I recently joined my media/film production course on a trip to The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY. The MotMI is dedicated to presenting the history of film and television. We took a tour which began with simple Victorian era toys such as the Zoetrope and Thaumatrope, and led us through how the moving image has changed in history, ending with how green screens are used.
My favorite part of the tour was learning about sound editing and how different noises are put together. At one point on the tour there was a station where you could sit down and dissect all of the different noises during a scene from “Titanic”. They used a variety of sounds to get all of the effects that they wanted, such as having people come into a sound booth and simply recording what they needed said. They also have people available who design the sounds with everyday items. My favorite part was how they use stock sounds of animals to fill in for certain scenes, for instance, at one point one of the chimney stacks on the ship falls into the ocean, and to get the effect of it falling, they used an elephant. I thought it was very interesting and a creative way to get the right effect.
Numerous change have occurred in moving image technology in the last 120 years or so. Beginning with the Zoetrope and Thaumatrope, which were really just creative ways to show how the human brain can be deceived by a fast image, to the Kinetoscope, moving to film cameras that use chemicals such as silver to capture light and images on film reels. The technology has also gotten much more mobile and smaller. The earliest film cameras were bulky, and had to be set on a tripod, and throughout the early twenty-first century they seemed to only get bigger. The invent of portable videos allowed for cameras to begin to decrease in size, changing our experience with them. Now, most people have a digital recorder in their phones.
