28th of December in 1895 something amazing happened in the heart of France; The birth of Cinema. Since there had never been anything like a motion picture before, the cinemas in Paris were packed during the 20 minutes divided onto 10 short stories sent 10 times a day. After this huge success, the frenchmen decided to build a permanent movie theatre, and in 1897 they could celebrate. Now, people started producing movies. In 1903 the first real life-based film was released, and was the appropriate length of 10 minutes. "The Story of the Kelly Gang" was the first full-length narrative feature film, and this Australian made production was somewhere between 60-70 minutes long.
1913 was the year we were introduced to studio system. Producers discovered that filming inside a studio(on a set) instead of locations in the real world, could save them a lot of money - the industry certainly grew fast in the early 1900s.Up till now, it would have only been silent movies shown in the theaters, so it was about time that in 1927 creators started experimenting with sound and making the very first "Talkie" with an actual dialogue (The Jazz Singer). People now started to realise that this was a mass form of entertainment from which they could earn massive amounts of money. So in 1929 the first 100% natural color talking, singing, dancing picture was released in New York City. In addition, the first ever Oscars award show happened in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16th same year.
Camden Drive-In, New Jersey turned out to be the start of another era in the history of the cinema; The Drive-In Theaters (1933).
A few years later, 1938 to be exact, Walt Disney with his "Snow White and the seven dwarfs" made astonishing 8 million dollars and the world was introduced to a new phenomena, the TV! This was becoming the future rival of the big screen, and the wonderful technology was first seen in Queens in 1939.
Since the cinema now officially had competition, Hollywood fought back and released feature-lenght 3D-sound films such as "House of Wax", in 1953. This was the movie-producers way of telling the people to get up from the couch, away from the TV and back into the movie theatres. Another attemt at filling the theatres again was to lure people with one good movie, a so called A-movie, and a second viewing of a more cheaply made movie, e.g. horror - because they were the cheapest ones and it seemed that they allways had an audience. This countermeasure made by the cinema, got the television world to think about showing movies on the TV. So instead of fighting, in 1955 the movie creators started licensing films to television stations and made even more money.Taking the cinema experience one step further, why not build several big screens in the same building? And so they did. By 1965 the first multi-screen movie theatre opened in Kansas City and still to come was the Megaplex, with over 20 screens and stadium-style seating. Still in the 60s, the same company that developed the "practical videotape recorder" (1956) now had created their first consumer version f a videotape recorder, to the grand price of 30 000 dollars! A very consumer friendly price.. Later this same decade, Sony launched a portable and also very expencive black & white video camera system, video tape recorder, and took it one step further in 1969 when they introduced the VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) for home use.
The father of independent movies, John Cassavetes, opened the door to a whole new side of film industry. After some struggling actor days, he directed and financed his second film named "Faces" and on the casting list was among others, his wife. Moving on into the 70s, another independent movie by the name of Billy Jack was released as a Block Buster, which basically ment a simultanious release in several cinemas. Before this, they actually had to drive the rolls of film from town to town and have a few days of viewings before going to the next movie theatre.
Another major event in the early 1970s, was the premiere of the IMAX widescreen format in Japan. This is an ridiculous big screen and they even had own cameras to make the IMAX movies.In the late 70s and early 1980s, we were briefly introduced to "DVDs" the size of records, better known as laser discs, and this could have been the end of the VHS, except there were no recording opportunities on them. Following, the MTV was born in 1981 and in 1983 the first coin operated, laser disc arcade game Dragons Lair, was released. In 1985 video film became popular, and the producers launched movies, mostly cheap horror productions, directly on discs, because there were no point spending money on releasing them in theatres (which is still being done today).
Regarding this weeks TuteSpark, we were asked to find 3 films that have been made especially for the Internet and distributed online. These are my findings:
This is a powerful short film, that tells the story of two brave men facing a fear:
This is a movie made by Pixar, as a form of online advertising:
The next movie is also in the comedy genre:
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