Background

Over the past 200 years, film, as an art form has drawn on several earlier traditions in the fields such as (oral) storytelling, literature, theatre, and visual arts, has been changed from the media triggering people’s curiosity into one of the important media for culture communication and entertainment. Although the start of the history of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined, many forms of art and entertainment that had already featured moving and/or projected images used since prehistoric times.

The film industry has grown fast and has become amplified. Comparing to the old days, people now enjoy films with more advanced watching experience. Be that as it may, what are the progressive opportunity to get status now? How do people think about that?

This project will focus on how film media has changed since prehistoric times to present days in chronological order. It will start with ancient and traditional shadow puppets which are played manually to most advanced 3D movie watching on streaming media now. This timeline attempts to reflect on how the development of technology has shaped the way people’s perspectives on spending time in the context of improving film media watching experience.

Process Documentation

Timeline.js allows non-developers to create interactive timelines by using the Google Sheets template. Besides, users can insert multimedia like videos and images to illustrate their timeline project more specifically. 

As the timeline for this project was not complicated, data was collected after reviewed the history of the film. There were several highlight times in the film industry that new technology was introduced, the film market has evolved. Therefore, the timeline of the brief history of film media was build based on the chronological order of the evolution film market. 

Shadow Puppets

Round 200BCE, shadow puppets originated in Central Asia, India, Indonesia, or China. It uses flat articulated cut-out figures (shadow puppets) which are held between a source of light and a translucent screen or scrim. In certain plays, they will introduce music to amplify the whole story. There are many parallels in the development of shadow play and modern cinema, such as their use of music, voice, attempts to introduce colors, and mass popularity.

Even though the shadow puppet is an ancient and traditional media that spreads culture communication and a way of entertainment,  it is popular in various cultures, among both children and adults in many countries around the world now. More than 20 countries are known to have shadow show troupes.

Magic Lantern

In the 1650s, the magic lantern was invented as an early type of image projector that used pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates (usually made of glass), one or more lenses, and a light source.

Chronophotography

In the 1840s, there were several incidental sequences photos captured, and it later had become an early model of Chronophotography, which is It is a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion.

Color in Cinema

It was 1916 that color was introduced in the film. However, the color was not great until 1932, with the introduction of the Technicolor process. The expense of the process was daunting, but the favorable public response in the form of increased box office receipts usually justified the added cost. The number of films made in color slowly increased year after year.

Sound film

The first known public exhibition of sound film projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it becomes commercially practical until the movie The Jazz Singer released in 1927, which used Vitaphone for sound effect.

VCRs&DVDs

Audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCRs around the 1980s. In the early part of that decade, the film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. 

In the 1990s, there is another cinematic transition began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile, DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.

Streaming Platform&3D

With the rapid development of the growing Internet industry, streaming media took place in DVDs. People tend to enjoy watching films through the streaming platform, as its efficacy and convenience. Competing with the increasing popularity of video games and other forms of home entertainment, the industry once again started to make theatrical releases more attractive, with new 3D technologies and epic (fantasy and superhero) films becoming a mainstay in cinemas. Plus, an increasing number of streaming platforms start to bring 3D effects to their product later.

Results and Discussion

This brief history of film media timeline containing 9 events guides readers from ancient and traditional shadow puppets to people’s most related film-watching experience: watching films on streaming platforms and enjoying 3D effects. For each highlight of the timeline, images or videos, headlines, paragraphs of description, and the corresponding dates follows a certain consistency. Even though a picture post may help illustrate most of the context for the timeline that people are familiar with, there are still several events that would be explained better with videos.

Please check my timeline here.

Reflection

Generally, Timeline.js is very easy for non-developers to use for the first time, as its system works monotonously. On the one side, the simplicity of the program makes all the steps clear and easy-to-follow; on the other side, it limits users for further development. For example, the timeline bar only fixed at the bottom of the screen, and users can only view the headline and dates on the timeline bar. If users want to explore more about a specific period, they have to go to the corresponding page for more details. Plus, if a specific page can deliver the highlight section with more hierarchies or more interactions, the information of the timeline would be amplified and leaving users a better reading experience.

Resources

Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film

Google Spreadsheet, https://www.google.com/sheets/about/

Timeline JS, https://timeline.knightlab.com/#preview-embed

Victoria and Albert Museum, https://www.vam.ac.uk/

New York University, https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies