FILMS/MOVIES

The movies are our dreams factories; they are bigger than life. Along with books, they are the only mass medium not dependent on advertising for their financial support. That means they must satisfy you, because you buy the tickets. This means that the relationship between medium and audience is different from those that exist with other media.

Defining Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still images which, when shown on a screen, creates the illusion of moving images due to phi phenomenon. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion picture camera; by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques; by means of CGI and computer animation; or by a combination of some or all of these techniques and other visual effects.

Film refers to a thin sheet of cellulose acetate or nitrocellulose coated with a radiation-sensitive emulsion for taking photographs.

Film vs. Movie

The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture, photoplay and flick. The most common term in the United States is movie, while in Europe film is preferred. Terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies and cinema.

ELEMENTS:

1. Image2. Time3. Motion4. Sound

5. Lighting6. Sequence7. Composition

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES:

Advantages:

-Entertainment

-Socializing activators

-Lesson of teamwork

-Movies stir over our imagination

-Showcase of world’s art and culture

-Films educate us

-Movies are mirrors to society

-Employment and revenue

-Quick frame.

Disadvantages:

-Movies profess violence

-Movies are made for profit

-Establish false notions

-Wastage of money and time

-Art form of personal opinion

-Adultery and premarital sex

-Meagne/No respect for laws and order

-Larger than life characters

-Means to propaganda

-Quick downfall

-Popularity of unideal role models

-Addiction to movies

-Conflicting personalities

TERMS:"Motion pictures" or "Moving pictures" are films and movies, and "the motion picture" is frequently used in film productions specifically intended for cinematic release, such as for instance Batman: The Motion Picture

A “Film stock” is consists of transparent celluloid, acetate or polyester base coated with an emulsion containing light-sensitive chemicals. Cellulose nitrate was the first type of film base used to record motion pictures, but due to its flammability was eventually replaced by safer materials. Stock widths and the film format for images on the reel have had a rich history, though most large commercial films are still shot on (and distributed to theaters) as 35mm prints.

A “DVD” is a digital format which may be used to reproduce an analog film, while “videotape" (“video") was for many decades a solely analog medium onto which moving images could be recorded and electronically (rather than optically) reproduced.

“Silent Films” need not be silent, but are films and movies without an audible dialogue, though they may have a musical soundtrack.

“Talkies” refers to early movies or films having audible dialogue or analog sound, not just a musical accompaniment.

“Cinema” either broadly encompasses both films and movies, or is roughly synonymous with "Film", both capitalized when referring to a category of art. It could also be the term that emphasizes the institutional structure within which films were produced, distributed and viewed.

The “silver screen” refers to classic black-and-white films before color, not to contemporary films without color. It is also used as a metonym for the entire film industry.

Animation is the technique in which each frame of a film is produced individually, whether generated as a computer graphic, or by photographing a drawn image, or by repeatedly making small changes to a model unit, and then photographing the result with a special animation camera.

THE FILM HISTORY:

1727 Johann H. Schulze, a German physicist, discovers that silver salts turn dark when exposed to light.

1780s Carl Scheele, a Swedish chemist, shows that the changes in the color of the silver salts could be made permanent through the use of chemicals

1826 A French inventor, Nicephore Niépce, produces a permanent image by coating a metal plate with a light-sensitive chemical and exposing the plate to light for about eight hours.

1839 – Daguerreotyped introduced Talbot’s calotype (paper film). A British inventor, William H. Fox Talbot, an English classical archaeologist, made paper sensitive to light by bathing it in a solution of salt and silver nitrate. The silver turned dark when exposed to light and created a negative, which could be used to print positives on other sheets of light sensitive paper.

1877 – Muybridge takes race photos. British photographer Eadweard Muybridge takes the first successful photographs of motion, showing how people and animals move. To display his work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a machine for projecting slides onto a distant surface.

1887 – Goodwin’s celluloid roll film

1888 – Dickson produces kinetograph.

1889 – Eastman’s easy-to-use camera. American inventor George Eastman introduces film made on a paper base instead of glass, wound in a roll, eliminating the need for glass plates. By developing films in its own processing plants, Eastman Kodak eliminates the need for amateur photographers to process their own pictures.

