Hello there! How would you like a ticket to one ofthe most influential forms of mass communicationthe world has ever known? It’s a universal language that lets us tellstories about our collective hopes and fears, to make sense of the world and the peoplearound us. I’m talking about film.
Crash Course on Movie Making
You probably figured that out because of the titleof this video, but, yeah, I'm talking about film. This powerful medium sits in a sweet spotof human culture: at the intersection of art,industry, technology, and politics. It’s inescapable, like FBI piracy warnings,and trailers that give away the entire movie. I'm looking at you, Batman v Superman.
The History of Cutting - The Birth of Cinema and Continuity Editing
And also vs Wonder Woman, apparently,'cause I learned that from the trailer. But before we get to a mouse named Mickey,a little Tramp, and whether or not Han shot first,we’re going back to the beginning... In a galaxy far, far–Well, right here We have to go all the way back to the beginningbecause the creation of this cornerstone ofmodern entertainment was basically an accident.
We owe it all to inventors and artists whowere experimenting with new technologies and trying to capture snippets of reality, tosee the world in a whole new way. I'm Craig Benzine, and this isCrash Course Film History. Ready? Lights! Camera! Action! Roll the intro now.We should roll the intro, I think. [Theme Music] The term “film” was first used to describea specific technology – a thin, flexible material coated in light-sensitive emulsionthat retains an image after it’s exposed to light. It’s also the end product of that photochemicalprocess. A film is a movie. But it’s also a verb to describe theprocess of capturing moving pictures, as in,“I’m going to film a movie today.” Or, “Nick is filming me right this verysecond.
” Or, "I'm gonna film a film on film." Over time, the original film technology hasswitched to analog and digital substitutes – first things like VHS or Beta, and eventuallydigital video, like when you record somethingon your phone. Now, at the very beginning of its history,before all these innovations existed, film started out as a collection of still imagesviewed one after another in rapid succession,which creates the illusion of motion. Like what you're seeing right now! It was a magic trick! And from that trick came an art form that’sa blend of literature, drama, photography,and music.
So how does this illusion actually work? It all comes down to a couple quirks of humanperception, tricks your eyes play on your brain…or your brain plays on your eyes… or maybe both. The 19th century British scholar Peter MarkRoget was the first to describe one of thesetricks, called Persistence of Vision. Basically, this is the phenomenon that keepsyou from seeing the black spaces between theframes of a projected film.
Now, frame can mean a lot of things in filmlanguage, but in this case, it’s what we call one ofthe still images that make up a movie. It turns out that if a frame flashes in frontof your eyes, your brain retains that image forabout a fifth of a second after it’s gone. If another frame appears within that fifthof a second, your brain won’t register theblack space between them. You’ll just perceive the next image. So when a film flashes 24 frames per secondin front of your eyes, your brain doesn’t interpret it as24 images separated by flashes of black. Instead, it looks like a constant picture. This effect can be combined with another oddity ofperception called the Phi Phenomenon, defined in 1912by the Czech-born psychologist Max Wertheimer.
Incidentally, "oddity of perception" –my nickname in high school. The Phi Phenomenon is an optical illusionthat lets you see a series of images in rapidsuccession as continuous motion. Think of those flip books you played withas a kid: Take a series of still pictures, shot or drawnin sequence, flip them quickly before youreyes and, voilá! The illusion of motion. You have yourself a “motion picture,”or a “moving picture.
” In other words, a moving-picturey. Better yet, a “movie.”Write that down, that's what we're going with. Now, people have been telling stories sincewe’ve had language, and they’ve been using pictures– even animating them – for almost as long. One line of thinking traces “movies” allthe way back to cave paintings in places likeChauvet, France or El Castillo, Spain. You know – those images of animals, trees,and human figures, painted on stone wallsas far back as 32,000 years ago.
Scientists think the original artists mighthave used flickering torchlight to make themappear to move. Fast forward to just 5000 years ago, and we findpeople inventing more sophisticated devices tocreate that same illusion of motion. Among these pre-film animation tools,the ones we’re most familiar with are calledzoetropes. Think of these as a bowl or a deep cylinderwith sequential images painted on the insideand small slits or windows cut into the edges. Spin the bowl and peer through the slits and– thanks to Persistence of Vision and the PhiPhenomenon – the pictures seem to move. Oooh! Over the centuries, these devices came inlots of different forms and just as many names:phenakistoscopes, stroboscopes, stereoscopes...
All kinds of ‘scopes. But not Scope,the mouthwash – that's something else. And for a long, long time, this is as closeas we ever got to film. Until photography came along. Now, it’s important to remember that no oneset out to invent movies. There was no one mastermind, and nogrand plan to revolutionize communicationor art on a global scale. If I was around, it would've been me,but there wasn't anyone. Instead, film as we know it today existsbecause of a series of happy accidents, technicalinnovations, and scientific byproducts. ‘Cause really, at the beginning, nobodyknew what they were doing. Just like now! I'm lookin' at you, Batman v Superman.
