5 Feb 2014

Edwin S Porter


Edwin S Porter



Porter was born and raised in Connellsville, Pennsylvania to Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary Jane (Clark) Porter; he had three brothers and one sister. After attending public schools in Connellsville and Pittsburgh, Porter worked, among other odd jobs, as an exhibition skater, a sign painter, and a telegraph operator. He developed an interest in electricity at a young age, and shared a patent at age 21 for a lamp regulator.

He was employed for a time in the electrical department of William Cramp & Sons, a Philadelphia ship and engine building company, and in 1893 enlisted in the United States Navyas an electrician. During his three years' service he showed aptitude as an inventor of electrical devices to improve communications.

Porter entered motion picture work in 1896, the first year movies were commercially projected on large screens in the United States. He was briefly employed in New York City by Raff & Gammon, agents for the films and viewing equipment made by Thomas Edison, and then left to become a touring projectionist with a competing machine, Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope. He traveled through the West Indies and South America, showing films at fairgrounds and in open fields, and later made a second tour through Canada and the United States.

Returning to New York in early 1898, Porter found work at the Eden Musée, a Manhattan wax museum and amusement hall which had become a center for motion picture exhibition and production and licensee of the Edison Manufacturing Company. While at Eden Musée, Porter worked assembling programs of Edison films, most particularly exhibitions of films of the Spanish American War, Edison productions which helped stir an outbreak of patriotic fever in New York City. As an exhibitor, Porter had tremendous creative control over these programs, presenting a slate of films accompanied by a selection of music and live narration.

In 1899 Porter joined the Edison Manufacturing Company. Soon afterward he took charge of motion picture production at Edison's New York studios, operating the camera, directing the actors, and assembling the final print. He collaborated with several other filmmakers, including George S. Fleming. During the next decade Porter became the most influential filmmaker in the United States. From his experience as a touring projectionist Porter knew what pleased crowds, and he began by making trick films and comedies for Edison. One of his early films was Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, a satire made in February 1901 about the then Vice President-elect, Theodore Roosevelt. Like all early filmmakers, he took ideas from others, but rather than simply copying films he tried to improve on what he borrowed. In his Jack and the Beanstalk (1902) and Life of an American Fireman (1903) he followed earlier films by France's Georges Méliès and members of England's Brighton School, such as James Williamson. Instead of using abrupt splices or cuts between shots, however, Porter created dissolves, gradual transitions from one image to another. In Life of an American Fireman particularly, the technique helped audiences follow complex outdoor movement.

In his next film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), Porter took the archetypal American Western story, already familiar to audiences from dime novels and stage melodrama, and made it an entirely new visual experience. The one-reel film, with a running time of twelve minutes, was assembled in twenty separate shots, along with a startling close-up of a bandit firing at the camera. It used as many as ten different indoor and outdoor locations and was groundbreaking in its use of "cross-cutting" in editing to show simultaneous action in different places. No earlier film had created such swift movement or variety of scene. The Great Train Robbery was enormously popular. For several years it toured throughout the United States, and in 1905 it was the premier attraction at the first nickelodeon. Its success firmly established motion pictures as commercial entertainment in the United States.

After The Great Train Robbery Porter continued to try out new techniques. He presented two parallel stories in The Kleptomaniac (1905), a film of social commentary like his technically more conventional film of 1904, The Ex-Convict. In The Seven Ages (1905) he used side lighting, close-ups, and changed shots within a scene, one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker departing from the theatrical analogy of a single shot for each scene. He also directed trick films such as Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), based on the comic strip by Winsor McCay. Between 1903 and 1905 he successfully demonstrated most of the techniques that were to become the basic modes of visual communication through film. For instance he helped to develop the modern concept of continuity editing, and is often credited with discovering that the basic unit of structure in film was the shot rather than the scene (the basic unit on the stage), paving the way for D.W. Griffith's advances in editing and screen storytelling. Yet he seemed to regard them only as separate experiments and never brought them together in a unified filmmaking style.

In 1909 Porter, in an attempt to resist the new industrial system born out of the popularity of nickelodeons, left Edison and joined with others in organizing Rex, an independent motion picture company. He also took part in launching a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors. After three years he sold Rex and accepted an offer from Adolph Zukor to become chief director of the newFamous Players Film Company, the first American company that regularly produced feature-length films. Porter directed the stage actor James K. Hackett in the first five-reel American film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1913), and also directed Mary Pickford, Pauline Frederick, and John Barrymore in feature films. But his directorial skills had not kept pace with rapid changes in motion picture art. His last film was released in 1915 Jim the Penman, the first 3D anaglyph movie. The year before he also showed a short film "Niagara Falls" in 3D anaglyph. He left Famous Players during a reorganization the following year.

From 1917 to 1925 Porter served as president of the Precision Machine Company, manufacturers of the Simplex projectors. After his retirement in 1925 he continued to work on his own as an inventor and designer, securing several patents for still cameras and projector devices. During the 1930s he was employed by an appliance corporation.

Aged 71, he died in 1941 at the Hotel Taft in New York City and was buried in Husband Cemetery, Somerset, Pennsylvania. He was survived by his wife, Caroline Ridinger, whom he had married on June 5, 1893; they had no children.

Porter remains an enigmatic figure in motion picture history. Though his significance as director of The Great Train Robbery and other innovative early films is undeniable, he rarely repeated an innovation after he had used it successfully, never developed a consistent directorial style, and in later years never protested when others rediscovered his techniques and claimed them as their own. He was a modest, quiet, cautious man who felt uncomfortable working with the famous stars he directed starting in 1912. Zukor said of Porter that he was more an artistic mechanic than a dramatic artist, a man who liked to deal with machines better than with people.