1891 – Edison’s kinetoscope. Edison recognize the advantage of the cinematographe over his kinetoscope, so he acquired the patent for an advanced projector developed by U.S. Inventor Thomas Armat. On April 23, 1896, the Edison Vitascope premiered in New York City, and the American movie business was born.

1895 – Lumiére Brothers debut cinematographe. Two French brothers, Louis and August Lumiére patent a combination movie camera and projector, capable of projecting an image that can be seen by many people. In Paris, they present the first commercial exhibition of projected motion pictures.

1896 – Edison unveils Edison Vitascope

1902 – George Méliés – A French filmmaker who began making narrative motion pictures. That is, movies that is told a story. He is often called the “first artist of the cinema” because he brought narrative to the medium in the form of imaginative tales such as A Trip to the Moon (1902).

1903 – The Great Train Robbery (1903) of Edwin S. Porter – was the first movie to use editing, intercutting of scenes and a mobile camera to tell a relatively sophisticated tale. This new narrative form using montage – tying together two separate but related shots in such a way that they look on a new, unified meaning.

*Montage is the technique by which separate pieces of film are selected, edited, and then pieced together to make a new section of film. A scene could show a man going into battle, with flashbacks to his youth and to his home-life and with added special effects, placed into the film after filming is complete. As these were all filmed separately, and perhaps with different actors, the final version is called a montage.

1908 – Motion Picture Patents Company founded. Members of the Motion Picture Patents Company submit their films to the New York State Board of Censorship the year after.

1915 – The first African-American owned studio, The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, is founded.

1915 - Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation – He used montage to create passion, move emotions and heighten suspense. The most influential silent film ever made. Its racist theme marks its legacy.

1922 – Hays office opens

1926 – Sound comes to film. Western Electric and Warner Bros. agree to develop a system for movies with sound. The year after, Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer, presents the movie's first spoken words: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet." The Vitaphone method that the studio uses involves recording sound on discs.

The first sound film was one of the three films produced by Warner Brothers. It was the following; Don Juan (1926), The Jazz Singer (1927) and Lights of New York (1928).

The Impact of Sound on the movies:

1. Sound made possible new genre – musicals, for example2. As actors and actresses now act, performance aesthetics improved.3. Sound made film production a much more complicated and expensive

proposition.

By 1930, when sound was firmly entrenched, the number of weekly moviegoers had risen to 90 million (Mast & Kewin, 1996)

1934 – Motion Picture Production Code issued. The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America calls on Protestants to support the Catholic League of Decency's efforts to suppress immorality in film. The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association appoints Joseph Breen to enforce the Production Code.

1937 Walt Disney's first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is released.

1939 – Television unveiled at World’s Fair. The number of homes with TV sets grew from 10,000 in 1946 to more than 10 million in 1950 and 54 million in 1960. By 1955, movie attendance was down to 46 million people a week, fully 25% below even the worst attendance figures for the depression years.

1947 – HUAC convenes. In October, HUAC conducts hearings on Communist influence in the movie industry in Washington, D.C. Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, and Ronald Reagan testify. HUAC charges the Hollywood Ten (Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo) with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with its inquiries.

1948 – Paramount Decision. It was issued by the Supreme Court, effectively destroying the studios’ hold over moviemaking. Vertical integration was ruled illegal, as was block booking, the practice of requiring exhibitors to rent groups of movies, often inferior, to secure a better one. The studios were forced to sell off their exhibition business (the theaters).

1948 – Cable TV introduced.

1969 – Indie Film Easy Rider

1975 Sony introduces Betamax, the first videocassette recorder for home use. It costs $2,295.

1976 – VCR introduced

1996 – DVD introduced

1998 - Titanic, which premiered in 1997, becomes the highest grossing film in Hollywood history, earning $580 million domestically.

MOVIES AND THEIR AUDIENCES

Top 10 All-Time Domestic Box Office Hits

1. Titanic(1997) - $ 6012. Star Wars(1977) - $ 4613. E.T.(1982) - $ 4354. Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom(1999) - $ 4315. Spiderman(2002) - $ 4046. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King(2003) - $ 3777. The Passion of the Christ(2004) - $ 3688. Jurassic Park(1993) - $ 3579. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers(2002) - $ 34210. Finding Nemo(2003) - $ 34

SCOPE AND NATURE OF THE FILM INDUSTRY

Domestic box office in 2003 was a record $ 9.5 billion. Twenty-six movies in 2003, including Finding Nemo, Bruce Almighty, Elf, The Hulk, Freaky Friday and American Wedding, exceeding $100 million in U.S. only box office. Nine exceeded $400 million worldwide.

