24/03/2023
Did you Know?
Lights, Camera, (Office) Action: Patents + the Film Industry
The “motion picture” has always been at the intersection of innovation and entertainment, bringing together audio, visual, and editing technologies in a constantly evolving attempt to thrill the masses.
Let’s take a look at some of the most influential technological discoveries that have shaped filmmaking into one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment.
A timeline of major film innovations
1878: The first motion sequence photographed in real time, rather than a series of posed photographs, was created by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge. He photographed a horse named Sallie Gardner in rapid motion by using a series of separate still cameras. (Image Source)
1892: The first animated projection was created in France by Charles-Émile Reynaud, a French science teacher. On October 28, 1892, he projected the first animation in public, “Pauvre Pierrot”. His films were not photographed, instead drawn directly onto the transparent strip.
1893: At the Chicago World's Fair, Thomas Edison revealed the Kinetoscope to the public. The coin-operated machine was contained within a large box, and images could be viewed by one person at a time by looking through a peephole. (Image Source)
1900: British film pioneer William Friese-Greene filed a patent for a 3D-film process. In his patent, two films were projected side-by-side on a screen. The viewer looked through a stereoscope to converge the two images. Because of the obtrusive mechanics behind this method, theatrical use was not practical.
1902: The first person to demonstrate a natural-color motion picture system was British inventor Edward Raymond Turner, who received a patent in 1900. Two years later, he was able to show promising but very mechanically defective results.
1908: During the 1890s, Thomas Edison owned most of the major US patents relating to motion picture cameras. Exhausted by constant lawsuits, his competitors negotiated a licensing deal. Many independent filmmakers responded by moving their operations to Hollywood, whose distance from Edison's home base of New Jersey made it more difficult for the patents to be enforced.
1927: Warner Brothers releases The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film.
1973: The sci-fi classic Westworld, the predecessor to the popular HBO show, had the first use of 2D computer animation in a significant entertainment feature film. The point of view of Yul Brynner's gunslinger was achieved with raster graphics, a rectangular grid of pixels with each pixel's color being specified by a number of bits. (Image Source)
1975: Futureworld, the sequel to Westworld, featured the first use of 3D CGI in a live-action film. The segment was a very brief, computer-digitized 3D representation of the animation of a hand and face. (Image Source)
2004: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow becomes the first movie with all-CGI backgrounds and live actors. Later in the year, The Polar Express becomes the first computer-animated 3D film to be created with motion capture. (Image Source)
(Source:https://blog.juristat.com/film-patents)
