Filming Years 18901900s

by zecoathediesel

Inspired from the Video Game Years. In this new series, it's just a documentary of the film industry. But instead of going year by year. It'll be decade by decade. In this series I'll be writing facts about people's favorite director, actor/actresses, and movies. I'll also be covering anything connected to film industry such as real wars, rise of television and more.

6. Fun Facts

With the rise of projectors, new theaters and film studios started to rise as well. New theaters such as the Edisonia Vitascope Hall and Nickelodeon would house a wide number of people, and charging them a nickel or a quarter depending on the movie. It was also clear that people were growing tired of day to day real life or news in the theater and they wanted some more narrative films with stories in them. So during the late 1890s to 1900s, more studios started to grow such as William Dickson's American Mutoscope Company, also known as the Biograph Company. Even Melies made his own film studio from a greenhouse-like building.

1896 also saw its first female director, Alice Guy-Blache, originally started off as a secretary she join Gaumont in his new film company, Gaumont Film, and with permission, she went and directed her own narrative films after being inspired by the Lumiere Brothers private screening, she was convince that she can put fiction stories into film. Much like Melies she also introduced some new effects as such running a film backwards and double exposure. She soon moved to America in New York and continue her directing career until 1922 where after she divorced her husband, she had to file bankruptcy and auctioned her film studio. She wasn't that well known as much as Miles was, but she still gain some recognized and got credit where credit was do.

Originally I was going to make animation it's own topic, because I love animation, but sadly I couldn't find that much information on animation during its beginning years to 1910. So this is going to have to go into the fun facts category. Anyway, animation was a thing that happened way before the idea of motion was being research. While not moving, the earliest days of using drawings to tell a story were from places like Iran to Egyptian burial chamber from the BC era. Then from the 1700s to 1800s we would have many inventors trying out different ways on making said drawings move. From Shadow play using cut-out figures and some sort of light. To the Magic Lantern, Flip books, anything they could think of. From 1888, French inventor Charles-Emile Reynaud would develop and patented a projection known as the praxinoscope, which almost looks like a Zoetrope but it has mirrors in the middle and these mirrors would help the image look right when being shown to audiences. There were three cartoons shown, and two out of the three are now lost, and we only have one of these cartoons called Pauvre Pierrot on YouTube. Fast forward to 1900 we have James Blackton's film the Enchanted Drawing the earliest surviving stop motion film in which you would see James drawing some sort of object in a picture and take that same object out from the drawing and becoming real. Then in 1906, he directed what people considered the first animated film recorded, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in which he used both stopped motion and cutout animation.

Finally in 1908, French animator, Emile Cohl was credited as the first hand draw animator with his film Fantasmagorie, in which he draw 700 drawings on paper and shooting the frame onto the negative film. And that's all I've got. Like I said I wish I could find some more info on these animation projects, but this is all I could find.

But don't worry because next chapter we'll be talking about stereotypes.