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hello there how would you like a ticket
to one of the most influential forms of
mass communication the world has ever
known it's a universal language that
lets us tell stories about our
collective hopes and fears to make sense
of the world around us and the people
around us I'm talking about film you
probably figured that out because of the
title of this video but yeah I feel this
powerful medium sits in a sweet spot of
human culture at the intersection of art
industry technology and politics it's
inescapable like FBI piracy warnings and
trailers that give away the entire movie
I'm looking at you Batman vs Superman
and also vs. Wonder Woman apparently
because I learned that from the trailer
but before we get to a mouse named
Mickey a little or whether or not
Han shot first we have to go all the way
back to the beginning in a galaxy far
far well right here we have to go all
the way back to the beginning because
the creation of this cornerstone of
modern entertainment was basically an
accident we owe it all to the inventors
and artists who are experimenting with
new technologies and trying to capture
snippets of reality to see the world in
a whole new way i'm craig benzine and
this is crash-course film history
ready lights camera action roll the
intro now we should roll the intro I
think
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the term film was first used to describe
a specific technology a thin flexible
material coated in light-sensitive
emulsion that retains an image after
it's exposed to light it's also the end
product of that photochemical process a
film is a movie but it's also a verb to
describe the process of capturing moving
pictures as in I'm going to film a movie
today or Nick is filming me right this
very second or I'm going to film a film
on film over time the original film
technology is switched to analog and
digital substitutes first things like
VHS or beta and eventually digital video
like when you record something on your
phone now at the very beginning of its
history before all these innovations
existed films started out as a
collection of still images viewed one
after another in rapid succession which
creates the illusion of motion like what
you're seeing right now it was a magic
trick and from that trick came an art
form at the blend of literature drama
photography and music so how did this
illusion actually work it all comes down
to a couple quirks of human perception
tricks your eyes play on your brain or
your brain plays on your eyes or maybe
both the 19th century British scholar
Peter Mark Rocha was the first to
describe one of these tricks called
persistence of vision basically this is
a phenomenon that keeps you from seeing
the black spaces between the frames of a
projected film now frame can mean a lot
of things in film language but in this
case it's what we call one of the still
images that make up a movie it turns out
that if a frame flashes in front of your
eyes your brain retains that image for
about a fifth of a second after it's
gone another frame appears within that
fifth of a second your brain won't
register the black space between them
you'll just perceive the next image so
when a film flashes 24 frames per second
in front of your eyes your brain doesn't
interpret it as 24 images separated by
flashes of black instead it looks like a
constant picture this effect can be
combined with another oddity of
perception called the five phenomenon
defined in 1912 by the Czech born
psychologists max Wertheimer
incidentally oddity of perception my
nickname in high school the five
phenomenon is an optical illusion that
lets you see a series of images in rapid
succession as continuous motion think of
those flip books you played with as a
kid take a series of still pictures shot
or drawn in sequence flip them quickly
before your eyes and voila the illusion
of motion you have yourself a motion
picture or a moving picture in other
words a moving picture II better yet a
movie write that down that's what we're
going with now people have been telling
story since we've had language and
they've been using pictures even
animating them for almost as long one
line of thinking traces movies all the
way back to cave paintings in places
like Chalet France or El Castillo Spain
you know those images
most trees and human figures painted on
stone walls as far back as 32,000 years
ago I just think the original artists
might have used flickering torch light
to make them appear to move fast forward
to just five thousand years ago and we
find people inventing more sophisticated
devices to create that same illusion of
motion among these pre film animation
tools the ones we're most familiar with
are called zoetrope these are like a
bowl or a deep cylinder with sequential
images painted on the inside and small
widths or windows cut into the edges
spin the bowl and peer through the slits
and thanks to persistence of vision and
the five phenomenon the pictures seem to
move em over the centuries these devices
came in lots of different forms and just
as many names phenakistoscope
stroboscope s-- stereo scopes all kinds
of scopes but not scope the mouthwash
that's something else and for a long
long time this is as close as we ever
got to film until photography came along
now it's important to remember that no
one set out to invent movies there was
no one mastermind and no grand plan to
revolutionize communication or art on a
global scale if I was around it would
have been me but there wasn't anyone
instead film as we know it today exists
because of a series of happy accidents
technical innovations and scientific
byproducts is really at the beginning
nobody knew what they were doing
just like now I'm looking at you batman
versus superman photography came about
in the early to mid 19th century at a
time of great scientific and artistic
innovation people have means all over
the world we're tinkering in their spare
time playing around with technology and
seeing what they could create combined
augment or transform before the
