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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.
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]
Full Transcript
- 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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