Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Motion Pictures

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Perhaps the greatest advancement in the arts in the 20th century was the creation of motion pictures.  Motions Pictures was a brand-new art form. While initially it was just recorded stage presentations, it eventually evolved into something much more.  Today, it is a multi-billion-dollar industry, which is all due to countless technical advancements that have occurred over the decades.  Learn more about the history of motion pictures, how they were created and how they evolved on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Available nationally, look for a bottle of Heaven Hill Bottled-in-Bond at your local store. Find out more at heavenhilldistillery.com/hh-bottled-in-bond.php Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free offer and get $20 off. Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month. Use the code EverythingEverywhere for a 20% discount on a subscription at Newspapers.com. Visit meminto.com and get 15% off with code EED15.  Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.  Get started with a $13 trial set for just $3 at harrys.com/EVERYTHING. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perhaps the greatest advancement in the arts in the 20th century was the creation of motion pictures. Motion pictures was a brand new art form. While initially it was recorded stage presentations, it eventually evolved into something much more. Today, it's a multi-billion dollar industry, which is all due to countless technical innovations that have occurred over the decades. Learn more about the history of motion pictures, how they were created and how they evolved on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Whether you call them motion pictures, films, or movies, no one can deny the huge cultural impact that they've had on. our society. Unlike other art forms, motion pictures are uniquely modern and have only tenuous precedence that came before them. If we wanted to find an ancient historical anaccedent to motion pictures, the closest we could probably find is shadow puppetry. First practice in China around 200 BC, it wasn't projecting images so much as just casting shadows and blocking light. In the 17th century,

the Dutch astronomer Christian Hoygens invented something called a magic lantern. The magic lantern. The Magic Lantern used light and lenses to project images painted on a glass plate. We don't know when someone discovered that a series of still images could represent motion, but the earliest example we have comes from an illustrated 15th century German poetry book called the Sigginot. It shows small images that represent intervals of time between them, but they don't quite show fluid motion. Using still images to create the illusion of motion was first created in the 19th century. In 1825, the British physician John Ierton Paris invented the Thalmatrope, which consisted of a disc with images on both sides that appeared to combine into one image when spun rapidly, demonstrating an early understanding of what's called persistence of vision. In 1832, the Belgian physician John Plateau created the phenokistoscope, which was a spinning disc with sequential images that when viewed through slits in the disc while it spun gave the illusion of motion.

simultaneously, Austrian mathematician Simon von Stamford developed a similar device known as the stroboscope. In 1834, William Horner invented the Zoe trope, which was a cylindrical device with images inside that appeared to move when the cylinder was spun and viewed through slits. These devices were all basically toys. They were interesting to people who had never seen such things before, but they served no real purpose. The advent of film photography in the 19th century offered new opportunities for the study and display of motion. One of the first and most famous uses of photography and motion was done by the English photographer Edward Moybridge. In 1878, he conducted a groundbreaking experiment to settle a debate about whether all four of a horse's

hooves leave the ground simultaneously during a gallop. He set up a series of 12 cameras along a racetrack, each triggered by a tripwire as the horse has passed. The resulting sequential photographs captured each phase of the horse's stride, proving that at certain points, all four hooves were indeed off the ground. This experiment not only answered the question, but also laid the foundation for motion picture technology, showcasing the potential use of multiple images in rapid succession to represent motion. Using 12 cameras to capture one motion wasn't very efficient, but it didn't take long to realize that you could capture motion much better if one camera could take a series of images and sequence. In 1891, Thomas Edison developed a

device known as a kinetoscope and later a kinetograph. The kinetoscope was a cabinet that somebody could look in that would loop through a film to show a moving image. The kinetograph was an early motion picture camera. Edison's system was not very practical in that it could only be viewed by a single person. The first system that we would recognize today as a motion pitcher, was created by the French photography manufacturers August and Luis Lomere. This system developed by the Lomere brothers could record moving images and then project them onto a screen for group viewing. They called their system the cinematograph.

On March 22, 1895, they presented the first ever motion picture exhibition for an audience of about 200 people. They made simple movies of people going about their daily lives on the street. There was no plot or story, the moving image was the attraction. One of their innovations was putting perforations in the film so it could be advanced at a regular rate with a sprocket. Many of their films still exist today,

and can be seen on YouTube, often digitally enhanced and cleaned up. In the first years after the turn of the century, the technology began being used to tell stories. Editing and camera work techniques were developed to make the stories more interesting. The 1902 film, a trip to the moon by a French magician

named George Millais was the world's first science fiction film and adopted many techniques that would be used in later films, including jump edits and special effects. It was only nine to 18 minutes long, depending on the number of frames per second that it was played at. By 1915, movies were becoming very big affairs. The film A Birth of a Nation was the first single 12 real film. The film was over two hours long and had a production budget of over 100,000, which was an enormous amount at that time. Film studios developed large production lots with sets to meet the constant demand for new films. All of the films at that time were silent.

Theaters often hired organists to provide some music beyond the sound of the projector, but there was never any dialogue. Eventually, sound and films were integrated together. The first system was known as the Vitaphone system. Developed by Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then adopted by Warner Brothers, The Vitafone was one of the first successful sound-on-disc systems. The sound was recorded on a phonograph record that was played in sync with the film projector.

