Film Making : The Process Of Making A Film

What were Edwin S. Porter's significant contributions to the development of early narrative film? In what sense did Porter build upon the innovations of contemporaneous filmmakers, and for what purposes?

The director is responsible for overseeing creative aspects of a film. They develop the vision for a film and carry the vision out, deciding how the film should look. The director may also be heavily involved in the writing and editing of the film, as well as managing the script into a sequence of shots, coordinating the actors in the film and supervising musical aspects. The Auteur Theory suggests that films contain certain characteristics or ‘signatures’ that reflect the director’s individual style and give a film its personal and unique stamp. Hayao Miyazaki is one such auteur whose entertaining plots, compelling characters

With this short but very interesting and informative class I have just scratched the surface of the what it takes to make a full fleged film. It takes much more than I had presumed to make a movie in Hollywood. The number of people that it takes to make a minute of a movie let alone the entire movie was astonishing to me. There are many things that it takes to start making a movie but without an idea of some sort there is no movie to be made.

Rarely has a film impacted an audience and held the test of time as the film Gone with the Wind. I have always been curious if director, Victor Fleming and producer, David O. Selznick and screenplay writer, Sidney Howard knew what they were creating a masterpiece and how this film would have such an enormous impact on audiences for years to come. Interestingly enough there were some who thought the film should not be made, as Irving Thalberg said to Louis B. Meyer in 1936, “Forget it Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel” (Ten Films that Shook the World).

The cinematic language that we know of today would not be as it is today if we had synchronous sound recording from the beginning of film. Cinematic Language is the systems, methods or conventions by which movies communicate with the viewer. A few examples of cinematic language are; montage; mise en scene, the use of long takes, depth of field shooting in order associate people or objects; Expressionism, the use of lighting techniques, severe camera angles, and elaborate props, to name a few aspects; and realism, a technique to make the action seem as true to life as possible. The list of techniques and styles of cinematic language go on, and can only be limited by the imagination. Early films, and early sound films both had something in common; they lacked many elements of the cinematic language. The reason sound films reverted back to the same pre-cinematic style of early films, was due to the fact that they had technical difficulties, that required them to fall into the style of the old ways. I do believe that if filmmakers would have had sound from the beginning, with the same sense of movie direction they worked with, they would have used sound as a crutch rather than an enhancing element.

In 1962, an American film critic, Andrew Sarris, wrote the “notes on the auteur theory.” He stated that the “first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of

Anyone who is even vaguely aware with film usually has a favorite director. Why? What distinguishes one director from another? A director is “the person who determines and realizes on the screen an artistic vision of the screenplay; casts the actors and directs their performances; works closely with production design in creating the look of the film…and in most cases, supervises all postproduction activity, especially editing” (Barsam and Monahan 496). Clearly, the director of a film is lead visionary in how the film is made. But what makes some directors truly memorable and instantly recognizable? Those directors take advantage of all different kinds creative possibilities and signatures to become the true “author” of the film, also known

The job of the director is to produce a film that captures the audience’s attention by

My entire life I have been fascinated with film and commercials. As a kid, I would stop what I was doing to watch a commercial. This has not changed through the years. My goal in life is to work in the film industry and work with video. This may have developed from my brother’s short term love for the video arts. Like most little brothers I followed in his footsteps through a lot of things and most of them would not stick. As I grew older I developed my own different ideals and likes. But, video just stuck with me. Even if film production doesn’t work out I have always had a childlike excitement for fighting fires. Being the person to save the day is something that everybody wants to do, but not everyone peruses this dangerous career.

The film industry has continuously changed since its inception due to rapid technology advancements. Camera technology has been a key factor that has influenced the growth of filmmaking. The first motion picture in the world was produced in the early 1880s, and the first public screening occurred ten years later. It didn’t take long for the quality of films to improve as new filmmaking equipment emerged. Ever since the first movie was produced, the film industry has been continuously changing in response to emerging filmmaking technology. Introduction of digital photography and digital data storage along with the development of internet significantly influenced the film industry (Barsam, 2015). These technologies contributed

Being a science fiction fan during his childhood, he worked his way in producing several highly acclaimed science fiction movies such as Avatar, Aliens, and the Terminator. Born on August 16, 1954, in Ontario Canada and later moved to California to finish his college at California State University. In order to pursue his dreams in cinematography, he worked as a truck driver and would work on screenplays. Then his career began from an art director in Battle beyond the Stars (1980) to directing various films. Now, he is an Oscar-winning director whose films Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009) remains the top grossing films of all time. He has won various awards from different sides of the world, Norway, France, and the United Kingdom. Mise-en-scenes were well incorporated in each of James Cameron’s movies especially for science fiction movies that used elegantly crafted visuals.

Every so often a movie is released with such tense anticipation and glamorous visual art that the public is drawn to this dramatic rendition of life in the theatre. For even just two hours or so, you are put into a different lifestyle. Action, drama or comedy it may be. We are thrust into a different way of thinking. We are forced to learn the characters thoughts and feelings. The hard work and artistic skill that goes into these magnificent films is not an easy thing to mimic. Out of the thousands of movies released worldwide each year only a handful are truly worthy of the label film art. Most of the great movies are either produced by a multi million dollar

When it comes to movies, many directors are good at their jobs. However, other directors are great in the art of film making. There is no doubt such statement is considered utterly subjective, but what would life be without subjectivity, for it is our differences that make us thrive against a monotonic existence. By the same token, Alfred Hitchcock and Christopher Nolan utilize their singularities to create films that for decades have impacted the movie making universe. In fact, it is their differences that provide us with a high contrast to compare and scrutinize their job and find what made them great at it.

During the mid to late years of the 19th century, a new form of entertainment emerged. Film entered the stage of innovation. New marketing and technological innovations developed for film to become the art it is today. In the 1830s, Joseph Plateau designed the Phenakistoscope. This device had a picture in the middle of a wheel made with mirrors and small openings. When spun, the Phenakistoscope made the picture appear to move. The name changed to Zoetrope in the 1860s and producers advertised the product as an accessory every home needed (Dixon & Foster, 2008). Later inventions that preceded the first motion picture camera include: Henry Du Mont’s Omiscope, Henry R. Heyl’s Phasmatrope, Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoöpraxiscope, Etienne-Jules Marey’s fusil photographique and Eastman Kodak’s chronophotographs (Parkinson, 1997). With a design by Thomas Edison, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson built the first modern movie camera, the Kinetograph, in 1890 (Dixon & Foster, 2008). In 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumiére patented the Cinématographe, a machine that combined the engineering of a camera and a projector (Bergan, 2006). Businessmen capitalized on the growing need for a place to witness these brand new films, thus they charged people to see them in their living rooms (Potter, 2014). These creations made movie-making a reality.

The cinematographic camera industry emerged in fact more than 100 years ago, it was only until recently that significant digital changes took place, apart from minimal technological improvements. Before the invention of digital cameras the main medium for shooting a movie was on celluloid film in which the quality of the image was very high from the beginning. However these cameras had some inconveniences. The cinematographer would have to set the lighting and frame to the directors vision and make sure that it was right. He could not see immediately if the scene was shot as desired and this caused the workflow to be very complex and time consuming which most producers would see limited. The developing, processing, transferring, editing and conforming the film normally took a day and the director along with the cinematographer would sit