Script

Narration Visuals
No narration Short montage sequence of camera being
set up on a tripod
No narration Sequence of scenes from popular films that
demonstrate good cinematography.
What is a cinematographer? Sequence of clips of directors of
Cinematographers or directors of photography working on set.
photography are the people behind the
scenes in charge of giving a film or
production its unique visual style. They will
work very closely with directors, camera
crew and lighting teams to create the exact
image that they want. They are mainly in
charge of everything to do with the
cameras, they say what they want to be
shot and exactly how they want it to be
shot.
The horse in motion Play the horse in motion, show a
It all started in 1872 when Eadweard screenshot of the horse in motion
Muybridge created The horse in motion, storyboard. Show other footage of old
the very first motion picture. Muybridge black and white horse race footage.
conducted an experiment to settle the
debate on if a horse had all of its hooves off
the ground at 1 single moment whilst it
runs. To do this he set up 12 cameras
across a race track and as the horse ran
down the track it set off a series of trip
wires triggering the cameras to take
photos. When you put this series of images
together in a loop and play it quickly it
creates the illusion of the horse running,
this was the start of motion picture.
History of technology
Fast forward a couple of years to 1889,
Thomas Edison put a team together with
the goal of creating the first motion picture
camera. They created, the strip
kinetograph, this invention used Eastman
Kodak’s flexible film rolls and a rapidly
spinning shutter disk to quickly capture
consecutive images that can be put
together to create the illusion of motion.
They later created the kinetoscope which
allowed people to watch the films that had
been captured on the device. People would
pay 5 cents to watch a short silent film
about 20 to 30 seconds long. 1894
Broadway in New York opened the first
kinetoscope parlour to the public.

This Lead the way for two brothers who

later became known as the Lumiere
Brothers to develop the cinematographe. In
1895 the Lumiere brothers filmed a 50
second continuous shot of a train pulling
into a station in France with a new camera
that they created called the
cinematographe which was a new and
improved version of Thomas Edison's
kinetoscope with the ability to project the
moving images it captured.

An upcoming camera production company,

Bell and Howell, realised there was a large
issue with LB cameras as they were made
primarily with wood and leather making
durability a big issue, Martin and OSA
Johnson were filming in Africa using a
wooden ben and Howell camera and found
that termites had eaten through the
cameras and the film, upon hearing this Bell
and Howell decided to develop the first all
metal movie camera, it was called the Bell
and Howell 2709. This completely changed
the game for film cameras. In 1908 Bell and
Howell decided to only manufacture
cameras and projection technology with
35mm film, this marked a standardisation
in film, by 1919 almost all of Hollywood
films were using Bell and Howell film
cameras.

George Albert Smith created the

kinemacolour camera using a 2 colour
additive process, the camera would capture
one frame in a red filter and the next in a
green filter, when projecting these
coloured frames together with a red and
green fly wheel, although only using 2
colours created an illusion of colour that
had never been demonstrated so well at
this point in time. This was the beginning of
coloured film.

Fast forward again to 1932 and a company

called Technicolour perfected the 3 strip
Technicolour system, using a beam splitter
they captured light on three pieces of film,
green onto its own strip and blue and red
onto a bipacked strip. This 3 strip process
was technically much better than anything
that had come before it but it was also very
expensive. The camera costing roughly
$30,000. In order to make a technicolour
film you needed, a technicolour
cameraman, use technicolour make up,
have the film processed and printed by
technicolour and accept a technicolour
consultant who would make sure your art
direction had an acceptable colour pallet. A
lot of Hollywood's major companies were
hesitant to jump on board with
technicolour's expensive process so
technicolour offered the process to a small
upstart, Walt Disney for his 'Silly Symphony'
cartoon series. Flowers and Trees (1932)
and The Three Little Pigs (1933) were both
huge successes and even went on to win
Oscars for best animated short.

The Bolex H16 was released in 1935 and

was the very first consumer film camera.
This camera used 16mm film which allowed
for a smaller and cheaper camera which
suited the consumer market much better.
Shortly after Bolex released the H8 and the
L8 which had 8mm film, making it much
easier for amateur film makers to produce
work as it was even smaller and cheaper.

