Watch: The Big Picture (13 min video)

Transcript

_{The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.}

Welcome to the first lesson of filmmaking from the first directors. In this lesson that’s entitled “Documenting Life” we will really start and talk about how did film begin, where did it come from, and what does this mean to you. This is called the big picture where I’m going to lay out the principles and some of the historical setting of a certain period in filmmaking. Now, where did the film begin? Well, the camera was invented in the 19th century and this took still pictures. We’ve seen the daguerreotypes, the pictures from the Civil War and other periods around there where everyone standing very still and staring at the camera and they usually kind of have a silver tone. Well in the 1870s there began a question became of a question of horses and horses running. And when a horse ran, did all four of its feet ever leave the ground at one point? So a guy named Edward Muybridge took up this challenge and worked with a cameraman and some other folks to create this contraption of the cameras that would take photographs very, very, very quickly.

What he did is he filmed a horse and it’s a very famous little moving picture of a horse. Essentially he put these images together and when he put them together in very quick succession it gave the illusion that the horse was moving. Now he went on and he did this, filmed all sorts of things that were moved. Basically he took lots and lots of pictures simultaneously very quickly and then put them together and he essentially employed a concept known as the persistence of vision. The idea of persistence of vision is when you put images together the brain essentially connects them and gives the illusion that there is motion. So if you think about it all of film making is based on an illusion. not real. One of the folks now a lot of our film is digital but films work in what’s called a frame rate and it’s the times that an image shows on a screen. Now digital is different the way things work today but back then when film was originally beginning the period we’re talking about and for actually up even now you can find films that are still projected.

This frame rate would happen at about 12 frames per second began to give a perspective of illusion of film. This persistence of vision would work. As you increased to 18 frames a second it got smoother. And then we settled on 24 frames a second was kind of the standard of okay this gives really smooth motion. Even though, and the joke has always been when you’re sitting in an old, basically when you’re sitting in a movie being projected, you are sitting in the darkness more than you’re sitting in a light. But your eyes, because they happen so fast, the images are persistent. Now these images that move that happened in the 1870s and 80s you had guys like Thomas Edison in the United States who had created the record player and he said listen it would really be neat to have images that would go along with my records. So ironically enough it was not that they were trying to put sound to images but images to sound and he created the first moving picture camera in America.

Other parts around the world people were taking cameras and putting them together to make a motion picture camera. Guys like the Brothers Lumiere in Lyon, France had done this. There were some folks in England. And these are the first in different parts of the world began to take the first films. So in the 1880s and 1890s we see the first films coming out. We’re going to look at some of these. I’m going to show you in our little section. You can watch Edward Muybridge’s Horse Running. You can watch some of the early films of Edison and some of the early films of the Lumiere brothers. Now we’ll talk more about the films themselves in that section. But if you think about it, the process of film making back then and now needs certain things. And the number one thing it needs is it needs a subject. It needs something to film. And this something to film, you’ve got to have a subject and you’ve got to have a place to set up the camera and you’ve got to have light.

So even today these three things are all very, very important when you’re dealing with a subject. There’s The second thing that matters is as we capture this, let’s talk about this camera. The camera requires there to be essentially a lens which adjusts the light in a certain way for it to be captured on your film stock or in this case on your digital, it’s basically a little digital, I can’t remember what it’s called, I told you I’m going to make mistakes here. The little digital screen that actually the light goes onto and transfers the plate that It transfers it into a digital image, basically ones and zeros. And then you’ve got to have usually a tripod or at least a camera that you can hand hold in a certain way. And then finally you’re going to need a camera operator. So someone with the technical know-how who can actually manipulate and use the camera in a way that’s effective. You’re going to have to process that film.

Back then they processed the film development, now a lot of it’s done but you’ve still got to pull it out of your camera and do something with it. And then finally you’re going to have to have a way to project it. Over there they usually use a projector, now we put it on a computer or it’s projected into a movie theater. These things, it was the way it was at the beginning and it’s still the way it is. And then finally, really the most important thing that went along with this was an audience. You’re not making films for yourself, you’re making them for someone else to watch. So having an audience and knowing something about your audience is important in the filmmaking process. That process of filmmaking, it was like that in the beginning and it’s like that now. It’s always important to remember these are the elements and the basics of filmmaking. Now what did these early filmmakers film?

You’re going to see they just documented life and so there was a realism if you will. And we’re going to talk about this concept more later. But the idea of looking at an action that had an intrinsic interest in and of itself. For example you’re going to find one of the very first films the Lumiere brothers did in France was people leaving their factories. this bunch of folks leaving their factory. And you may watch this for a few seconds and think, now why is this interesting? Now for them, people had never seen moving images. But let’s put up a contrast here. What if they had shown their factory when it was empty and had shown it for two or three minutes? Well, which is how about how long this piece goes as people filled all their factory up and they leave it. It would have been absolutely boring. This keeps your interest. So even the simple fact of people leaving the factory, Another example of a train showing up.

Well they could have just filmed the tracks with no people in it. But instead the train appears. They realized early on and everyone realized that filmmaking is about capturing action that is intrinsically interesting. It’s important to realize this, that every shot you ever take needs to be interesting and have a point in and of itself. If it doesn’t then what’s the point of showing it? So even the early filmmakers realized this and looked for things that were interesting. Now these shots were generally outside because there’s usually more light from the sun than inside. Later on it would have to have special lamps that were designed that would put enough light out to be able to capture on the film stock. Most of these shots are continuous, meaning there’s no edits and there’s no breaks. They’re just showing something. They turn the camera on and they shot something. The cameras are still.

