Raindance Producers' Lab Lo-To-No Budget Filmmaking, 2nd Edition

5 The Camera Package

 

 

THE BASIS OF MOTION picture camera technology was invented in 65 BC. The Roman poet Lucretius proposed a theory called persistence of vision that basically states that when the human eye views an object under bright light, the image remains for one tenth of a second after the light source is turned off. Ptolemy of Alexandria proved the theory 200 years later.

Can you believe that during a 100-minute movie we sit in pitch black for an hour? This is part of the magic of cinema—we accept this distortion, this contrivance. We would never say to a loved one ‘Do you want to sit in a black room for an hour?’ Instead we say: ‘Honey, let's see a movie.’

A movie is made of a sequence of many individual pictures or frames, each ...