Stop...and Go.

Short movies were filmed in one long strip of film, no shoot, stop, then go again. It didn't happen until 1898, where an older couple was shown outside an art gallery, and the shot skips, then they are shown inside looking at the art. It is the first time that the film is stopped in it's tracks, then restarted in a new spot.

The art is perfected in 1900, when the stop-motion technology is used to show a man looking through a telescope, and in the next shot the view through the telescope is shown. This technology leads to the remarkable new idea of ''Reverse-angle'' film cut. It takes a shot, filming action usually, then turns around and shows the continuation of that action from another angle.

The first ever film to employ reverse-angle shooting is ''Attack on a China Mission Station''; It shows an attack on a man, from two separate angles! From there, films became longer, having solidified the basics of sound, filming and stop-motion technology. In 1902, George Méliès developed ''le voyage dans la lune'' (A trip to the moon) in which he used multiple shots to make the movie longer.

 ''In 1907 there were about 4,000 small “nickelodeon” cinemas in the United States'' (www.wikepedia.org) which was essentially the modernisation of the industry, gently evolving into the cinemas we know today. These ''nickelodeon'' cinemas used much smaller projection rooms, about the size of an elementary school classroom, and housed about 20 people. Larger cinemas started becoming more common, housing about 50-60 people at a time.

Throughout the 1910's, coming over into the 20's, movies became longer, and became more large-scale to produce... and the cinema has now officially come into the modern times.

Huh? What? What did he say?

What? I can't hear you! Oh wait, there we go. In the early 1900's, films started coming out with a soundtrack! Not the techno music or romantic classical during a kissing scene that we see today, but with the actors voices. Now, the theatres didn't have surround sound, but instead, a Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, a disc-playing sound machine. It was also really hard to synchronize the sound from the disc to the mouths on the film screen. The volume on the sound machine was also hard to make loud enough to hear, but the people kept coming. The new technology was drawing people in, even though it wasn't perfect. In 1913, Edison made the problem a little less harsh, and brought out the Kinetophone, successfully linking the sound and picture to bring the accuracy up. In march 1924, the technology of talking pictures is perfected by Dr. Lee De Forest, and the cinematic industry as a means of commercial entertainment is born. Guess who comes into play now? Warner Bros. studios. In 1926, they used sound discs to make the first feature length film, a 3 hour long production of Don Juan. It had sound effects and music, but no acting voices... in other words, it was meant to be a silent film when filmed, but was changed around by the studio. Paramount and MGM, Universal and the fading First National—and Cecil B. DeMille's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC)all agreed to use the same provider for sound conversion in 1927, therefore solidifying the sound-on-film idea. The sound disks are done.

Europe isn't far behind, with Alfred Hitchcock's first directed film in 1929, Blackmail. Austria, Poland, Japan and China follow in the next twenty years, and the movie industry has officially caught on in a worldwide epidemic. Yay to the guys who made all this possible! next up: color films!

The Beginning of the Industry...

The movies... something we take for granted today. With Cineplex Cinema's 4$ tuesday tickets, everyone can see a movie, any movie really, for a cheap price and just for fun. Ask your grandmother about the movie theatres when she was a kid... you're going to hear a whole different kind of story. Way back when, a movie was a big treat, and took a whole lot shorter of a production time. Why? Because the technology and special effects were'nt as big a part of the process as they are today. In the early movies, the acting was the focus of the storyline, not big explosions and all the cool stuff that goes on today.

In the early days, back before grandma's grandma was even alive (1830's) moving images were used for research, such as seeing wether a horse's feet were ever all off the ground at once- which they were'nt, proved by this fabulous new science-or to study human movement. At that time, it was solely for research purposes, which is kind of awesome, considering entertainment remained in plays and dances performed in theatres... movie theatres didn't even exist!

Originally, these research movies were only visible to one person at a time, by looking through a peephole in a dark box, to see the film lit from behind moving quickly upwards. Quite a headache if you ask me... It was only through a projector system that it became available to the public, and people started to call them "the ­moving pictures". From there it was just the moving pictures, as sound wasn't introduced into films until the 1920's.

Ever watched a silent movie? Chances are that the movie you watched was produced before 1920, and reworked into VHS or even DVD... but we'll get there some other time... that's still way too advanced for us moving pictures fanatics.