelodeon (circa1905)

The coming of television

Cinema competes with television

Imax Cinemas

Cinerama is the trademarked name for a widescreen process which works by simultaneously projecting images from three synchronized 35 mm projectors

onto a huge, deeply-curved screen, subtending 146°

of arc.

The mid 70s saw the introduction of the home video recorder

Betamax tape

VHS tape

Rival companies warred over two formats

The laserdisc (LD) was the first commercial optical disc storage medium, and was used primarily for the

presentation of films.

• The laserdisc (left) compared to a DVD

The DVD

• DVD (commonly known as "Digital Versatile Disc" or "Digital Video Disc") is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. DVDs resemble Compact Discs as their diameter is the same (120 mm or 4.72 inches, or occasionally 80 mm or 3.15 inches), but they are encoded in a different format and at a much higher density.

Home Cinema

http://www.7digital.com/stores/default.aspx?shop=286

Downloading film vs. streaming

Who watches film on one of these?

http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/general-film-chat/8091-

cinema-experience.html

What is the best way to view a film?

In the HD DVD versus Blu-ray contest, we’re back to rival formats competing for the same audience.

Different films were released on different formats. Pirates of the Caribbean movies on Blu-ray outsold The Matrix trilogy on HD DVD when released in the same week in 2007.

According to US site The Hollywood Reporter, the Pirates movies sold a timber-shivering 47,000 units in the US, with the Matrix box set shifting around 14,000.