12 februari 2015

Merry-go-round



A film transition is a technique used in the post-production process of film editing and video editing by which scenes or shots are combined. Most commonly this is through a normal cut to the next scene. Most films will also include selective use of other transitions, usually to convey a tone or mood, suggest the passage of time, or separate parts of the story. These other transitions may include dissolves, L cuts, fades (usually to black), match cuts, and wipes.


 



Early German movies





Expressionist movies relied heavily on symbolism and artistic imagery rather than stark realism to tell their stories. Given the grim mood in post-WWI Germany, it was not surprising that these films focused heavily on crime and horror. The film usually credited with sparking the popularity of expressionism is Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). It painted a picture on the cinema screen with non-realistic sets built with exaggerated geometry, images painted on the floors and walls to represent objects (and often light and shadow), and a story involving the dark hallucinations of an insane man. An exaggerated acting style and unnatural costume design are other trademarks of this movement. Other notable works of Expressionism are Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Carl Boese and Paul Wegener's The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920). The Expressionist movement died down during the mid-1920s, but it continued to influence world cinema for years afterward. Its influence is particularly noticeable in American horror films and film noir, and the works of European directors as diverse as Jean Cocteau and Ingmar Bergman.

10 februari 2015

A German Dragon




The title character Siegfried, son of King Siegmund of Xanten, masters the art of forging a sword at the shop of Mime. Mime, who is envious of Siegfried's skill as a swordsmith, claims there is a shortcut through the Wood of Woden; in reality, this route will lead Siegfried away from Burgundy and expose him to attack from the magical creatures inhabiting the wood. During his journey, Siegfried discovers a dragon, and deviates from his path to slay it. He touches its hot, yellow blood and understands the language of the birds, one of which tells him to bathe in the dragon's blood in order to become invincible to attack — except for one spot on his shoulder blade, which is missed after being covered by a falling lime (linden) leaf.


09 februari 2015

Eternal carnaval



Comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or to amuse by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film and stand-up comedy. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. Satire and political satire use comedy to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of their humor. Parody subverts popular genres and forms, critiquing those forms without necessarily condemning them.

Battleship Potemkin



One of the most celebrated scenes in the film is the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps .

This scene has been described as one of the most influential in the history of cinema, because it introduced concepts of film editing and montage to cinema. In this scene, the Tsar's soldiers in their white summer tunics march down a seemingly endless flight of steps in a rhythmic, machine-like fashion, firing volleys into a crowd. A separate detachment of mounted Cossacks charges the crowd at the bottom of the stairs. The victims include an older woman wearing pince-nez, a young boy with his mother, a student in uniform and a teenage schoolgirl. A mother pushing an infant in a baby carriage falls to the ground dying and the carriage rolls down the steps amidst the fleeing crowd.


The massacre on the steps, which never took place, was presumably inserted by Eisenstein for dramatic effect and to demonise the Imperial regime. It is ironic that [Eisenstein] did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa steps is often referred to as if it really happened.



 

06 februari 2015

Trailer Fairytale




In less technical contexts, the term is also used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness, as in "fairy tale ending" (a happy ending) or "fairy tale romance" (though not all fairy tales end happily). Colloquially, a "fairy tale" or "fairy story" can also mean any farfetched story or tall tale; it is used especially of any story that not only is not true, but could not possibly be true. Legends are perceived as real; fairy tales may merge into legends, where the narrative is perceived both by teller and hearers as being grounded in historical truth. However, unlike legends and epics, they usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and actual places, people, and events; they take place once upon a time rather than in actual times.


Horses rescued





Electronic news-gathering (ENG) is a broadcast news industry description of television producers, reporters and editors making use of electronic video and audio technologies for gathering and presenting news. The term was commonly used in the television news industry in the 1980s and 1990s, but it has since been less frequently used as the technology has become ubiquitous.

Electronic news-gathering can involve anything from a lone broadcast journalist reporter taking a single professional video camera out to shoot a story, to an entire television crew taking a production truck or satellite truck on location to do a live television news report for an outside broadcast newscast.


