History of film technology

It is believed that the technique was more commonly used by charlatans, priests and wizards to conjure up magical, religious and necromantic appearances, for instance of spiritual beings like ghosts, gods or demons.

In the 19th century, several other popular magic lantern techniques were developed, including dissolving views and new types of mechanical slides that created dazzling abstract effects (chromatrope, et cetera) or that depicted, for instance, falling snow or the planets and their moons revolving.

[1] In January 1833, Joseph Plateau, who had been working on similar experiments for years, published a letter about his recently discovered slotted disc inspired by Faraday's input.

[2] The possibilities of the Fantascope were limited to the short loops of images that could be drawn or printed on a cardboard circle, but Plateau suggested in a letter to Faraday that the principle might find modified applications in, for instance, phantasmagoria.

The earliest known public screening of projected stroboscopic animation was presented by Austrian magician Ludwig Döbler on 15 January 1847 at the Josephstadt Theatre in Vienna, with his patented Phantaskop.

Stereoscopy inspired hope that photography could also be augmented with colour and motion for a more complete illusion of reality, and several pioneers started to experiment with these goals in mind.

[6] Jules Janssen developed a large photographic revolver that was used to document the stages of the transit of Venus in 1874 at different geographic points, in an early form of time-lapse photography.

An article in Scientific American concluded: "It is already possible, by ingenious optical contrivances, to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience.

Donisthorpe announced in the 24 January 1878 edition of Nature that he would advance that conception: "By combining the phonograph with the Kinesigraph I will undertake not only to produce a talking picture of Mr. Gladstone which, with motionless lips and unchanged expression shall positively recite his latest anti-Turkish speech in his own voice and tone.

Many people working in the field followed the international developments closely through information in periodicals, patent filings, personal contact with colleagues or by getting their hands on new equipment.

On 25 November 1894, Anschütz introduced his patented projector with two intermittently rotating large disks and continuous light to project images on a 6 by 8 meter screen for 300-seat audiences.

The projector would have positive transparencies on flexible material, "such as gelatine, mica, horn &c" to be "adjusted on a pair of endless metallic ribbons accurately punctured with small round holes" and guided past the lenses and shutters by pins on drums.

[39][40] It is believed that the preserved images are from experiments relating to the ones mentioned in the letter, and were shot at the corner of Rue Bochard-de-Saron (where Le Prince was living) and Avenue Trudaine.

He created several Pantomimes Illumineuses for this optical theatre by painting colourful images on hundreds of gelatin plates that were mounted into cardboard frames and attached to a cloth band.

[46] He showed his negative film strips and a projection device at the Photographic Convention held at the Town Hall, Chester, in late June 1890, but was unable to demonstrate the projector, supposedly because it had suffered some derangement during transport.

[44] Donisthorpe's interest in moving pictures was revived when he heard about the successful experiments of Louis Le Prince, who was then working in Donsithorpe's home town of Leeds.

A prototype of the Kinetoscope was demonstrated to a convention of the National Federation of Women's Clubs visiting the Edison studio on 20 May 1891, with the short demo film Dickson Greeting, leading to much press coverage.

After Anschütz's Electrotachyscopes and Edison's Kinetoscopes were presented publicly and the underlying technique was described in magazines, many engineers would try their hand at the projection of moving photographic pictures on a large screen.

From narrow teleological viewpoints, historians would often ignore pioneering technology if it didn't resemble the movie apparatus that they knew best (for instance the use of stroboscopic flashtubes instead of shutter blades).

[53] The Eidoloscope, devised by Eugene Augustin Lauste for the Latham family, was demonstrated for members of the press on April 21, 1895 and opened to the paying public on May 20, in a lower Broadway store with films of the Griffo-Barnett prize boxing fight, taken from Madison Square Garden's roof on May 4.

[55] Max and Emil Skladanowsky screened short motion pictures with their "Bioscop", a flickerfree duplex construction, starting as part of a popular variety program at the Berlin Wintergarten theatre from 1 to 31 November 1895.

[58] By 1896, it had dawned on the Edison company that more money could be made by showing motion picture films with a projector to a large audience than exhibiting them in peep-show machines.

[53] The first person to demonstrate a natural-color motion picture system was British inventor Edward Raymond Turner, who applied for his patent in 1899, received it in 1900, and was able to show promising but very mechanically defective results in 1902.

The Kinemacolor camera had red and green filters in the apertures of its rotating shutter, so that alternating red-filtered and green-filtered views of the subject were recorded on consecutive frames of the panchromatic black-and-white film.

Utilizing a dichroic beam splitter sandwiched between two 45-degree prisms in the form of a cube, light from the lens was split into two paths to expose three black-and-white films (two of them in bipack), one each to record the densities for red, green and blue.

Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome (Eyman, 1997).

In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the "Vitaphone" system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features.

Heilig couldn't find funding to exploit or further develop this project 4D film has become a regular theme park attraction since the 1980s and became a common screening option for high-budget action movies in an increasing amount of theatres since the introduction of the 4DX technology in 2009.

[93] In the 1970s, Kasco (Kansei Seiki Seisakusho) released The Driver, a hit electro-mechanical arcade game with live-action FMV, projecting car footage filmed by Toei.

[94] The early virtual reality system The Sword of Damocles was created in 1968, with the perspective of the stereoscopic view of cg wireframe rooms depending on mechanical head tracking.