Photography came about in the early-to-mid-19thcentury, at a time of great scientific and artistic innovation. People of means all over the world were tinkeringin their spare time, playing around with technology and seeing what they could create, combine,augment, or transform. Before the photograph was invented, peoplewere isolating images of the world aroundthem with devices like the camera obscura. From the Latin meaning “dark chamber,”a camera obscura is essentially a box, tent, or room with a lens or pinhole in one end,and a reflective surface like a mirror at the other. Light travels through the hole and displaysan inverted image on the mirror.
Like most of these pre-photography technologies, the camera obscura was mostly a novelty, a toy, or sometimes a tool that let artists create images to study or trace. As the 19th century dawned, folks startedplaying around with photosensitive chemicals, to figure out their properties while tryingnot to melt themselves with acid. Which we should all try to do, in practice. In the 1820s, a French inventor named JosephNicéphore Niépce took the first known cameraphotograph. He called it “View from the Window at LeGras.” Niépce used a camera obscura to project an imageonto a pewter plate coated in a light-sensitive chemical. The areas of the chemical that were hitwith the brightest light hardened, but the areastouched by weaker light could be washed away, so a crude permanent record of the original image survived. Scientists now believe it took a couple daysof exposing the plate to light for the imageto finally show up.
So we’re still a long way from movies! But we’re getting closer.Get excited. Louis Daguerre – another Frenchman, anda close buddy of Niépce – was able to shortenthe exposure time to just a couple of minutes. His daguerreotype process became the firstcommercially-available, mass-market meansof taking photographs in 1839. And this is usually considered to bephotography’s birthday. Hooray!Happy birthday– But hold on, the daguerreotype still had afew problems to work out: the photographs were pretty fragile, they weren’t easyto replicate, and the chemicals were, shall we say, toxic. Along came George Eastman, an American entrepreneur and the founder of Eastman Kodak, who invented a way of taking pictures on paper, rather than metal or glass plates. This method also didn’t need as many chemicals,which probably saved a lot of snap-happy inventorsfrom health problems. Now photography was off to the races. Literally. So let’s go to the Thought Bubble and seehow photographs were used to pause time andtake a closer look at movement. Take it away, Thought Bubble! Well, I–I will take it– I'm gonna narrate, so... In 1872, Leland Stanford, the former governorof California and a horse race aficionado, made a bet with another bigwig that a horseat full gallop raises all four hooves off the groundat some point.
To settle the bet, Stanford commissioned aphotographer and inventor named Eadweard Muybridgeto find photographic proof. So, Muybridge set up twelve cameras alonga racetrack, each triggered by a tripwire to capturea still image of a horse in motion. His set of twelve photos was something brandnew: rapid motion broken down into frozen,studiable moments. Spoiler alert – Governor Stanfordwon his bet! There were a couple images where that horsewasn’t touching the ground at all. Muybridge’s experiment launched a waveof “motion studies,” as photographers and inventors all over the worldbegan using these new technologies to break downcontinuous motion into individual images. And that was one giant step closer to motionpictures. Thanks Thought Bubble!You're so great! One of those photographers was yet anotherFrenchman – a man named Étienne-Jules Marey, whose training in physiology led him tocapture motion studies of birds in flightand human athletes in action. Instead of tripwires like Muybridge, Marey inventedwhat he called a chronophotographic gun (awesome) and switched from sheets of photographic paperto rolls, allowing him to take bursts of photographs– 12 per second. Even with all these increasingly-fancy techniques,it’s important to note that these were still justseries of photographs.
Motion studies were sometimes projected,using devices like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope,but nobody was trying to make movies yet. So, the world was boring. Each of these innovations set up Thomas Edison and a scientist who worked for him named W.K.L. Dickson to invent the kinetograph – the world’s first motion picture film camera. And they, in turn, paved the way for the firstfilmmakers to experiment with motion picturetechnologies and storytelling. We mentioned earlier that film is an illusion,but it’s an illusion that’s carefully crafted by peoplewho want to show a specific point of view. With aesthetic choices – from shot angleand shot size to lens type and lighting style and how much hair you put on a wookie –filmmakers can further affect how we, as anaudience, interpret reality. In a real sense, film wasn’t invented,it was stumbled upon. A series of happy accidents eventually ledus to Citizen Kane, Grand Illusion, Black Girl,and the experimental works of Stan Brackage. Not to mention, things like The Wizard of Oz,Raiders of the Lost Ark, Captain America: Civil War,and Sharknado! There’s a whole world of film out thereto discover, and there’s a lot that film canhelp you discover about yourself too.
And that’s the story we’ll continue, nexttime we meet. Today we talked about how film is a sort ofmagic trick, thanks to the ways our eyes andbrains work. Thank you eyes and brains! We introduced the very, very beginnings offilm, when people started using sequentialimages to tell stories. We discussed photography as a huge technologicalleap forward, since chemicals and light could capture images and break down fast-movingreality like never before. And next time, we’ll learn about the veryfirst motion picture cameras, and the startof movies as we know them now. Crash Course Film History is produced in associationwith PBS Digital Studios. You can head over to their channel to checkout a playlist of their latest amazing shows, like BBQ With Franklin, PBS Off Book, andIndy Alaska. This episode of Crash Course was filmed inthe Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio with the help of these nice phenakistoscopesand our amazing graphics team, is Thought Cafe.
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