photograph was invented people were
isolating images of the world around
them with devices like the camera
obscura from the Latin meaning dark
chamber a camera obscura is essentially
a box tent or room with a lens or
pinhole in one end and a reflective
surface like a mirror at the other light
travels through the hole and displays an
inverted image on the mirror like most
of these pre photography technologies
the camera obscura was mostly a novelty
a toy or sometimes a tool that let
artists create images to study or trace
as the 19th century dawned folks started
playing around with photosensitive
chemicals to figure out the properties
while trying not to melt themselves with
acid which we should all try to do in
practice in the 1820s a French
adventurer named Joseph nice a foreign
yep took the first known camera
photograph he called it view from the
window at La Crosse yep's used the
camera obscura to project an image onto
a pewter plate coated in a
light-sensitive chemical the areas of
the chemical that were hit with the
brightest light hardened but the area's
touched by weaker light could be washed
away so a crude permanent
Eckerd of the original image survived
scientists now believe it took a couple
days of exposing the plate to light for
the image to finally show up
so we're still a long way for movies but
we're getting closer
get excited Louie de Guerre another
Frenchman and a close buddy of MEPs was
able to shorten the exposure time to
just a couple of minutes
his daguerreotype process became the
first commercially available mass-market
means of taking photographs in 1839 and
this is usually considered to be
photography's birthday correct happy
birthday but hold on the daguerreotype
still had a few problems to work out the
photographs were pretty fragile they
weren't easy to replicate and the
chemicals were shall we say toxic alone
tame George Eastman an American
entrepreneur and founder of Eastman
Kodak who invented a way of taking
pictures on paper rather than metal or
glass plates this method also didn't
need as many chemicals which probably
saved a lot of snap happy inventors from
health problems now photography was off
to the races
literally so let's go to the
thought-bubble and see how photographs
were used to pause time and take a
closer look at movement
take it away thought-bubble well I will
take I'm going to narrate so in 1872
Leland Stanford the former governor of
California and horse racing aficionado
in a bet with another bigwig that a
horse at full gallop raises all four
hopes off the ground at some point to
settle the best Stanford commissioned a
photographer an inventor named Eadweard
Muybridge to find photographic proof so
Muybridge set up twelve cameras along a
race track each triggered by a trip wire
to capture a still image of a horse in
motion instead of 12 photos with
something brand new rapid motion broken
down into frozen study Abul moments
spoiler alert
governor stanford won his bet there were
a couple images where that horse wasn't
touching the ground at all
Boyd Burgess experiment launched a wave
of motion studies as photographers and
inventors all over the world began using
these new technologies to break down
continuous motion into individual images
and that was one giant step closer to
motion pictures thanks thought-bubble
you're so great one of the
photographer's was yet another Frenchman
a man named Etienne Jules Marais whose
training and physiology led him to
capture motion studies of birds in
flight and human athletes in action
instead of trip wires like Muybridge
Marais invented what he called the
corona photographic gun auslan and
switched from sheets of photographic
paper to rolls allowing him to take
bursts of photographs 12 per second even
with all these increasingly fancy
techniques it's important to note that
these were still just series of
photographs motion studies were
sometimes projected using devices
like Muybridge is Zoopraxiscope but
nobody was trying to make movies yet so
the world was boring each of these
innovations set up a fellow you may have
heard of Thomas Edison and a scientist
who work for him named wkl Dixon to
invent the kinetograph the world's first
motion picture film camera Dada
and they in turn paved the way for the
first filmmakers to experiment with
motion picture technologies and
storytelling we mentioned earlier that
film is an illusion but it's an illusion
that's carefully crafted by people who
want to show a specific point of view
with aesthetic choices from shot angle
and shot size to lens type and lighting
style and how much hair you put on a
Wookiee filmmakers can further affect
how we as an audience interpret reality
in a real sense film wasn't invented it
was stumbled upon a series of happy
accidents eventually led us to Citizen
Kane grand illusion black girl and the
experimental works of Stan Brackett not
to mention things like The Wizard of Oz
Raiders of Lost Ark Captain America
Civil War and sharknado there's a whole
world of film out there to discover and
there's a lot that film can help you
discover about yourself too and that's
the story will continue next time we
need today we talked about how film is a
sort of magic trick thanks to the ways
our eyes and brains work
thank you eyes and brains we introduced
the very very beginning of the film when
people started using sequential images
to tell stories we discussed photography
with a huge technological leap forward
since chemicals and light to capture
images and break down fast-moving
reality like never before next time
we'll learn about the very first motion
picture cameras and the start of movies
as we know them now crash course film
history is produced in association with
PBS Digital Studios you can head on over
to their channel to check out a playlist
of their latest amazing shows like
barbecue with Franklin PBS off-book and
Indy Alaska this episode of crash course
was filmed in the doctor Cheryl C Kinney
crash course studio with the help of
these Knights phenakistoscope and our
amazing graphics team is thought cafe
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