Technical Aspects Of Film

The Muse Of Film welcomes you to this exploration of the technical aspects of film.

About This Feature

Ever wonder why filmmaking is considered by people who work in the film industry to be a technical subject? Popular Hollywood- and Bollywood-style motion pictures are so natural and easy to watch, to many laymen moving pictures don't seem to require much technical effort to produce.

Why do films like these seem so easy to make? Because they're not.

The majority of entertainment movies like these actually are very technically demanding. So are most other kinds of films. They may be fun for audiences, but they're a virtual hell for filmmakers.

In most films, producers go to great pains to make sure that the technology they exploit is maintained at a very high level; if high levels weren't employed, quality would fall. But producers also go to great pains to mask the technology; otherwise, the technical nuts-and-bolts would detract from the film's realism and entertainment. Many things happen behind the scenes that audiences don't see because cadres of technocrats work extra hard to hide them.

Film technology is not anywhere as complex, esoteric, or as hard to comprehend as the LHC particle accelerator at SLAC. The technical challenges films present are not nearly as difficult or costly to overcome. But neither are they easy or something to ignore.

In this feature, The Muse Of Film explores some of the challenges that film technology has overcome and has yet to overcome. The Muse is not just interested in examining the techniques and technologies involved in making entertainment flicks. The Muse addresses the technology of film in all its fields and in all its aspects, from still photography to high tech moving pictures; from high speed photography to underwater photography; from exposing and developing film to archiving it.

In the sense used in this feature, film is motion pictures collectively: the motion-picture industry, its productions, and its operations. Film is motion pictures as a genre, an art form, and a field.

The technology of film is not just a matter of strips of cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate coated with emulsions to digital data and television; it includes apparatus, equipment, techniques, and technologies arising in all aspects of film, from taking pictures to making movies to selling, showing, and distributing them.

Film technology isn't getting simpler; it's getting more complicated. 4-D movies are on the way, 3-D movies in cinemas with seats that rock and special effects like wind, fog, strobe lights and scents that are synchronized with the on-screen action. Surround sound systems with loudspeakers that circle overhead and all the way around are just around the corner.

In this feature, you'll keep abreast with what's going on, what's coming, and how we got here.