UNIVERSITY OF JOS

FACULTY OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION

COURSE: INTRODUCTION TO FILM SCRIPTWRITING MAC 221

COURSE LECTURER: FR GABRIEL GOWOK

GROUP TWO

HOW TO READ A FILM BY JAMES MONACO

CHAPTER TWO: TECHNOLOGY IMAGES AND SOUND

GROUP MEMBERS

1. BLESSING KADAH UJ/2020/AR/0344

2. IFE. DAPO. UJ/2020/AR/0659

ART AND TECHNOLOGY: INTRODUCTION

Every art is shaped by technology the, way politics, philosophy and economics do in a society.
Technological development can lead to a change or enhancement in the system of art. For instance, this
novel could never have come into being without the printing press but because of the novel. Another
instance we can give is STAGE DRAMA. Technology has helped in stage drama in the sense of lightning
techniques which allowed it to be brought indoors. The artistic contribution of the recording ar, ts- film,
sound recording, and photography is dependent on complex and sophisticated technology. We can’t
comprehend fully the way their effects are accomplished without a basic understanding of the
technology that makes them possible.

IMAGE TECHNOLOGY

The basic artistic impulses of nature that drive us were technological in the pre technological era and
the present. The invention of photography in the early nineteenth century marks an important line of
division between the two. Previously were limited by our own physical abilities: the musician created
sounds by blowing or strumming or singing, the painter who captured real images depended entirely on
his own eyes to perceive them, ovelists and people engaged in their art were limited in describing
events or characters by the ovation.

In order to record or reproduce sounds and images, recording technology must translate aural and
visual information into physical or electronic language systems. Visual. Information is far more complex
than aural information and therefore more difficult to encode because there is vastly more information
to represent-oriented encoding is bit oriented and often binary. In other words, information can have
either of two values ‘yes or no' or 'black or White’. Recording technology now offers us the opportunity
of capturing a representation of sounds, images and events and transmitting them directly to the
observer without the interposition of the artist’s personality and talents.

Although the camera did not come into practical use until the early 19th century, efforts to create a
magical tool which would record reality directly dated from much earlier. The camera obscura, the
grandfather of the photographic camera, dates from the Renaissance. Da Vinci had described the
principle and the first published account of the usefulness of the invention dates from 1558, the year in
which Giovanni Battista Della Porte, published his book ' Natural Magic'. The camera obscura ( literally
dark room) is based on a simple optical rule but it includes all the elements of the photographic camera
except one: film, the medium on which the projected image is recorded

SOUND TECHNOLOGY

The technology of sound developed more rapidly than image. In many ways, it is a more extraordinary
invention than cinematography since it has no antecedents to speak of. The desire to capture and
reproduce still pictures predated the development of moving pictures by many years but there is no
such thing as a still sound so the development of sound recording of necessity took place all at once.
Edison’s phonograph, which does for sound what the camera does for images, dates from 1877. Equally
as important as the phonograph but not often mentioned in the history of recording arts is
BelBell'slephone (1876). It shows how electrical signals can be made to serve the purposes of sound
recording.

By 1900, all the basic tools for the technological arts had been invented: the painter had the late,
native of the phonograph and novelists and theater folks were contemplating the possibilities of motion
pictures. Each of these records could be reproduced in large quantities and reach large number of
people. We are now realizing, as cable technology develops, that wired transmission offers quite a few
advantages over radio wave broadcasting not least of which is addressability.

THE LENS

Contemporary cameras both still and motion pictures operate on a principle: the box is precisely
mandachined, photosensitive, flexible film has drawing paper as the screen where the image falls. So
much depends upon the glass eye of the lens through which we all eventually view a photograph or a
film that it must be regarded as the heart of photographic art.

The basic idea of that logy of optics is because light travels at different speeds in pays rent mediums,
light Ray’s bend when they pass from one medium to another. Lenses are then made of glasThecus
those rays. While the lens of the human eye is continuously variable, changing in shape each time we
unconsciously refocus from one object to another. Photographic lenses can only perform the specific
tasks for which they are designed.

It should be noted that these lenses are not simply solid pieces of glass as they were in the 18 th
century but rather mathematical combinations of elements designed to admit the most amount of light
to the camera with the least amount of distortion.

THE CAMERA

The camera provides a mechanical environment for the lens which accepts and controls light and the
film which records light. The heart of the camera is the shutter which allows the photographer to control
the amount of light that strikes the film. We find a significant difference between still and movie
photography. For still photographers, shutter speed is closely linked with aperture size. If they want to
photograph fast action, still photographs will probably decide first to use a fast shutter speed to 'freeze'
action. Shutter speeds are measured in ftionsfractionssecond and in still photography are closely linked
with corresponding apertures.

The mechanical devices that make camera movement possible are all simple in design: the tripod
panning/ tilting head is a matter of carefully machined plates; tracking shots are accomplished by laying
down tracks to control the sites of the camera oitss mount; the camera crane that allows a
cinematographer to raise and lower the camera smoothly.

Film, then, is a tool that can be applied to time in the same way that the telescope and the microscope
are applied to space, revealing natural phenomena that are invisible to the human eye. Slow motion,
fast motion anytime-lapse photography make comprehensible events that happen either too quickly or
too slowly for us to perceive them just as the microscope and the telescope reveal phenomena that are
too small or too far away for us to perceive them.

THE FILMSTOCK

A positive print of the Negative image can easily be obtained by either contact printing the negative
or projecting it on similar film stock or photographic paper. Reversal process is the positive image on the
camera's film in the camera when the shot is made. The development of fast film stocks and fast lenses
has given filmmakers welcome freedom to photograph scenewithby available light at night or indoors

In the past, early photography methods like daguerreotypes required long exposure times,
measured in minutes, to capture an image. However, two technological advancements were necessary
for motion pictures to become possible: a flexible base to carry the photographic emulsion, and a fast
enough emulsion that could be properly exposed within a shorter time frame, around 1/20 second. The
speed of standard emulsions today is such that exposure times of 1/1000 second are more than
sufficient under normal conditions. It's important to note that not all image-fixing methods are
chemically photographic. Television images, for example, are electronically produced, with
photosensitive and phosphorescent chemicals playing a role. Photocopying machines, such as those
used by Xerox, also employ different methods compared to traditional silver-salt photography. There
has been a renewed focus on non-silver means of photography due to events like the silver scare in the
early 19s when the price of silver temporarily skyrocketed.

In terms of electronic photography, Sony introduced the first all-electronic snapshot camera called
the Mavica in 1989, but it took a few more years for digital cameras to gain consumer acceptance, finally
becoming popular in the late 1990s. In 1992, Kodak developed a transitional solution with Photo CD: the
photograph is taken using traditional chemistry-based film, and then the image is transferred by a
commercial photo-finisher to fully digitized files on a CD-ROM. This CD-ROM is returned to the
customer, who can view their snapshots on a monitor or television by inserting the disc into any CD-
ROM reader that meets the Photo CD standard. The decreasing price of color laser and ink-jet printers
allows photo enthusiasts to make their paper prints at home, reducing the need for darkroom facilities.
Computer software like Adobe Photoshop already offers greater flexibility than many advanced photo
labs. These advancements in technology continue to shape the world of photography, leading to new
possibilities and convenience for photographers.