The origins of the film were quite complicated and it is hard to take credit for the making of the film to be attributed to one person. History has more than once shown that success is made up of the work of many people. Perfecting the ideas of others, combining, experimenting, sometimes a mere coincidence - success has many facets. This is exactly what happened in the case of the film. The film and the camera were born through...the discovery of a visual defect! So more and more devices were created to 'trick' the eye. And so, one by one, things were created that eventually led to the camera.
Camera obscura → Phenakistiscope (1832) → Zoetrope (1834) → Praxinoscope (1877).
Such was the history, one might even say the prehistory of cinema! Later, more inventions, more discoveries, more people contributed to the beginning of the 1895 In the year Auguste and Louise Lumiere patented the cinematograph. What's more, they held their first film screening later that year.
The Lumiere brothers, the filmmakers, did not believe in the future of film and the further development of this technology.
However, the opposite has happened and today we cannot imagine life without television, cinema, entertainment, news, souvenir films. The film has already changed our lives forever and continues to evolve. The first films were completely unlike those of today. Completely different technology, equipment, equipment size, quality, way of shooting. Successively, since the first films were made, people began to experiment with film and the camera. Successive camera fans introduced new ideas. Cameras were becoming more mobile, smaller. As a result, they began to be manipulated, changing perspectives, angles, settings. It slowly gave birth to everything that we take for granted today. Cinema and everything related to it grew to skyrocketing proportions and spread all over the world. Even though the first films were quite simple, consisting of easy shots, they still aroused huge interest. It was definitely a breakthrough all over the world.
Personnel and outlook
Today, films are being shot with increasingly complex shots. Cameras, gadgets, camera cars, drones, studios equipped to mount cameras and manipulate minis. Newer and newer ideas and techniques. All of this makes cinema, film, camera a powerful machine today, which is accelerating even further and growing ever faster. But what does a film actually consist of? The rule is simple:
frame → shot → scene → sequence → act → film
The smallest unit in film is the frame. Frames make up the shot, shots make up the scene, scenes make up the sequence, sequences make up the act and acts make up the film. We also distinguish between different frames in a film:
Total- very general, the man is a minor character in the frame.
General- the character is visible but not the most important; the image of the place of action.
Full- a piece of the general plan; the figure from head to toe is visible.
American- figure, from knee to head, dominates the frame.
Medium- figure from the waist up; background completely secondary.
Near- figure from the bust upwards.
Close-up- we can clearly see the protagonist's face up close.
Detail- we focus on a particular element, a detail of the body.
Macrodetal- a small slice of reality that is almost invisible to the naked eye.
Depending on what we want to show and emphasise, what is important for the film, we choose the right kind of frame. A lot depends on this, including how the viewer will perceive and understand the film, what emotions will be awakened in him or her. This is why it requires a lot of experience, knowledge but also feeling. The camera perspective is also very important. There are three camera perspectives:
- Bird's eye perspective- is filming a subject from above. It doesn't matter what height we are filming from. These days, beautiful bird's-eye perspective shots are coming out of a drone, especially nature shots, of a large space.
- Frog perspective- filming from below, with the camera eye looking upwards. This perspective is meant to evoke certain feelings and emotions in the viewer. We use it when we want to evoke a specific result.
- Eye level - a very traditional perspectiveyjna. Most commonly used during interviews.
Big cinema screen versus small phone display
The perception of a particular scene as well as the whole film depends on which frame we use, which perspective, which technique or camera. It doesn't matter if it's a cinema film, a television film or an internet film. Each of the above-mentioned guidelines gives direction and shapes the character of each film. This is exactly the principle that guided us during the production of a short film about digital stress
All the treatments from dynamics, type of shots, framing, perspective are deliberate and carefully chosen. We wanted to achieve the right effect, to show how the boundaries between our remote work and life have become blurred. This is a major problem of civilisation and we are only now beginning to feel its effects. Dynamic shots, close-ups, bird's-eye perspective - this allowed us to show the essence of the problem.