Chapter 1 Motion Picture Language 5school project, or you are recording skateboarding or snowboarding action,
or you are exchanging moving images with peers using the Internet. As part
of these processes, you may have imported footage onto your computer and
used an editing program to cut up the material.
Each time you hit the record button and then hit the pause button, you
have created a shot, which is the basic building block of motion pictures.
Recorded shots can be as short as the limits of a high speed camera (for
example, 1/2000th of a second) and they can be as long as the length of the
material on which you are photographing and recording (perhaps ten minutes
for fi lm or one hour or even more for digital video). When you begin the
editing process, you will cut and move these shots to create sequences that will
make up your completed motion picture, whether short or feature length.
From the origins of humanity, people have communicated visually. Th ey
crawled into caves and drew fascinating images from their world, particularly
the animals that they hunted. Th rough the ages, civilizations have sought
to develop a variety of methods to depict their lives, to plan their works, to
create stories, and to express spiritual and philosophical ideas.Evolution of Moving Images
In the nineteenth century, a new method of portraying the world was developed:
photography. Th rough scientifi c research and discovery, Niépce and Daguerre
(photographic inventors who are discussed in Chapter 2) developed the fi rst
processes for capturing light and transferring images onto fi xed surfaces. At this
time, there already existed devices that displayed movement through a rapidFigure 1-3 Study of a pole vaulter by Etienne-Jules Marey, inventor of
the chronophotograph. (Courtesy Getty Images).Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).