The earliest films are not being panned, they’re not being moved. They’re simply showing one thing. So the act of the pan and the tilt, so the pan is going from left to right and the tilt is going up and down, these came later. Actually much later in respect to some of these early, early films. Now, I put a little documentary in there that yourself called Let’s Go to the Movies that will discuss and show you how you’re going to see these early films. But one of the interesting things is where did they show these films? So the early films were shown in Nickelodeon theaters, is what they were often called, or Odeons. But the Nickelodeon was an Odeon that was used and you could pay a nickel for. And you would go and see these really, really short films, and often they were 20, 30 seconds, and sometimes they would last up to a minute or two, but they’d pay a nickel. Eventually we’d go to 10 cents, but that’s where the word Nickelodeon comes from.

The famous Nickelodeon channel gets its name from these Nickelodeon theaters. What about sound? So initially, in some cases, there was absolutely no sound, just the sound of the projector going. You hear people around you breathing because these places were packed. They were usually a tent. As far as they could get dark, they could set a projector up and they would often travel around the United States and just set these things up or in a little Nickelodeon theater where they’d have kind of a simple chair set up. And these things popped up like mushrooms around the United States in the 1890s. By the 1900s they were getting to be more developed theaters. But the role of sound, then people began to realize, well what if we put a piano to this? Or what if we put an organ to it? This sound then that was shown on the films, and by the way the films had to be hand cranked. You’ll see the guy in this documentary doing this.

So the films when they were taken were hand cranked and then they were done projected they were hand cranked. So they didn’t have an automatic projector so they could be done faster or slower. So even the guy who was hand cranking them had to try to match the scene. In some cases they would know to, for instance with Charlie Chaplin, if it was a chase scene they would do it faster. And then sometimes they would want to go into slow motion and this was all done by the projector. In the same way the person that was playing the piano or playing the organ would have to be watching the movie and then either make up music or in most cases they had music they learned that this is the kind of music, exciting music for the chase scene or it’s a romance scene so it’s going to be slower and more romantic. They would often pull from classical music and they would make the music as it happened. So we look back and a lot of the music that has been composed later was not the original music with it.

Now Charlie Chaplin did begin to compose his own films. D.W. Griffith and some of his larger works actually had scores written, for instance, Birth of a Nation. But the earliest films had no music and some of them even had no sounds. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to de-emphasize sounds ourselves at the start and just focus on these images. Now an important point. The question has always been, is filmmaking a business or is it an art? If you look all the way back historically in many ways, filmmaking was a business first. Edward Muybridge, who in some ways we could say had the first films, went around the United States showing these films and he would discuss them as being artistic, but he was out there to make a buck and he made a lot of money in the process. And these early filmmakers realized that they could make these films and make money. So from the beginning, filmmaking and art have been side by side.

And most people moved and made these films in order really to make a buck. And the idea of an artistry, in some cases, I hate to say, didn’t come until later. I hate to say this, it’s the truth. Filmmaking is about entertainment and even today if you look at it, most people would say filmmaking is about entertainment and isn’t always as artistic. Probably not so. Most of what gets made today is made to make money and to entertain people. People are going to trade their money for that moment of entertainment and that’s what it’s really all about. Now, that brings us to this issue of money is that what makes film an unusual medium, call it an art form for the moment, What makes it unusual is it takes an enormous amount of capital to make a film. Now when I use the word capital I’m using it in the economic sense of money or assets. So you’ve got to have cameras, you’ve got to have tripods, you’ve got to have sets in many cases, you’ve got to have people, you’ve got to have all this infrastructure to go around and as the movies got bigger the infrastructure gets bigger.

So filmmaking is a very capital intensive business even in a small way. compared to writing a novel or painting a picture or writing a poem or singing a song or writing some music. All these things really can be done without a lot of extra equipment. Filmmaking is not that way. Filmmaking takes equipment and you’ve got to understand the equipment and so there’s a really interesting comparison between this world of money, between the world of art of what you do and then there’s the technical world of making a film and you’ll find that different people have different interests. As a filmmaker you need to understand all three. If you forget one it’s usually at your own peril. For instance if you’re not worried about money and not worried about your films ever selling or being able to be used, you’re probably going to have a limited ability to make them. If you’re not worried about the technical things and you don’t really begin to understand some of this then you’re not going to understand how to do this and how to make a film.

Finally if you forget the artistry then you’re going to forget a lot of what makes a film enjoyable. In this case Everyone knows the film that looks beautiful, they spent a lot of money on it, but it’s the most boring thing in the world. It just doesn’t work. So all these things work together. Now, we are going to come next, you’re going to now, basically this is the end of the big picture for this first one. We’ve kind of given some very broad brush strokes of the early part of film. I want you to start watching these films. I’ve got a number of films, a short documentary, and then some of the films of Edison. And again, when I say the films of Edison, these were not Edison himself making these films. filmmakers who work for the Edison company. Second, we’re going to look at the films of the Lumiere brothers and these were ones that the Lumiere brothers themselves made in France. And then finally there will be, I think I’ve got the Muybridge early horse and you can watch that first because that’s what came first.

Each time watch the films and then come back and I’ll have a commentary section that I’ll talk about some of the aspects of the films. It may not be all of them but just some pieces together all put together so that we can talk and I’ll give some commentary on what’s going on. After that you’ll come back and we’ll have the production part where we’ll discuss what are some production elements then and then I’ll give you your assignment where you can go and start making films yourself.