The system required precise synchronization between the record and the film reel, which was achieved using mechanical linkages. This system was used for the very first talking pitcher, the jazz singer in 1927. The jazz singer wasn't totally recorded with sound, only sections. The first film that was recorded totally with sound was light. of New York in 1928. The Vitaphone system, however, was cumbersome.

A system that integrated sound into the film itself would be much simpler and would not require synchronization with an external audio source. The movie tone sound system was released soon after the Vitaphone system. The movie tone system captured analog sound by literally

making an image of the sound wave that appeared alongside the film. There were two methods of recording sound using this technique. variable density and variable area. Sound completely changed the way movies were produced and recorded. Studios now had to be built for sound in acoustics. Some actors were unable to make the transition to talking, and theaters had to be equipped for sound, which was not inexpensive.

However, it was a hit. Soon, almost every film was a talkie. The next hurdle to overcome was color. All the films up until this point were recorded in black and white. The first attempts at creating color motion pictures dates back to before the introduction of sound. At first, film frames would be colored by hand, but that was an incredibly laborious process. The technology that was eventually adopted was known as Technicolor. Technicolor was a company founded in 1915.

Their first process was known as two-color Technicolor. It used a prism to split the beam of light coming from the camera lens into two different roles of film, one which was dyed red and the other green. While this method produced acceptable results, it was limited to a range of colors and was not entirely satisfactory for capturing the full spectrum of color. This was replaced in 1932

with three color tenta color. A special camera was developed that used a beam splitter to expose three separate strips of black and white film simultaneously. Each strip captured a different primary color, red, green, and blue. The three black and white,

negatives were used to then create three color matrices. Each matrix was dyed in respective color, red, green, or blue, and then successfully printed onto a single strip of film, creating a full color image. This process allowed for rich, vibrant colors and became the standard for color films from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. The very first three-color film was Becky Sharp, which was released in 135. However, the big year for color was 1939, with the release, with the release of two of the biggest films of all time, both shot in color, The Wizard of Oz and Gone at the Wind.

Three-color Technicolor was used extensively up till the early 1950s. It was eventually replaced with Eastman Color, which was a single-film color process developed by the Eastman Kodak Company. In addition to sound in color, there was another area of innovation that took root in the 1950s, aspect ratios. Early films were mostly shot in the same dimension. In 1932, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established what became known as the

Academy ratio as the standard for motion pitchers. The Academy ratio was 4 to 3, or 1.33 to 1. If you've ever seen an older film on your television set, it will probably have black bars on the sides in order to compensate for the different aspect ratio. Beginning in the 1950s, films began to adopt wider and wider aspect ratios. The European widescreen ratio was set at 1.66 to 1. In response, the American widescreen standard was set soon after with a ratio of 1.85 to 1. And 1.85 to 1 is still a very common aspect ratio in films.

However, there was a desire for ever wider film ratios to provide audiences with an even more immersive experience. In 1935, Cinemascope was launched, and it was truly an ultra-wide format. It had an aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1. Many of the big-budget epic films of the era were shot in Cinemascope, including pictures such as Ben Hur. Cinemascope was an anamorphic system, where a special lens was used to bend light so it would fit onto a standard 35-millimeter film. Another lens was then used in projection to display the image.

I should also at least mention Cinerama, which was launched in 1952. It was an extremely wide system where three 35-millimeter projectors were used together to project a single image on a parabolic screen. There were special Cinerama theaters that were built to display these films, so the format never really saw widespread adoption. If Cinerama was a gimmick and Cinemascope was a hack to fit a wide format image on standard 35-millimeter film, then the way to truly deliver a high-quality widescreen experience was to use a larger film stock. The answer was 65mm and 70mm film. Although there are obviously differences in size, both are collectively just called 70 millimeter. There were a host of different large film formats which were released in the 1950s and 1960s.

Todd A.O., Todd 70, Super Panavision 70, Panavision System 65, Dimension 150, and several others. These 70 millimeter films provided a much larger area for collecting light and provided much more detail. Some of the truly epic and classic films of this era were all shot on 70-millimeter film. Parts of Ben Hur, in particular the chariot racing scenes, Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, Cleopatra, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, 2001 a Space Odyssey, Patton, and many others. The problem with 70-millimeter film is that it was expensive. It ceased being used in the early 1970s, but has recently made a minor resurgence. In 2015, it was used with Quentin Tarantino's film,

hateful eight. While 70-millimeter mostly died out in the 1970s, a new large-scale format slowly rose to replace it. IMAX. IMAX is just a 70-millimeter film that is run sideways. The image takes up a larger area this way, but the aspect ratio isn't as wide. IMAX, like Cinerama before it, required custom theaters with enormous screens. Many of the first screens were actually installed at amusement parks. And for years, the only film shot on IMAX were custom-produced shows, usually documentaries designed to showcase the format. However, there has been more recent adoption of IMAX for future films. Parts of Interstellar, Oppenheimer, The Dark Night Rises, the Hunger Games Catching Fire, and several others have been shot in IMAX. There is a lot more to the story

of motion pictures. I haven't even touched the topics of digital recording and digital projection, So I'll leave that subject for a future episode. Motion pictures are the art form of the modern world. However, there is more to it than just the art of making films. There's also a technical element that has been consistently evolving over 120 years. And it's that innovation that has led films to provide an experience, unlike anything, we ever had before. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever.

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