History of Film

Someone once said “To know where you have been is to know where you are going." In other words: to understand yourself you have to look back at your own history and take it into account.

Not only does that quote give us a guiding light about our own lives, (you have to grasp the past as a guide to the future) it helps us as filmmakers as well.

How? As filmmakers, we need to know about the history of this visual medium (how movies were made in the past and the filmmakers who made them) because this knowledge will help us understand where we can go in the future.

Here’s a good example.

In 1986 I was the 1st AD on a TV Series called “Stingray.” The scene we had to shoot was of a ship leaving the dock. Well… because of time and budget (where have you heard that before!) we could not afford to shoot a real passenger ship leaving the dock in Vancouver where the series was filmed.

The location that was chosen was a pier where an old cargo ship was permanently docked. This ship worked for all our interiors, but it couldn’t move. So how do we film the departure scene?

After some discussion about this in prep, several of us (who had been to film school) came up with the idea of using the same technique Sergei Eisenstein used in his famous 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin:

Because our cargo ship couldn’t move, we will “make it move” by using a locked off camera on an object moving away from the ship in the foreground - which will give the illusion of the ship departing from the dock in the background.

Basically, this is what we did: we put a car on a flatbed trailer with some extras by the car. The camera was attached to the trailer with the car and extras in the foreground and the cargo ship in the background with other extras on the ship waving etc. On cue, the flat bed trailer moved forward as we filmed the extras on the ship waving.

And it worked! In the dailies, we saw (the illusion of) the cargo ship moving out of port - just like we saw the battleship leaving port in Eisenstein’s movie.

I believe that understanding how movies were made in the past will enable you to be a more creative filmmaker today. So remember, “always look back to where you have been, for a clue to where you are going."

"Do not run through life so fast that you forget not only where you have been, but also where you are going" Author Unknown

Find out how at my "Film and Television Directing Tips" Hub http://hubpages.com/hub/bcfilmmaker