Film Timeline

Stoboscope

Early to Mid-1830’s Moving images were first made on drums and disks by Simon von Stampfer (Stroboscope) in Austria, Joseph Plateau (Phenakistoscope) in Belgium and William Horner (zoetrope) in Britain.

1839 William H. Fox Talbot made paper sensitive to light by putting it in a solution of salt and silver nitrate.

1867 The first machine that showed animated pictures was a device called the “wheel of life” or “zoopraxiscope” created by William Lincoln from America.

Zoopraxiscope

1878 Eadweard Muybridge takes the first successful photographs of motion, showing how people and animals move.

1885 George Eastman creates film made with paper base instead of glass, rendering glass plates useless.

1889 Thomas Edison and W.K. Dickson develop the Kinetoscope, a device in which film is moved past a light.

1891 The Edison company successfully demonstrated the Kinetoscope, enabling one person at a time to view moving pictures.

Kinetoscope

1894 The first commercial exhibition of film took place on April 14, 1894 at the first Kinetoscope parlor ever built.

1895 Louis and August Lumiere patent a movie camera and projector, able to project an image that can be seen by many people. They presented the first commercial exhibition of motion pictures. The Lumiere brothers were the first to present projected, moving, pictures to a paying audience of more than one person.

Mercury Lamp

1905 Cooper Hewitt’s mercury lamps make it possible to shoot indoors without sunlight.

1906 The first animated cartoon is produced.

1910 actors in films receive screen credit, the creation of film stars begun.

1912 Carl Laemmle forms Universal Pictures, which will become the first major film studio.

1915 The Bell & Howell 2709 movie camera allows directors to make close-ups without physically moving the camera.

1923 Warner Bros. is established.

1925 Western Electric and Warner Bros. agree to develop a system for movies with sound.

1928 Paramount becomes the first studio to announce that it will only produce “talkies”.

1930 The motion picture industries adopts the Production Code, a set of guidelines that describes what is acceptable in movies.

1934 The first drive-in movie theater opens in New Jersey, USA.

1937 Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, is released.

1940’s Disney create more animated films like Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) following the success of snow white and the 7 dwarfs.

1960’s The studio system in Hollywood began to be used less and less do to many films  being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecittà in Rome.

VHS Tape

1980’s Viewers began increasingly watching films on VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the film studios tried legal action to get VCRs banned claiming that they were a violation of copyright, which was unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films VCR became a huge “second venue” for the exhibition of films, and an additional source of income for the film industries as they decided to create their own VCRs and sell them to the public.

1990’s Independent cinema became a huge success in the United States.  Whilst increasingly being dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2 (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997), independent films like Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) had huge success at the cinema and with home sales.

Major American film companies began to create their own independent production companies to produce smaller films. In 1994 Disney purchased Miramax after seeing the success of reservoir dogs. The year after the purchase Pulp fiction was released. The year 1994 was also the beginning of online film and video distribution.

1995 Pixar animations produce the first computer generated animation, Toy Story. Computer animation began to rapidly grow and allowed other companies such as DreamWorks to compete with Disney and produce their own animated films.

Late 1990’s DVD’s become the new standard way to distribute films to consumers for home use. They replace VHS tapes.

2002 Films started to be released for IMAX cinema

2009 The 3D film Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time.

2010 3D films become more and more popular with the most successful films being released in 3D.