FILM

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The movies are our dreams; they are bigger than life. Along with books, they are the only mass medium not dependent on advertising for their financial support. That means they must satisfy you, because you buy the tickets. This means that the relationship between medium and audience is difference from those that exist with other media.

Short History of the Movies

Sunday, January 4, 2009

The Early Entrepreneurs

When people watch the rapidly projected, sequential slides, they swathe pictures as they were in motion. This perception is the result of a physiological phenomenon known as persistence of vision, in which the images our eyes gather are retained in the brain for about 1/24 of a second. Therefore the photographic frames are moved at 24 frames a second, people perceive them as actually in motion.

Dickson combined Hannibal Goodwin’s newly invented celluloid roll film with George Eastman’s easy-to-use Kodak camera to make a motion picture camera that took 40 photograph a second. He used his kinetograph to film all types of theatrical performances, some by unknowns and others by famous entertainers.

Changes Comes to Hollywood

The Talkies

There is no confusion, however, about the impact of sound on the movies and their audiences. First, sound made possible new genres – musicals, for example. Second, as actors and actresses now had to really act, performance aesthetic improved. Third, sound made film production a much more complicated and expensive proposition. As a result, many smaller film makers closed shop, solidifying the hold of the big studios over the industry.

Scandal

The popularity of the talkies and of movies in general, inevitably raised questions about their impact on the culture. Newspapers and politicians were bombarded with complaints from the offended. Kissing in the theatre was one thing; in movies, it was quite another! The then-newborn industry responded to this and other calls for censorship with carious forms of self-regulation and internal codes.

Television

When World war II began, government took control of all patents for the newly developing technology of television as well as of the material necessary for its production. The diffusion of the medium to the public was therefore halted, but its technological improvement was not. In addition, the radio networks and advertising agencies that war would eventually end and that their futures were in television, were preparing for that day. When the World War did end, the movie industry found itself competing not with a fledging medium but with a technologically and economically sophisticated one.

Movies and Their Audiences

Saturday, January 3, 2009

We talk of Hollywood as the “dream factory” of makers of “movie magic”. We want our lives and loves to be ”just like in the movies” The movies are “larger than life”, and movie stars are much more glamorous than television stars. The movies, in other words, hold a very special place in our culture. Movies like the books are a culturally special medium, an important medium. In this sense the movie-audience relationship has more in common with that of books than with on television. Just as people buy books, they buy movie tickets. Because the audience is in fact the true consumer, power rest with it in film more than it does in television.
For better or worse, today’s movie audience is increasingly a young one.

Scope and Nature of Film

Friday, January 2, 2009

Three Components Systems

Production

Production is the making of movies. Technology, too, has affected the production.

Distribution

Distribution was once as simple as making prints of films and sending them to theatres. Now it means supplying these movies to television networks, cable and satellite networks, and makers of videocassettes and videodiscs.

Exhibition

It is no surprising to any moviegoer that exhibitors make such of their money on concession sales of items that typically have an 80% profit margin, accounting for 25% of theatres total revenues. This is the reason that matinees and budget nights are attractive promotions for theatres.

Trends and Convergence in Moviemaking

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Conglomeration and the Blockbuster Mentality

Other than MGM, each of the major is a part of a large conglomerate. Blockbuster mentality is a filmmaking characterized by reduced risk taking and more formulaic movies. Business concerns are said to be dominate artistic considerations as accountants and financiers make more decisions once made by creative people.

Concept Movies

The marketing and publicity departments of big companies love concept films - movies that can be described in one lone.

Television, Comic Book, and Videogame Remakes

Nothing succeeds like success. That, and the fact that teens and preteens make up the largest proportion of the movie audience, is the reason of many movies are adaptations of television shows, comic books, and video games.

Convergence Reshape the Movie Business

So intertwined are today’s movie and television industries that it is often meaningless to discuss them separately. But the growing relationship between theatrical films – those produced originally for theatre exhibition – and television is the result technological changes in the latter. The convergence of film with satellite, cable, pay-per-view, digital videodiscs (DVD), and videocassettes has provided immense distribution and exhibition opportunities for the movies.