The chairman, Cyril Dawson welcomed members to the April meeting in the Expanse Hotel on Thursday. He also reminded members of the need for nominations for office for next year before the May annual meeting. After an excellent lunch Cyril then introduced Len Collins as speaker. Cyril was fulsome in his praise of Len, who is the club’s Speaker Finder but also does so much else in maintaining the club’s success. On this occasion he was the speaker himself and his topic was “The Science of Cinema”.
He began by distributing “flick books” amongst members and talked of zoetrope which was a pre-film animation device. He then spoke of early pioneers. Muybridge photographed horses and athletes and a series of images showed horses with all four legs off the ground at one time. Louis Le Prince became known as the father of cinematography (from which the word cinema was derived).He produced the first true moving image in 1895. His film of a moving train coming towards the audience caused people to flee the cinema. Hand printed colour appeared in 1902 but the first true colour, Technicolor didn’t appear until the 1930’s and needed an enormous camera creating red, green and blue negatives. The 1939 film Wizard of Oz began in black and white but then Technicolor took over.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s arising from competition from T.V experiments were made with widescreen, 3D, compressed screen, stereo soundtrack and anamorphic lens. This led to Cinemascope and its first example was “The Robe” in 1953. “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Sink the Bismarck” and “The Longest Day” all followed in the 1960’s.
3D glasses were introduced to be used with 3D films but the idea never really took off. Len surmised that this may still be one for the future along with 4K T.V screens. Len concluded his talk by showing extracts from “The Day After Tomorrow” and “The Desolation of Smaug” from The Hobbit series to illustrate the use of computer generated images. There are a variety of special effects using matte techniques, green screen, and slow motion and modelling.
The number of comments and questions were an indication of the interest that Len had created in a fascinating topic. Chris Slingsby gave an appropriate vote of thanks.
For further information on the club’s activities go to www.probusbridlington.weebly.net
He began by distributing “flick books” amongst members and talked of zoetrope which was a pre-film animation device. He then spoke of early pioneers. Muybridge photographed horses and athletes and a series of images showed horses with all four legs off the ground at one time. Louis Le Prince became known as the father of cinematography (from which the word cinema was derived).He produced the first true moving image in 1895. His film of a moving train coming towards the audience caused people to flee the cinema. Hand printed colour appeared in 1902 but the first true colour, Technicolor didn’t appear until the 1930’s and needed an enormous camera creating red, green and blue negatives. The 1939 film Wizard of Oz began in black and white but then Technicolor took over.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s arising from competition from T.V experiments were made with widescreen, 3D, compressed screen, stereo soundtrack and anamorphic lens. This led to Cinemascope and its first example was “The Robe” in 1953. “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Sink the Bismarck” and “The Longest Day” all followed in the 1960’s.
3D glasses were introduced to be used with 3D films but the idea never really took off. Len surmised that this may still be one for the future along with 4K T.V screens. Len concluded his talk by showing extracts from “The Day After Tomorrow” and “The Desolation of Smaug” from The Hobbit series to illustrate the use of computer generated images. There are a variety of special effects using matte techniques, green screen, and slow motion and modelling.
The number of comments and questions were an indication of the interest that Len had created in a fascinating topic. Chris Slingsby gave an appropriate vote of thanks.
For further information on the club’s activities go to www.probusbridlington.weebly.net