Taking A Look Back At The Past of Hollywood Cinema Techniques
The earliest hollywood cinema movie cameras were attached directly to the mount of its tripod or other support, with only the crudest type of levelling tools available, in the manner of the still-camera tripod heads of the hollywood period. The first movie cinema cameras were hence resolutley static during the course of filming, and hence the first camera movements were the result of mounting the camera to a moving car. The first sighted, well before cinema or hollywood, of these was film shot by a Lumière cameraman from the back carraige of a train leaving Jerusalem some time in 1896, and by 1898 there were an increasing amount of cinema films shot inside moving vehicles, Hollywood was beconing. Although categorised within the ambiguous heading of “panoramas” in the sales catalogues of the era, those films shot straight forward looking out from the front of a train engine were specifically described as “phantom rides”.
Then in 1897, Robert W. Paul created the first working moveable camera mount engineered to be put atopon top of|on} the tripod, so that the camerman could follow the passing parade of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted cinema shot. The device had the camera set on a vertical setting that could be moved by a worm gear activated by rotating the handle, and Paul distributed it on general retail the following year. Films made with such a “panning” head were also known as ‘panoramas’ in hollywood listings of the first years of cinema.
The standard pattern for early film studios in Hollywood was provided by the studio that Georges Méliès built sometime in 1891. This had a glass roof and three glass walls constructed after the model of large studios for static photography, it was also fitted with flimsy cotton blinds that could be stretched below the roof to counteract the bright ray of the sun on brilliant mornings. The soft overall light devoid of real shadows that this arrangement delivered, and which also happens naturally on lightly overcast afternoons, was to become the norm for cinema film production in hollywood film studios for the next era.
Unique within all the one minute hollywood cinema films priduced by the Edison company, that recorded sections of the shows of variety performers for their Kinetoscope cinema viewing machines, was The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. The film depicted a person adorned as Mary putting her head on the execution block in front of a small gathering of onlookers in period dress.
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