PINIGAI INFO

This is the era of animations, graphics and visual effects. Depictions of the fantastic flying superheroes, ferocious velociraptors and battling starships rely on software to maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Even the most realistic movies call on animators to simulate an un-gettable shot or to make a moment just a smidge more perfect. The most modern of all the arts, cinema is fittingly the most reliant on science and technology. The 20th century’s dominant art form was born out of the 19th century predilection for machinery, movement, optical illusion and public entertainment.

Film’s history is a labyrinth of discoveries, inventions, part-solutions and failures in the context of visual effects. The progress that filmmakers have made in creating and using the latest technology has phenomenally influenced the film industry and the cinematic experience. This has caused films to evolve over the years with each progressing idea, technology and technique, allowing film makers to bring their vision to life more accurately, precisely and convincingly to the big screen. The development of technology has affected an extremely wide array of areas concerning film, including the production process, the way films are viewed, how the films are distributed, and even how they are promoted. In the pioneering days, three different processes had to be combined to create the movies.

The first process was to work on and enhance gadgets that made little drawings seemingly come alive with motion. These began out as simple flick-page drawings and silhouette puppetry, before moving on to more technical approaches such as devices that exploited persistence of vision to give impressions of moving pictures. In 1880 Emile Reynaud had invented such a machine, ‘praxinoscope’, which projected seemingly moving paintings onto a screen. The second necessary step was to merge these gadgets with the science of photography. In 1889 Thomas Edison, and his associate William Dickson, created ‘kinetoscope’, which used moving imagery and photography. The catch was that to see the show, a viewer had to peep through an opening in the device. The third step was to project the moving photographs onto a wall. Later, two French brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, created the first practical machine that combined all three steps mentioned, and they called it ‘cinematograph’.

But it was not until 1894 that such creations were open to the paying public when parlours, called ‘nickelodeons’ (because it cost customers a nickel to watch short animations) began to open. With the age of inventions and the path laid, man was spurred on to continue developing such mechanisms. New ideas brought about better cameras that captured more realistic photographs to animate, and improved lenses and bulbs to send out quick flickers of light to trick the eye further and create smooth moving motion. Moving photographs, then moved onto celluloid strips. With this discovery, possibilities became practically endless; companies began to form and the art of filmmaking began to spread further and further across the globe. However, there were still large limitations with such movies such as the length of time they could be displayed.