 

horse 

02 februari 2015

Itch



A taboo is a strong social prohibition (or ban) against words, objects, actions, or discussions that are considered undesirable or offensive by a group, culture, society, or community. Breaking a taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent. Some taboo activities or customs are prohibited by law and transgressions may lead to severe penalties

Some taboos originated by acts of authority, be it legal, social or religious, over a period of time. When not in "polite society", discussions on taboos are allowed in humorous expression, such as comedy and satire like

22 januari 2015

Winter in St Petersburg



a slide show



18 januari 2015

Early motion pictures devices




The Mutoscope was an early motion picture device, patented by Herman Casler on November 21, 1894. Like Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope it did not project on a screen, and provided viewing to only one person at a time. Cheaper and simpler than the Kinetoscope, the system—marketed by the American Mutoscope Company (later the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company)—quickly dominated the coin-in-the-slot "peep-show" business.

The Mutoscope worked on the same principle as the "flip book". The individual image frames were conventional black-and-white, silver-based photographic prints on tough, flexible opaque cards. Rather than being bound into a booklet, the cards were attached to a circular core, rather like a huge Rolodex. A reel typically held about 850 cards, giving a viewing time of about a minute.


 

Very old footage (Biograph Company)


Biograph The company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. Dickson left Edison in April 1895, joining with inventors Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and businessman Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey in December 1895. The firm manufactured the Mutoscope, and made flip-card movies for it, as a rival to Edison’s Kinetoscope for individual “peep shows”, making the company Edison’s chief competitor in the nickelodeon market. In the summer of 1896 the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison’s Vitascope projector. The company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world including the British Mutoscope Company. In 1899 it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and in 1909 to simply the Biograph Company.

The first studio was located on the roof of 841 Broadway at 13th Street in Manhattan, known then as the Hackett Carhart Building and today as the Roosevelt Building. It was at this location that D. W. Griffith began as a director, and quickly became the studio's focus.


13 januari 2015

Polar Hero




How a Dutch boy became an international polar hero.
The film revolves around the person Sjef van Dongen, forgotten by most, but once he was a famous polar hero. In 1928, the newspapers were full of articles about the world Italia expedition Nobile and ... Van Dongen. The children of Van Dongen in 2012 donated the private archive of their father at the Zeeland Archives in Middelburg. The Zeeland Archives got his personal diaries and hundreds of letters and newspaper articles, mostly from his adventures in the nineteen twenties. A large part of the material has been digitized and inventoried.

12 januari 2015

I pad





In film and video production, split screen is the visible division of the screen, traditionally in half, but also in several simultaneous images, rupturing the illusion that the screen's frame is a seamless view of reality, similar to that of the human eye. There may or may not be an explicit borderline. Until the arrival of digital technology in the early 1990s, a split screen was accomplished by using an optical printer to combine two or more actions filmed separately by copying them onto the same negative, called the composite.

In filmmaking split screen is also a technique that allows one actor to appear twice in a scene. The simplest technique is to lock down the camera and shoot the scene twice, with one "version" of the actor appearing on the left side, and the other on the right side. The seam between the two splits is intended to be invisible, making the duplication seem realistic.


 

Blues


Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures and file footage is film or video footage that can be used in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock footage is called a "stock shot" or a "library shot".[1] Stock footage may have appeared in previous productions but may also be outtakes or footage shot for previous productions and not used. Examples of stock footage which might be utilized are moving images of cities and landmarks, wildlife in their natural environments and historical footage. Suppliers of stock footage may be either rights-managed or royalty-free. Many websites offer direct downloads of clips in various formats.

08 januari 2015

Mix carnavalesque




You may be surprised to learn that your home movies can hold great interest for a much wider public, including local historians, international scholars, and artists. Popular celebrities or historic events that appear in your films would be obvious examples, but in fact it is the record of normal human beings being themselves in everyday circumstances that may be of most historical value.



