History of Film

By TheGhostPro02

  • Thomas Edison patents the Kinetograph

    Thomas Edison built a small movie studio to demonstrate his films. Unlike other cameras at the time, Edison's used celluloid film, which was invented by George Eastman in 1889. This was one of the first film studios in America.

  • Cinema is Invented

    The Lumiere brothers, using the Cinématographe, created the first film. It was a documentary, called Workers leaving the Lumiere factory in Lyon. The film was a success, and saw the birth of an industry that would into a huge, worldwide phenomenon.

  • The First Film to use Editing

    The film Grandma's Reading Glass by George Albert Smith, Smith created the film by filming multiple shots and editing them together. This film was one of the first examples of using this technique. Although, now this technique is taken for granted by film creators today.

  • The First Feature Film

    The Story of the Kelly Gang by Charles Tait was the first to be a feature length film, spanning over an hour, this was unheard of at the time. It was a huge success, and it showed that films could be longer than 10 to 15 minutes. this film is also the only film about Ned Kelly that doesn't have Mick Jagger or Yahoo Serious starring in it.

  • The First "Talkie"

    Films would usually have live music performance playing along with the film. That all changed with the film The Jazz Singer. This was the film to have a recorded soundtrack put into a film.

  • Surround Sound is Created

    While Walt Disney was working on Fantasia, he wanted to have the audience to hear the sound of a bee buzzing around the theatre. So Walt talked to the engineers at Bell labs, who created what was called Fantasound. The thing was though, it cost $85000 to install, which was why only 2 theatres had it installed.

  • The Beginning of 3D

    Led by the release of Bwana Devil in 1952, the first color stereoscopic 3D film, and with releases across most of the major film studios, 3D took cinema by storm. For a couple of years, anyway. While 3D films continued to be produced throughout the 50s and 60s, competing technologies like Cinemascope, coupled with the rise of television and the expense of having to run two projectors simultaneously for 3D meant the format never really took off.

  • The Beginning of IMAX

    In 1970 a Canadian company showcased the very first IMAX film, Tiger Child, at Expo 70 in Osaka. Using a special camera that supports a larger film format, IMAX films offer a significantly higher resolution than that of standard film counterparts. With dedicated IMAX cinemas launching from 1971, the increased resolution means viewers can typically sit closer to the screen.

  • The Birth of Dolby Sound

    In 1975, Dolby introduced Dolby Stereo, which was followed by the launch of Dolby Surround (which itself became Dolby Pro Logic) which took the technology into the home.With the release of 1992's Batman Returns, Dolby Digital introduced cinemas to digital surround sound compression, which was reworked as the Dolby AC-3 standard for home setups.

  • The Rise of CGI

    While people were playing around with computer graphics on screens as far back as the 1960s and 70s, with examples like Westworld showing a graphical representation of the real world, things really started taking off with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In the film, the Genesis Effect sequence is entirely computer generated, a first for cinema. We can partially thank George Lucas for this trend, as the effects were created by his company, Industrial Light and Magic.

  • The Beginning of Digital Cinematography

    With The Phantom Menace, George Lucas managed to revolutionise filmmaking by including footage shot on digital cameras. The film also saw the arrival of digital projectors in theatres around the world.
    By late 2013, Paramount had moved entirely to digital distribution of its films, eliminating 35mm film from its lineup entirely.

  • Dolby's Atmos

    Atmos enables 128 channels of synchronised audio and metadata associated with the panning image to create the most lifelike surround sound solution to date. What makes Atmos truly magnificent is that it renders the sound based on the metadata in real time using whatever speaker system is in place, rather than having a sound engineer dictate which sounds are playing through which speaker.