Citizen Kane, released in 1941 and directed

by Orson Welles, is well known for its great
cinematography but the main technique
they used which stood out was the deep
focus. A deep focus is a shot that has the
foreground, middle-ground and
background all clearly in focus and visible.
Coming back to the world of coloured film,
Technicolour and their supplier Eastman
Kodak controlled 90% of the coloured film
market at this point in time, they did had
rivals like Cinecolour and Trucolour, but the
USA Justice department saw this as a
problem and filed an anti-trust civil suit in
1947. In 1950 a court decree forced
Technicolour to make available certain
cameras to small independent companies
on a first come first serve basis, but this
decree didn't bring an end to technicolour's
power in the industry. What eventually
became the downfall of technicolour was a
new film stock, Eastmancolour.
Eastmancolour was based on a German
Agfacolour process which was developed
back in 1936. Using automatic colour
masking and released in 1950,
Eastmancolour was relatively cheap, didn't
require specialised lights or lab processes,
and would work in conventional motion
picture cameras.

During the 1950’s Japanese film maker,

Akira Kurasawa, rose to fame with films like
Rashomon and Seven Samurai. Rashomon
was the first Japanese film to be highly
recognised across the world, it won the
academy award for best foreign language
film in 1951. Kurosawa is thought of as the
director that created cinematography, he
showed how a beautifully shot film can
truly impact a story and the enjoyment of
the film, and he made people admire the
technicality behind each shot.

The dolly zoom is a technique that moves

the camera closer or further to the subject
whilst simultaneously adjusting the zoom to
keep the subject the same size in the shot,
this makes the subject in the foreground
stay stationary whilst making the
background change size and move in a very
disorientating way. Alfred Hitchcock was
the very first cinematographer to use this
technique in his film, Vertigo, this is why it
is also known as the vertigo effect.
Hitchcock used the dolly zoom to create a
disorientating effect for the viewers in a
scene where two characters are walking up
stairs and the dolly zoom is used to stretch
the height of the stairs.

Panavision introduced cameras like the

Panavision 70 and ultra-Panavision 70,
which gave us pictures in 70mm film size
which allowed for creators to capture much
more in the shot.

A tracking shot is simply just following and

moving alongside a subject with the
camera. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining,
released in 1980, included one of the first o
tracking shots, a child is riding a tricycle
round the house and the camera follows
him all the way, it makes the audience feel
like they are moving with this character.

George Lucas came out with the Sony HDW

F900 in 2000, he partnered up with Sony
and designed this camera for his upcoming
movie, Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the
Clones and it was one of the first digital
cameras to break in to Hollywood. This star
wars film was the very first film to be filmed
completely on digital cameras.

Whilst George Lucas was pushing the film

industry towards the digital film, Quentin
Tarantino was and still is trying to keep film
stock in the industry. He is known widely
for using only film in his movies and his
thoughts against using digital cameras to
shoot on. In his early days, Tarantino was a
video store clerk. That’s where he found his
appreciation for movies and found a lot of
the inspirations for his future work. Since
then, Tarantino has come to see shooting
on film stock is by far the superior format
for cinematic storytelling. He’s said that
when he goes to the theatre and sees a
movie shot or projected in digital, he feels
ripped off.
He’s obsessed by the “magic of film,” and
sees digital as the wrong route to
reach that magic. Filmmakers like Judd
Apatow, Rian Johnson, Christopher Nolan,
and Paul Thomas Anderson are also with
him on shooting on film stock.

Not everyone sides with Tarantino, though.

Big names like Danny Boyle, James
Cameron, and Steve Soderbergh all shoot
using digital cameras and no one can claim
that those directors don’t make beautiful-
looking films on digital.

In 2007 the first 4K camera was introduced,

the Red One MX. 4K cameras quickly spread
across Hollywood and have given us the
extremely high quality images we have
today. 4K cameras quickly spread into
consumer versions, DSLR cameras, these
cameras were revolutionary for amateur
film makers, the cameras were able to give
consumers the ability to film in as high a
quality as feature films but with a camera
that is much smaller and easier to use, this
gave upcoming film makers the oportunity
to produce high quality films without the
issue of needing a big budget. These high
quality cameras then spread even further
into smartphones which shoot in 4K, most
of us are carrying round cameras in our
pockets that use to shoot high budget
feature films, one film maker has recently a
full feature film using only an iPhone
camera, and this really shows how quickly
our technology has evolved over the past
10 or 15 years and how it is still progressing
at the same rapid speed. Having much
smaller cameras have allowed film makers
to experiment with many different ways of
shooting like using a crane or zip wires, this
has opened up the way that creators can
use cameras and has allowed for much
more creativity to be demonstrated in film.

Cinematographers