06 januari 2015

Domaine du val Golf



All cameras use the same basic design: light enters an enclosed box through a converging lens and an image is recorded on a light-sensitive medium. A shutter mechanism controls the length of time that light can enter the camera. Most photographic cameras have functions that allow a person to view the scene to be recorded, allow for a desired part of the scene to be in focus, and to control the exposure so that it is not too bright or too dim. A data display, often a liquid crystal display (LCD), permits the user to view settings such as ISO speed, exposure, and shutter speed.

A movie camera or a video camera operates similarly to a still camera, except it records a series of static images in rapid succession, commonly at a rate of 24 frames per second. When the images are combined and displayed in order, the illusion of motion is achieved.

03 januari 2015

Saint Riquier



Historically, video frames were represented as analog waveforms in which varying voltages represented the intensity of light in an analog raster scan across the screen. Analog blanking intervals separated video frames in the same way that frame lines did in film. For historical reasons, most systems used an interlaced scan system in which the frame typically consisted of two video fields sampled over two slightly different periods of time. This meant that a single video frame was usually not a good still picture of the scene, unless the scene being shot was completely still.

With the dominance of digital technology, modern video systems now represent the video frame as a rectangular raster of pixels, either in an RGB color space or a color space such as YCbCr, and the analog waveform is typically found nowhere other than in legacy I/O devices.


31 december 2014

Antarctica and mankind



Antarctica is Earth's southernmost continent, containing the geographic South Pole. It is situated in the Antarctic region of the Southern Hemisphere, almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle, and is surrounded by the Southern Ocean. At 14.0 million km2 (5.4 million sq mi), it is the fifth-largest continent in area after Asia, Africa, North America, and South America. For comparison, Antarctica is nearly twice the size of Australia. About 98% of Antarctica is covered by ice that averages at least 1.9 kilometres (1.2 mi) in thickness, which extends to all but the northernmost reaches of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Antarctica, on average, is the coldest, driest, and windiest continent, and has the highest average elevation of all the continents. Antarctica is considered a desert, with annual precipitation of only 200 mm (8 inches) along the coast and far less inland. The temperature in Antarctica has reached −89 °C (−129 °F). There are no permanent human residents, but anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 people reside throughout the year at the research stations scattered across the continent. Only cold-adapted organisms survive, including many types of algae, bacteria, fungi, plants, protista, and certain animals, such as mites, nematodes, penguins, seals and tardigrades. Vegetation where it occurs is tundra.





World of old masters



The paintings of Le Mair can justifiably be compared to those of the Old Masters, sometimes exposing him to criticism by the more modern leaning art reviewers. But for the viewer who pays attention, le Mair’s paintings show a very unique identity.
Cornelis le Mair is a multi-talented man. Besides being a painter of portraits, figures, still lifes and landscapes, his interests span a wide spectrum: Architecture, Sculpture, Music and Interior Design among them. Occasionally he exchanges his painting brush for a writing pen and in 2002 he finished his novel “Vanitas”. Publisher In De Knipscheer will also introduce a new book of essays: “Het Edele Ambacht” (The Noble Trade), that will address different aspects of traditional fine art painting.
Le Mair’s farmhouse, decorated and furnished to his own vision, has been filmed, photographed and written about on many occasions.

25 december 2014

Fishing in Suriname


Suriname was colonized by the British and the Dutch in the 17th century. In 1667 it was captured by the Dutch, who governed Suriname as Dutch Guiana until 1954. At that time it was designated as a land (lit.: country) of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, next to the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles (dissolved in 2010). On 25 November 1975, the country of Suriname left the Kingdom of the Netherlands to become independent.

At just under 165,000 km2 (64,000 sq mi), Suriname is the smallest sovereign state in South America. (French Guiana, while less extensive and populous, is an overseas department of France.) Suriname has a population of approximately 566,000, most of whom live on the country's north coast, where the capital Paramaribo is located. Suriname is a mostly Dutch-speaking country; Sranang, an English-based creole language, is a widely used lingua franca. It is the only independent entity in the Americas where Dutch is spoken by a majority of the population.