23 Jan 2014

George Melies and Early Special Effects

George Melies and Early Special Effects


Georges Méliès was born 8 December 1861 and died 21 January 1938), his full name is Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès, a prolific innovator in the use of special effects, accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to usemultiple exposurestime-lapse photographydissolves, and hand-painted color in his work. Because of his ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality through cinematography, Méliès is sometimes referred to as the first "Cinemagician". Two of his best-known films are A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904). Both stories involve strange, surreal voyages, somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy. Méliès was also an early pioneer of horror cinema, which can be traced back to his Le Manoir du diable (1896).

In the Autumn of 1896, an event occurred which has since passed into film folklore and changed the way Méliès looked at filmmaking. Whilst filming a simple street scene, Méliès camera jammed and it took him a few seconds to rectify the problem. Thinking no more about the incident, Méliès processed the film and was struck by the effect such a incident had on the scene - objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects.

In 1900 Méliès had made 33 films, including the 13 minute Joan of Arc, starring Bleuette Bernon in the title role. He also made The One-Man Band, in which Méliès continued to fine tune his special effects by multiplying himself on camera to create a seven piece one man band. 

Méliès discovered from this incident that cinema had the capacity for manipulating and distorting time and space. He expanded upon his initial ideas and devised some complex special effects.
He pioneered the first double exposure (La caverne Maudite, 1898), the first split screen with performers acting opposite themselves (Un Homme de tete, 1898), and the first dissolve (Cendrillon, 1899).

Méliès tackled a wide range of subjects as well as the fantasy films usually associated with him, including advertising films and serious dramas. He was also one of the first filmmakers to present nudity on screen with “Apres le Bal”.

Faced with a shrinking market once the novelty of his films began to wear off, Méliès abandoned film production in 1912. In 1915 he was forced to turn his innovative studio into a Variety Theatre and resumed his pre-film career as a Showman.

In 1923 he was declared bankrupt and his beloved Theatre Robert Houdin was demolished. Méliès almost disappeared into obscurity until the late 1920’s when his substantial contribution to cinema was recognised by the French and he was presented with the Legion of Honour and given a rent free apartment where he spent the remaining years of his life.

Georges Méliès died in 1938 after making over five hundred films in total - financing, directing, photographing and starring in nearly every one.

A Trip to the Moon is a 1902 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, it follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled spaceship, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return in a splashdown to Earth with a captive Selenite in tow.

An internationally popular success at the time of its release, it is the best-known of the hundreds of films made by Méliès, and the moment in which the spaceship lands in the Moon's eye remains one of the most iconic images in the history of cinema. Each strip of film had been painted to give colour to such things as the dressed, the setting, the spaceship, etc. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JDaOOw0MEE )


List of films: 

  • Own Melies inspired video as created in class by yin similar techniques and ideas to create a short film. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0APOREMLt_A )
  • "The Spider and the Butterfly" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m89pDxu_pXc

Lumiere Brothers & The Cinematographe

Lumiere Brothers & the Cinematographe


The Lumière brothers were born in BesançonFrance, in 1862 and 1864, and moved to Lyon in 1870, where both attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon. Their father, Claude-Antoine Lumière (1840–1911), ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for him: Louis as a physicist and Auguste as a manager. Louis had made some improvements to the still-photograph process, the most notable being the dry-plate process, which was a major step towards moving images.

It was not until their father retired in 1892 that the brothers began to create moving pictures. They patented a number of significant processes leading up to their film camera, most notably film perforations (originally implemented by Emile Reynaud) as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. The original cinématographe had been patented by Léon Guillaume Bouly on 12 February 1892. The brothers patented their own version on 13 February 1895. The first footage ever to be recorded using it was recorded on March 19, 1895. This first film shows workers leaving the Lumière factory.

The Lumières held their first private screening of projected motion pictures in 1895. Their first public screening of films at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This history-making presentation featured ten short films, including their first film,Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory). Each film is 17 meters long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.

The world's first film poster, for 1895's L'Arroseur arrosé
It is believed their first film was actually recorded that same year (1895) with Léon Bouly's cinématographedevice, which was patented the previous year. The cinématographe — a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures — was further developed by the Lumières.

On February 13, 1895, the Lumiere brothers patented their Cinematographe, which was a combination of the camera and projector.  The Cinematographe was hand-cranked, lighter, and smaller than the Kinetoscope, and played film at a slower speed, 16 frames per second, while the Kinetoscope played at 48 frames per second, but created a lot of noise and used more film.  Another benefit of the Cinematographe was that it played actual films, while the Kinetoscope played photographs in rapid succession.  One of the first films the Lumiere brothers made shows workers leaving their factory.  Click "Oldest Surviving Footage" to see this film as well as others by the Lumiere brothers.  The first public showing of the Cinematographe was on December 28, 1895, and in 1896, Cinematographe theaters were built in Belgium, London, New York and Brussels.  The Lumiere brothers also created the Autochrome plate in 1907, which was the first color photography process.  At first, Auguste and Louis had doubted the success of their invention.  As Louis Lumiere once said, "The cinema is an invention without a future."  This statement has become one of irony, as cinema is now a huge success worldwide. 


  • Own Lumiere Brothers inspired film -  "Girl Eating Sandwich" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lzN1hGEiSM 

  • First Lumiere Brothers film - "The Factory" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDnppCDhI9U

  • "Baby's Lunch" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgGCAskh98E

  • "Arrival of Train" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk

  • "Waterer Watered" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOZPgx0_E54