Life Of An American Fireman Essay

Matthew E. Barnes was a firefighter who could be called many things including a hero, a friend, a husband, a father and even an angel. The story begins like many 9/11 stories do, with the planes being hijacked, he was one of the men working that day in the New York City Fire Department that would go into the World Trade Center, but would never come out. The 37-year old resident of Monroe, New York was a father to three boys and the husband to Ms. Susan Barnes; he would spend all his available time with his family, somehow slipping out of chores and such just to go fishing with his boys. Two years before the 9/11 he had saved two twins, Isabella and Jacob Kalodner from a fire in their mother, Linda Kalodner’s apartment, by climbing up a 100-foot aerial ladder to the 10th story to save the 6 week old twins.

Edwin S Porter was an expert builder of photographic equipment and a film projectionist, he worked for Thomas Edison. In 1901, Porter began operating the camera, and was responsible for directing film, from there, Porter was credited with almost all of the innovations of the pre-1908 period by making first story film titled Life of an American Fireman. Porter was also the one who is credited with editing, he also successful in creating models. Porter’s biggest contribution to cinema, is concentration on fiction filmmaking.

Film has revolutionized the world as we know it. In the current day and age film is quite advanced. You can watch movies with special effects and insane resolution there were never thought possible before. But film has not always been this way. Over the decades since around the 1900s when the first film was made there been amazing advances in technology and in acting. An examination of the past hundred or so years will show the amazing advances film has taken to come to what we know of it today.

We are the most technically advanced nation in the free world but yet we have not been able to reduce the number of firefighter fatalities over the years. Its one of the great mysteries of the world today. Our gear is better than what they wore thirty years ago, its better than what they wore ten years ago and we still lose an average of one hundred firefighters every year. I know that not all are dying in structure fires but just one is one too many.

However, In Ken Dancyger: The Technique of Film Video Editing History Theory and Practice states that the first invention of film was back in 1895 were editing was not even something they hoped to achieve. Edwin S Porter sued dynamics to show continuity in his film which consisting of 20 shots. He discovered that shots are the building block of the film, which is true, the whole film is made of shots that are compiled together, edited to make it seem like a one scene. The things we see today for editing to be specific we not taken into consideration, screen direction and continuity of the story. The cameras we placed fixed to one position and the act is far away from the screen.

Editing is all about bringing a creative force into a film. The process could mean fixing a number of things like moving things around, meaning to arrange, select, and assemble - this goes for every component in the film. What you visualize, hear, with the use of special effects all are components that are edited and added to the film in a unique way to create a good story. The movie to be analysis is the film Forrest Gump with editor, Arthur Schmidt, he won an Oscar at the 67th academy awards for best film editing. Arthur Schmidt had three responsibilities as an editor in the film, which are spatial relationship, temporal relationship, and rhythm.

The first film that showed early signs of a rise in the quality of technology was the Western “The Great Train Robbery.” When this film first came out the audience were so amazed at the fact that they could watch something on a TV or at the cinema. Although this film was very good for the 1900s it still lacked some key features that make films much easier to understand such as dialogue, sound and camera shots. The one feature of a film that developed the quickest over the period of time was sound. Sound was introduced in October 1927 in the film “The Jazz singer”, which had three song numbers and a few lines of spoken dialogue. Apart from these few songs and words, the rest of the movie was silent, but the audience still thought that it was amazing that words had been spoken in the film, they used to call it “the movie that talked”.

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

Perhaps no other director has generated such a broad range of critical reaction as D.W. Griffith. For students of the motion picture, Griffith's is the most familiar name in film history. Generally acknowledged as America's most influential director (and certainly one of the most prolific), he is also perceived as being among the most limited. Praise for his mastery of film technique is matched by repeated indictments of his moral, artistic, and intellectual inadequacies. At one extreme, Kevin Brownlow has characterized him as "the only director in America creative enough to be called a genius." At the other, Paul Rotha calls his contribution to the advance of film "negligible" and Susan Sontag complains of his "supreme vulgarity and even

The Substitution splicing technique is historically significant because it is the first special effect technique used in film production. Georges Melies's work with it is also the first recorded use of film editing, This set the film industry down a path where editing the film was more widely used and is still used to this day in the modern film making

In the early years of post production, there was a distinct lack of editing within the film industry. Everything filmed was for the most part one continuous shot and lacking too much creativity in the post production region. Edwin Porter was one of the key founders that changed the way post production was addressed. Although he originally filmed following what is referred to as Aristotelian construction (Musser, 1991, p167) he began paying closer attention to how a story could be told more effectively through visual representation. Edwin began straying away from Aristotelian construction and instead opted to use cutting to help him create the story he wished to create. Whilst this was not an

The use of editing within Porter’s films help audiences follow the progressing linear narrative, more specifically the technique of intercutting allowed Porter to shift the action between the protagonist and the antagonist.

Battleship Potemkin is a movie produced by Eisenstein in 1925. A film about the Soviet Union soldiers' life on the battleship and how they disobey their authoritative generals. In addition, how they are welcomed by their families and the people, but get turned down by the governmental army by shooting down the crowd from the stairs. Therefore, this story was expressed by the cuts from frame to frame with sensitivity and anguish feelings.

No matter who a person thinks invented the motion picture camera, whether it was Louis Lumiere or Thomas Edison, I'm sure they had no idea what it would become at the turn of the century. Motion pictures, has become an entertainment medium like no other. From Fred Ott's Sneeze to Psycho to Being John Malkovich, the evolution from moving pictures to a pure art form has been quite amazing. Different steps in filming techniques define eras in one of the most amazing ideas that was ever composed. Silent to Sound. Short to long. Black and white to color. Analog to Digital. All were important marks in the History of Motion Pictures. "It's different than other arts. It had to be invented"

Film Industry has been expansively affected by the changes in technology. The mechanical and digital innovations give cause to the influence of equipment, distribution and the way in which films are made and consumed. New trends shape directors and filmmakers to expand creatively towards telling stories in motions. The film industry has developed to one of the most important tools of communication, it's cause so powerful affecting the way individuals and societies think, act and behave. Among the new Era approaching film, and seeing celluloid film fade is that of the Digital Era and a camera that saw celluloid films passing hastened.