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History of Technology 6: The Evolution of Film Technology 177 Views


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Description:

Let's go back in time to when a sprinkler was the biggest star in Hollywood. And no, we don't mean Gérard Depardieu. Today, we're looking at the evolution of film technology.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:02

So after regular cameras were invented the challenge of building a [Woman climbing up a mountain]

00:05

movie camera wasn't an impossible mountain to climb. People just needed a

00:10

way to take lots of pictures very quickly and then roll them past the

00:13

eyeballs even more quickly, actually that sounds kinda hard and kinda gross

00:18

anyway one of the early successful attempts was in 1877 by a dude named [Edward Muybridge stood on a stage]

00:22

Edward Muybridge how'd he do it? Well, he set up a whole bunch of cameras in a

00:27

row and snapped pictures while a horse ran by genius after that Muybridge [A series of cameras taking pictures of a person riding a horse]

00:32

simply flipped all his pictures in front of a primitive movie projector and bam!

00:37

folks could watch three seconds of a horse running may not sound all that [People watching a 3 second clip of a film]

00:41

impressive now but back in the day this kind of thing had blockbuster potential

00:46

Still, Muybridge's system wasn't useful for anything much longer than the three

00:50

seconds or so of course somebody had a gazillion cameras sitting around and a [People in bushes taking pictures of lions]

00:54

gazillion photographers with perfect reflexes

00:57

if only Craigslist had been around back then. It wasn't until the 1890s that

01:01

camera has got more serious with the creation of the cinematograph which was

01:06

basically the Swiss Army knife of cameras [Swiss army knifes appear by a film recorder]

01:08

It don't didn't have a can opener but it could do other cool things. Anyway the cinematograph was a camera with the ability to take lots of pictures quickly

01:16

on top of that it was a projector and it could slide through those pictures [Man operating a projector]

01:21

really fast and project them on a screen so no it couldn't help castaway survive

01:26

on a desert island but it could keep them entertained and that's almost as [Man on desert island being entertained by a movie]

01:30

good as being fed lots of people were probably working on similar ideas but

01:33

the cinematograph was first made popular by the Lumiere brothers and yes like

01:39

Lumiere the candlestick in beauty and the beast, the Lumiere brothers were French [Lumiere brothers enjoying a dinner together]

01:43

very French by 1895 the Lumiere brothers they were putting on projected shows for

01:48

anybody with some extra change these films were black and white and silent and [Lumiere brothers arranging a movie for people to watch]

01:53

usually lasted less than five minutes long but they were amazing to the

01:57

Lumiere brothers audiences sometimes the Lumiere films were even downright

02:01

terrifying in an early screening of a film showing a train arriving at a [People watching a train arriving into a station]

02:04

station the audience totally freaked out thinking the train was going to hit them good thing the

02:10

Lumiere brothers hadn't figured out 3d right well the first comedy film was [Man wearing 3D glasses stands up and walks out of theatre]

02:14

also created by the Lumiere's it was called the sprinkler sprinkled and

02:18

showed a kid tricking a gardener into spraying himself with a hose for the [People watching a movie of the sprinkler sprinkled]

02:22

audience in the 1890s this was apparently like anchorman mixed with

02:26

caddyshack with just a bit of Bill Murray sprinkled in so yeah

02:31

funniest thing ever now at some point our good buddy Thomas Edison got wind of [Thomas Edison sat in a lab]

02:35

the motion picture craze and as we all know Edison was not a guy to pass up the

02:39

whiff of cash well nabbing other people ideas and improving them and selling them

02:43

was his jam so he got on board the projector train and the Edison Company [Edison showing a film on stage]

02:48

started playing films for the public on something he called the Vitascope and

02:53

so movie started to get a little longer and more complicated over the next

02:57

decade tons of competing patents and companies started to appear and the film

03:01

industry was born. Before long Hollywood California was the entertainment capital [Spotlight on Hollywood sign]

03:05

of the world by the way movie night at our place yep

03:08

we're showing a double feature of the sprinkler sprinkled and that horse

03:12

running for three seconds all right who's in anyone Bueller Bueller [Kids stood in a department store]

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