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The Columbia Encyclopedia Essay Camera inventions multiplied speeds pictures can become available. Someone explored the possibilities of different ways to use many pictures at one time. The amazing invention was moving photography, motion pictures, short for pictures in motion. The first motion pictures made with a single camera were by E. J. Marey, a French physician, in the 1880s, in the course of his study of motion. (The Columbia Encyclopedia) Art historians document the camera obscura was invented dating as far back as 200-300 B. C. but it is Aristotle who popularized the item, finding many useful purposes for it. Film, television and movie programs use light shinning through a miniature circle narrowing the focus of the object, reflected on a huge screen. This technical invention allowing high quality moving pictures to be possible began when Aristotle used the invention to study science, specifically the sun. To explain the camera obscura in simple terms, it is a box, with a pinhole, and light reflects through the tiny pinhole. The amount of light allowed to shine through the pinhole is controlled, giving the objects more detailed precise pictures, more focus. The next step camera technology was the Kinetoscope. In 1889 Thomas Edison and his staff developed the Kinetograph, a camera using rolls of coated celluloid film, and the Kinetoscope, a device for peep-show viewing using photographs that flipped in sequence. (The Columbia Encyclopedia) The Kinetoscope was to the camera obscura what the digital camera is to the Polaroid camera. It allowed a series of pictures to be produced and flipped through faster, giving illusion of continuous smoothly flowing pictures. Moving pictures, studying of motion, were making rapid advancements. The camera obscura allowed one person to view through the pinhole, the Kinetoscope showed moving pictures to groups of people, further encouraging exploring different ways of connecting pictures. The admission for shows cost one penny. In France the LumiA? re brothers created the first projection device, the CinAÂ ©matographe (1895). (The Columbia Encyclopedia) It was not long before moving pictures were in great demand. People loved the entertainment, and movie houses were being built at an alarming rate. Today, movies and movie technology shows no signs of slowing down. The camera served as a link between art paintings and audio recordings. It is the middle point that transformed paintings into multiple copies of still photographs and added sound to it, eventually named film and television movies. Recordings Paintings existed from the beginning of time. The camera was used by artists to view possibilities of looking at their paintings. During the time the camera was continuously being experimented with, musicians were fine tuning audio recordings. Someone found a way to put a combination of photographs into an aesthetic flowing sequence, in a pattern that tells a complete story. After the photographs became a series of one long continuous moving picture, someone added sound. Paintings, cameras, scriptwriting and recordings are the historical events that created film and television entertainment. All films, videos, and most television programs are, before they become anything else, recordings. (Watson 1990, 14) Film and television are photographs that move adding singing or talking audible voices. Sound quality used in film and television are equally important to putting together a show that is visually pleasing, holding audience as much as the lighting, designing, blocking, wardrobe, makeup and sequence of films. In the early 1900s, recordings were external devices played along with the film or television. Technologys ability putting motion into a series of photographs, showing the pictures in motion were not yet capable of recording the actors voices. Some television companies were using this technique as late as the seventies. If the actor’s prerecorded audio voices were offset from the video only fractions of a second, the inaccurate timing was visible to the audience. The actor was speaking and the words the actor was saying were heard before or after the audience could see him or her saying it. The popular Broadway musical, Singing in the Rain, released in the 1950’s shows audible One of the main points of the play tells how recordings were first incorporated into making complete films and television, how movies went from silent films to speaking films. One of the main characters was a very attractive dumb blonde lacking vocal skills. The studio gave her only nonspeaking roles, later attempted to work with her on her voice, experimenting with frustrating recording techniques. The point was to show how nonvisible audio determines visuality of the movie. External prerecorded devices are used, of course exaggerated into entertaining comedy, resulting in the woman’s voice getting mixed up with the acting parts of the male actors voice. The importance of sound quality to film and television comes together at the end of the movie, when a voice double is discovered. The first lesson one learns almost immediately after undertaking to write a comprehensive and critically weighed history of the American sound film is that one can never finish; one can only stop. (Sarris 1998, 3) Audible recordings were the last additions to completing the making of the films. Once added, limitations of film were lifted, allowing more options for visual enhancement for moving pictures. Voice projections, embellishments, sound effects give characters in the moving photographs personality, bringing the person shown in the picture or written in the book to life. Today, making silent full-length movies are not even considered. Art Consciously and unconsciously, artists borrow plots, characters, symbols, themes, interests, generic forms, ways of seeing, feeling and thinking. (Watson 1990, 98) Artist of today borrow from other artists, but the ones who invented art history are the masterminds and the reasons for the existence of film and television. Everything started with artists pictures, their drawings and probably the earliest story books. When someone decided to add movement to these pictures, it was determined music would give these pictures a stronger identity. The most popular films, television programs used borrowed themes from art legends. The most advanced filming techniques used today, originally began when there were no such thing as electricity, such as the camera obscura. The addition of sound to film originated with Pythagoras numbering system when studying the octaves of the universe. Impressions are not dependent on mathematical accuracy however, but intermittent imagery. (Watson 1990, 82) Images are indeed the visual effects carrying story lines from the beginning to the end in films, movies and television. When nonspeaking films were first invented in the 1920s, the audience had no idea of the visual affects produced by the background technology used to make the film. It was to the advantage to the technicians to study such techniques because it was cost effective. Today, the general public paying audiences may not understand the techniques behind movie making, but they can certainly see the lack of use of techniques. The first film and television developers were well aware of the importance of images to successful films and television programs. The whole idea behind films and television was moving images. Many of these moving images were borrowed from the artists from the past, or the theme of the movie implied a famous painting. Abstract art was considered to be a meaningless combination of colors. Use of coloring combinations makes images stand out and get noticed. Art paintings are the beginnings of the study of film and television productions. Finding a way to produce multiple pictures and putting these multiple pictures into motion pictures are the backbone of films and movies. Historical points sell. They give the audience a familiarity or a connection to the past. Perhaps, subconsciously historical images repeated in current films bring them back to a time in their life when they first studied these artists. Whatever the reason for the success, it works. Works Cited Camera. 2007. In The Columbia Encyclopedia 6th ed. , edited by Lagasse, Paul. New York: Columbia University Press. http://www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=od=112849953 (accessed March 16, 2008). Motion Pictures. 2007. In The Columbia Encyclopedia 6th ed. , edited by Lagasse, Paul. New York: Columbia University Press. http://www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=od=112874771 (accessed March 16, 2008). Sarris, Andrew. 1998. You Aint Heard Nothin Yet: The American Talking Film: History Memory, 1927-1949. New York: Oxford University Press. http://www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=od=24355309. Watson, Robert. 1990. Film and Television in Education: An Aesthetic Approach to the Moving Image. London: Falmer Press. http://www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=od=103505179.