I presented a five minute micro teach on a current change in technology within the media industry and discussed how it may affect the industry. My chosen topic was the Lytro Cinema Camera.
A timeline on the changes in technology within the film industry:
Early to Mid 1830's - Moving images were produced on revolving drums and discs with independent invention by Simon von Stampfer, Joseph Plateau and William Horner.
1867 - The first machine patented in the US that showed animated pictures was a device called the "wheel of life" or "zoopraxiscope". Patented by William Lincoln, moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit.
1878 - British photographer Eadweard Muybridge takes the first successful photographs of motion, showing how people and animals move.
1885 - American inventor George Eastman introduces film made on a paper base instead of glass, wound in a roll, eliminating the need for glass plates.
1889 - Thomas Edison and W.K. Dickson develop the Kinetoscope, a peep-show device in which film is moved past light.
1895 - The Lumiere brothers patent a combination movie camera and projector, capable of projecting an image that can be seen by many people at once. In Paris, they present the first commercial exhibition of projected motion pictures. They were the first to present projected, moving, photographic pictures to a paying audience of more than one person.
1905 - Cooper Hewitt mercury lamps make it practical to shoot films indoors without sunlight.
1906 - The first animated cartoon is produced.
1910 - Actors in American films began to receive screen credit and the creation of film stars began.
1911 - Credits begin to appear at the beginning of motion pictures.
1912 - Carl Laemmle organises Universal Pictures, which will become the first major studio.
1915 - The Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera allows directors to make close-ups without physically moving the camera.
1923 - Warner Bros. is established.
1925 - Western Electric and Warner Bros. agree to develop a system for movies with sound.
The first in-flight movie is shown.
1927 - Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer, presents a movie's first spoken words. The Vitaphone method that the studio used involved recording sound on discs.
1929 - The first Academy Awards are announced, with the award for the Best Picture in 1927 going to 'Wings'.
1930 -
The motion picture industries adopts the Production Code, a set of guidelines
that describes what is acceptable in movies.
1933 - Theatres begin to open refreshment stands.
1937 - Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature, Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs, is released.
1940 - The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs allowed
Disney to make more animated features like Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940),
Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
1945 - ‘Post-classical cinema’ described the changing methods
of storytelling of the “New Hollywood” producers. The new methods of drama and
characterization meant the story chronology may be scrambled; storylines may
feature unsettling “twist endings”.
1953 - Seven-year contracts with actors are replaced by
single-picture or multi-picture contracts.
Early 1960’s - The studio system in Hollywood declined,
because many films were now being made on location in other countries, or using
studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecittà in Rome.
1970’s - Filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual
content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic images of
bloody deaths.
1971 - Marked the release of controversial films like Straw
Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Dirty Harry. This sparked
heated controversy over the perceived escalation of violence in cinema.
Mid 1970’s - A new group of American filmmakers emerged, such
as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg,
George Lucas.
1972 - Film directors begin to express their personal vision
and creative insights. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped
to give these directors far greater control over their projects than would have
been possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial
successes, like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Coppola’s The Godfather films,
Polanski’s Chinatown, Spielberg’s Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and George Lucas’s Star Wars.
1976 - The phenomenal success in the 1970s of Jaws and Star
Wars in particular, led to the rise of the modern “blockbuster”. Hollywood
studios increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of very large budget
films with massive marketing and promotional campaigns.
Early 1980’s - Saw audiences began increasingly watching films
on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the film studios tried
legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which
proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films on home video
became a significant “second venue” for exhibition of films, and an additional
source of revenue for the film industries.
Early 1990’s - Saw the development of a commercially
successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was
increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment
Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997), independent films like
Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and
on home video.
1994 - Major American studios began to create their own
“independent” production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare.
One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought
by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino’s runaway hit Pulp Fiction
in 1994. The year 1994 also marked the beginning of film and video distribution
online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their
popularity, with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The
Lion King (1994).
1995 - The first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy
Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney. After
the success of Toy Story, computer animation began to grow and became the
principal technique for feature length animation, which allowed competing film
companies such as DreamWorks Animation and 20th Century Fox to effectively
compete with Disney with successful films of their own.
1992 - Americans spend $12 billion to buy or rent video tapes,
compared to just $4.9 billion on box office ticket sales. 76% of households
have VCR players.
1994 - Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen
form the film studio DreamWorks.
Late 1990’s - Another cinematic evolution began, from physical
film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile DVDs became the new standard
for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.
2000 - The documentary film began to escalate as a commercial
genre for conceivably the first time, with the success of films such as March
of the Penguins and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.
2001 - Saw the beginning of a growing problem of digital
distribution to be overcome with regards to expiration of copyrights, content
security, and enforcing copyright. There is higher compression for films, and
Moore’s law allows for increasingly cheaper technology.
2002 - More films began being released simultaneously to IMAX
cinema, the first was Disney animation Treasure Planet.
2003 - The Matrix Revolutions and a re-release of The Matrix
Reloaded could be viewed in IMAX cinemas.
2005 - The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to
have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology.
2009 - James Cameron’s 3D film Avatar became the highest-grossing
film of all time.
2010 onward - 3D films gained increasing popularity with many
other films being released in 3D. The best critical and financial success was
the feature film animation of Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar’s Toy Story 3.
2012 - Titanic was re-released in a special 3D version to
celebrate the 100th anniversary.