Three Components Systems

Production. Production is the making of the movies.

Technology has affected production. Many Hollywood films are shot on videotape. In most cases, this taping is done in conjunction with shooting the movie on film and is used as a form of immediate feedback for directors and cinematographers.

Another influence of technology is the Digital filmmaking that has made grand special effects not only possible but expected. Stunning special effects, of which Titanic (1997), is a fine example, can make a movie, an excellent one.

Distribution. Distribution was once as simple as making prints of films and sending them to theaters. Now it means supplying these movies to television networks, cable and satellite networks and makers of videocassettes and videodiscs. Another important factor in films’ promotion and eventual financial success is the distributor’s decision to release it to a certain number of screens. One strategy, called the platform rollout, is to open a movie on a few screens and hope that critical response, film festival success and good-word-of-mouth reviews from those who do see.

Exhibition. There are about 36,000 movie screens in the United States. More than 80% of theaters have two or more screens and average of 360 seats in front of each.

THE STUDIOS:

Studios are at the heart of the movie business

TRENDS AND CONVERGENCE IN MOVIEMAKING

Other critics, point to record box office figures as a sign of the economic and artistic health of this industry. Convergence, however, too, is changing the movies’ three component systems.

Conglomeration and the Blockbuster Mentality

According to many critics, the combination of conglomeration and foreign ownership forces the industry into a blockbuster mentality – filmmaking characterized by reduced risk taking and more formulative movies.

Concept Movies – high concept films depend little on characterization, plot and development and dialogue are easier to sell to foreign exhibitors than are sophisticated films.

Audience Research. Before a movie is made, its concept, plot and characters are subjected to market testing. Chicago Reader film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, audience testing is “believed in like a religion at this point. It’s considered part of filmmaking” (quote in Scribner, 2001, p. D3).

Sequels, Remakes and Franchises. Nothing succeeds like success. Hollywood, too, is making increasing use of franchise films, movies that are produced with the full intension of producing several more sequels. James Bond film (1962) has had 21 sequels, Star Wars (1977) 4 and counting, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

Television, comic Book and Videogame Remakes. The teens and the preteens make up the largest proportion of the movie audience, is the reason so many movies are adaptations of television shows, comic books and videogames. Examples are The Flintstone, Mission: Impossible, Batman and Superman.

Merchandise tie-ins. Films are sometimes produced as much for their ability to generate interest for non-film products as for their intrinsic value as movies.

Product placement. Many movies are serving double duty as commercials

CONVERGENCE RESHAPES THE MOVIE BUSINESS

The convergence of film with satellite, cable, pay-per-view, digital videodisc (DVD) and videocassette has provided immense distribution and exhibition opportunities for the movies. Fifty percent of studio revenues come from domestic, VCR, cable and satellite rentals alone (Henrick, 2002)

Today, distributors make three times as much from domestic home entertainment (DVD, videotapes and network and cable television) as they do from rentals to movie houses.

The convergence of film with digital technologies is beginning to reshape production, distribution and exhibition. In early 1999, three companies, Kodak,

Texas Instruments and CineComm began demonstrations of their digital distribution of films to theater via satellite.

The surprise 1999 hit The Black Witch Project is the most visible success of the growing microcinema movement, through which filmmakers using digital video cameras and desktop digital editing machines are finding audiences, both in theaters and online for their low-budget features.

As digitalization and convergence are changing exhibition and production, they are also changing distribution.

Sources:

>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/film_chron

>targetstudy.com/articles/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-movies.html

>www.filmclass.net/ElementsofFilm.htm

>plato.stanford.edu/entries/film

>www.wikipedia.com

February 7, 2014

>Stanley J. Baran, Introduction to Communication (Media Literacy and Culture), International Edition 2006, pp. 139-170

Group Four:

*Arthessa Marie Ladoing

* Sheena Alicante *Shante Angelita Cedeño *Pamela Claire Mella

*Jonalyn Morilla *Kristine Joy Bueza *Paul Fabienne Sevilla

*Joan Jet Garalde *Romulo Ray Balisnomo