Nowadays, all kinds of film and television works continue to fill our lives, so that we can enjoy the wonderful movies shot by countless excellent directors and actors in our leisure time, which greatly enriches our lives.
So, have you ever wondered how the great invention of cinema came about and matured? Although the emergence of images is inevitable with the development of the times, the emergence of its initial prototype is still full of interest.
<h1>The prototype of the birth of early cinema</h1>
At the end of the 19th century, Liland Stanford, a rich man who started by railroads in California, saw a group of horses speeding past his eyes and could not see how the four legs of the horse ran.
So he asked an interesting question: When a horse is running, will its hooves leave the ground at the same time? Because of the naked eye alone, he could not be sure of his own conjecture, after all, the horse was too fast to see clearly when it ran at a high speed. He pondered and racked his brains but still couldn't find a convincing answer.
Later, he thought that he could use the camera to take a picture of the horse running and slowly observe. He had also made bets with others, and he felt that his suspicions must have been correct. In order to prove his conjecture, he spent a lot of money to make a device that could shoot down the movements of the horse as it ran.
The shooting was carried out like this: 24 cameras were set up on the way of the horse, each equipped with a photographer. The shutters of these cameras are connected to the ropes placed on the runway; when the horse is running on the runway, it will kick off the rope, and the rope will also drive the shutter button to shoot, so that as the horse runs, 24 cameras will capture the horse's attitude change in march.
Later, in a fortuitous event, a photographer continuously pumped the film of the state of the horse when it was running, and the originally static horse actually moved! It looked like it was alive on film. This is the prototype of early videotapes. The person who discovered this magical phenomenon was Maple Ridge, the most famous photographer in California at that time.
This experiment also succeeded in letting Stanford know the results of his conjecture, and he lost, and it turned out that the horse would always have one foot in contact with the ground when running.
It seems to be boring and real, but it did not expect to bring inspiration to the development of video, and sure enough, more real people can often bring some unexpected gains.
<h1>The process of the birth of cinema</h1>
The continuous movement of the horse running, which was filmed in this way, was finally made public in 1878, which aroused the interest of many scientific researchers. Since then, many scientists have devoted themselves to the study of "continuous cameras". Among these people, it is particularly worth mentioning the brothers Edison and Lumiere.
Edison (1847-1931) is a great American inventor we have always known, and he invented about 2,000 kinds in his lifetime. Inventing the phonograph, improving incandescent lamps and telephones, creating the world's first large-scale power plant, etc., he also made an indelible contribution to the birth of cinema.
In the 1870s, while studying phonographs, Edison also found a way to represent visible images.
In 1888, he built a camera capable of shooting more than 600 images continuously on 60-foot soft film. In other words, he can shoot moving scenes that last for 1 minute with the camera he made. This was also a miracle at the time.
But Edison was reluctant to put his short films on the screen, arguing that doing so would be like "killing a hen that lays golden eggs." In 1894, Edison made a play called the "cinema mirror," which was shaped like a large cash cabinet with a magnifying glass and a film box that could hold 50 feet of chiseled films (which could be screened for 15 seconds) that could only be viewed by one person through a small hole. This "cinematic mirror" and a large number of accompanying short films were once sold in New York and Europe.
So who first brought the film to the screen? The French brothers Lumière and their father run a large factory in Lyon that makes cameras and produces photographic chemicals. When Edison's "cinematic mirror" had just flowed into France, the Lumière brothers began to study the film machine. They built a "continuous camera" that could shoot at least 16 frames per second. They combined the active photography with the slide projection, so that the film rotated in front of the small hole of the projector, and the strong light was installed behind the hole, projecting the picture one after another onto the screen for many people to watch together. This is the dimension of modern cinema.
On December 28, 1895, in the Indian Salon of the "Grand Café" at 14 Rue Capsin in Paris, France, a noisy audience watched the first public film performance in human history with great curiosity. The screening was hosted by the Lumière brothers, the inventors of the film. They screened 10 short films, including "The Wall", "Baby's Morning", "The Horseshoe Maker", and "Watering the Gardener", which lasted only 20 minutes in total. This day is recognized as the birth day of world cinema.
People who experienced that historic scene, after watching those "movies", were all amazed by the "magical" scenes in the film, and they were excited about the upcoming film era!
The development of film technology and the success of the first screening of the Café de Paris greatly encouraged the Lumière brothers, who have since hired many photographers and projectionists and started running cinemas.
In the beginning, the movies were soundless and didn't have much plot. But it tells people that movies are a way to record what's going on around them. Because of this, when Lumière's photographers are shooting outdoors, they always attract a large number of passers-by, who hope that the photographer can absorb themselves into the film, and in the evening, people flock to the cinema, in order to see themselves on the screen of the cinema, so the cinema business has become particularly prosperous.
<h1>The progress of science and technology lies in continuous exploration and breakthroughs</h1>
Because the technology is not yet developed, the original film has no sound, and the cinema has made some primitive and funny dubbing attempts in order to give the audience a more realistic experience.
For example, when Lumière screened his film "Delegates Login", when the scene of the astronomer Johnson and the speaker of the Rhône Province, LaGrange, appeared on the screen, he asked La Grange to stand behind the screen and repeat the dialogue during the meeting. This method of dubbing a silent film, although simple and primitive, is undeniable that it is also an attempt at progress.
The first to combine sound and image was Edison. However, the volume of the phonograph invented by Edison in the earliest days was too small, and even if it was put in a small movie theater, the effect was not very good. It was not until 1928 and 1929 that the advent of sound films was prompted by the development of electroacoustic technology and radio broadcasting technology.
In order to make the sound match the picture of the image, a large record was originally used, which used a mechanical chain to use the record player and the projector to run synchronously, and then through the amplification, the sound was played out by the speakers installed near the screen.
However, the above equipment that separates the sound and picture equipment is very inconvenient to use, so it was quickly replaced by the method of recording sound on film film.
The advent of sound films enhanced the dramatic effects of films and soon made them an important tool of entertainment and publicity.
<h1>Film technology exploded</h1>
After the advent of sound films, another great achievement in film technology was the colorization of films. Just as people used coloring to obtain color photographs before the appearance of color photographs, the earliest color films were also made by tireless coloring on black and white copies. This is not only costly, but also less effective.
From 1932 to 1933, due to the emergence of color film production systems, people ushered in a new era of color films.
For more than 100 years, cinema has made great strides in both art and technology. Modern cinema can not only achieve the initial real scenes in life to be recorded and reproduced on the screen, but also can show the virtual world in science fiction and mythological stories, making it difficult to distinguish between true and false. That is what we now often call special effects.
It can not only absorb the ground scenery that we can see, but also through superb photography technology, the wonders from the sky to the river valley, and the microscopic world that cannot be observed by the naked eye can be absorbed into the lens; through special effects, it can also synthesize things that cannot appear in reality on a picture, which greatly enriches and strengthens the artistic effect of the film with the technique of fake reality.
In addition, even lifeless pictures can be active in movies, which are especially popular cartoons for children.