Development of film

Week 1, Lecture 4 Prior to discussing the digital age, there is another technology that should be addressed. If I were to introduce history in chronological order, this technology would come before the digital era, but there is a reason why I saved it for later. This technology is film. Film and movies were first created when still-images were used to form motion pictures. Their underlying premise has had a strong influence on transmedia phenomena. The invention of movies was and continues to be culturally and aesthetically important, and has led to a significant change in the way we deal with subject matter on a conscious level.

Take a look at the history of plastic arts, or what is also known as visual arts, that is, sculpture, architecture, and other art forms that express what is primarily visual in nature. Other art form deal with time, such as literature or music. Some art forms are intimately interwoven with both the visual elements and time, while others are skewed toward one or the other. Although some fields have attempted to create a multi-sensory experience, these attempts have been insignificant or partial efforts. Films are what first brought together and integrated the visual, the temporal, and the spatial. The picture you see now is from Muybridge. In it, you see several images of a running horse.

The frames were all taken over the course of a few seconds, and in one image, you can see the horse’s movement broken into several individual and sequential shots. Through the series, you can see the horse’s movements in great detail. It’s the same horse, but the horse in the first photo on the left and that in the last photo on the right are existing in different time zones. I wanted to use this image to show you the complete movement in one picture? an image that contains temporal context. This portrait of time can be observed in nature, as seen in tree rings. Slicing through a one-hundred-year-old tree will reveal the tree rings within, perhaps a hundred of them.

When we examine them, we can deduce the age of the tree. For this reason, I propose that this one image contains the temporal space of a hundred years. We have thousands of years of history, a period that includes historical art pieces, but it is difficult to overcome the limitation of time. Stage art is limited to the stage, fiction is limited to paper, and music has its own space. Movies are not just a combination of many genres of art but a means of combining time and space within the same art form. In fact, this could very well be the foundation for digital media. The traditional film camera captures 24 frames per second.

In other words, it takes 24 still images in continuous motion to give us the illusion of movement. A reduction of the number of images to any quantity up until a final of 12 frames would give rise to strange motion. Audience members would find movements unnatural or not smooth. When we see movement depicted by 24 frames or more, it no longer looks disconnected and appears to be moving as it would in the real world. Digital media allows us to reproduce a very realistic depiction of reality. Whether it is 48 frames or 96 frames, as the number of frames increases, there is greater approximation to the naturalness we see in real life.

Another component that can be added to the frame is the sound recording. There is a separate band beneath the image that is for recording sound. The integration of sound and motion was greatly improved with the advent of computers. These advances mean that the audience can now have the simultaneous sensory experience of auditory and visual information. Nonetheless, films hadn’t started off with having sound. The history of the cinema started with silent movies, where moving pictures brought temporal space and external environments to the screen. The meeting of time and space created a great sensation back in the day.

Films are not just for fun and interest; after a while, people realized that movies could serve as a recording device, and had great industrial and commercial potential. This also marked the birth of fiction film. Stories that we couldn’t even imagine to exist were embellished and brought to life on the screen, and narratives that occur outside of our social environment were captured and shared with wider audiences. These two traditions are in represented by the genres of fiction and documentary filmmaking. Two landmark films in each genre are Louis Lumiere’s Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1985) and Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), respectively. From this point onward, extensions such as fantasy and science fiction grew wings and took flight.

The multi-sensory experience and narrative sharing in film can now be reflected in transmedia. It appears that the model we use is crucial in examining how transmedia can disseminate a wide range of content through different media forms and how it can integrate these media forms successfully. Transmedia and convergence are now important topics, and we can look at the history of filmmaking to shine a light on the future direction of transmedia.