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2000 BCE
In the Paleolithic era
people used to draw in the rocks to present the movement -
the horse
The horse owner Leland Standford was debating with his friends about whether or not all four hooves of a horse were off the ground during a gallop. -
Zoopraxiscope
Edward Muybridge was an inventor. He had come up with a machine called the zoopraxiscope. -
Kinetoscope
The Edison Company in the USA successfully demonstrated a prototype of the Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures. -
Adding colour
Τhe principles of colour separation were used to produce so-called ‘natural colour’ moving images with the British Kinemacolor process, first presented to the public. -
Longer movies
By 1914, several national film industries were established. Europe, Russia and Scandinavia were as important as America. Films became longer, and storytelling, or narrative, became the dominant form. -
Adding sound
The first attempts to add synchronised sound to projected pictures used phonographic cylinders or discs. The first feature-length movie incorporating synchronised dialogue, The Jazz Singer (USA, 1927), used the Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system, which employed a separate record disc with each reel of film for the sound. -
The three colours
The early Technicolor processes from 1915 onwards were cumbersome and expensive, and colour was not used more widely until the introduction of its three-colour process in 1932. -
CINEMA’S GOLDEN AGE
During the 1930s and 1940s, cinema was the principal form of popular entertainment, with people often attending cinemas twice weekly. -
The visits
In Britain the highest attendances occurred in 1946, with over 31 million visits to the cinema each week -
the screen
There were many experiments with other formats, there were no major changes in screen ratios until the 1950s. -
television
In 1952, the Cinerama process, using three projectors and a wide, deeply curved screen together with multi-track surround sound, was premiered. It gave audiences a sense of greater involvement and proved extremely popular. However, it was technically cumbersome, and widescreen cinema did not begin to be extensively used until the introduction of CinemaScope in 1953 and Todd-AO in 1955, both of which used single projectors. -
large screen
Specialist large-screen systems using 70mm film have also been developed. The most successful of these has been IMAX, which today has more than 1,000 screens worldwide. -
since then....
In the past 20 years, film production has been profoundly altered by the impact of rapidly improving digital technology. Though productions may still be shot on film (and even this is becoming less commonplace) most subsequent processes, such as editing and special effects, are undertaken on computers before the final images are transferred back to film.