Week 2 Half Term Work In my Unit 16: Film and Video Editing Techniques we have covered many topics

cs starting off by learning about the first and basic uses of camera techniques and the people involved, our first lesson was in understanding the first attempts to wow the world. A Thaumotrope which was first brought along in 1825 was a basic necessity in the start of film making, its a cardboard cut out in a circle and then drawings on either side which represent one another, then attached either end is two pieces of string and when spun fast it creates an moving image, its basic but to the human eye it just looks like one image.

Three other processes of basic film we experienced is the Magic Lantern developed in 1820, the Praxinoscope and the Zoetrope developed in 1867. The Magic Lantern is something that we can relate to today its the basic footsteps of a projector, there is a light shining through a hole in the lantern and when glass or plastic films in black and white are feed through they produce an imagine on the wall directly in front of the Lantern, these images would have been painted or draw on, this took great craftsmanship, time and skill. A Praxinoscope is a circular object that pivots on the spot and you lie around the inside a painting which moves in small motions and once spun produces and image that moves when you look through the reflection on the mirror. A Zoetrope is something we still currently see today and something that I remember from my childhood, much like the Praxinoscope the object is lined with the image you will see moving and around the top of the Zoetrope there are holes so that you see flickering movements.

The first ever photograph was taken by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in either 1826 or 1827, the image gives a view from an upstairs window at his estate (Le Gras), in the Burgundy region or France.

Eadweard Muybridge was an English Photographer born on the 9th of April 1830 in Kingston-upon-Thames, and he was famous for making a 12-frame photograph that moved in bite-size chunks. He based his shot on a running horse.

The Lumiere Brothers produced the first moving film, the first public screening of this was held on December the 28th in 1859 at a cafe in Paris, the production was called Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, each film was 17 metres long which was cranked through a projector and runs for approximately 50 seconds.

George Melies was born on the 8th of December in 1861 in Paris, famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Innovator in the use of special effects and accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick. He was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse, photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color in his work. And one of his best known films is A Trip to the Moon made in 1902, this story involves strange, surreal voyages. From watching his film personally I feel it was very well executed for that period, the characters moved more than the camera but some of the editing and artwork is quite brilliant, obviously its not something I would usually see but I was impressed. D.W Griffiths was born on the 22nd of January in 1875 in Kentucky, he was a director to the head turning film in 1915 The Birth of a Nation this film used advanced camera and narrative techniques, this film was extremely controversial because of the negative way it depicted African-Americans, and the positive portrayal or slavery and the KKK.

Lev Kuleshov was born in 1899 on the 13th of January in Russia he was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist who taught at and helped establish the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. What I learnt from his work was his 6 six simple shots, 3 of the mans face and 3 of the objects he was looking at. What my class and I fell for was the fact in every shot of his face he had the same expression no matter what he was seeing; it was only us as the audience who thought he was changing his facial expressions when he wasnt.