Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice—that is not part of the narrative —is used in a radio, television production, theatre, or other presentations. The voiceover is read from a script and may be spoken by someone who appears elsewhere in the production or by a specialist voice talent. Synchronous dialogue, where the voiceover is narrating the action, taking place at the same time, remains the most common technique in voiceovers. Asynchronous, however, is used in cinema, it is prerecorded and placed over the top of a film or video and used in documentaries or news reports to explain information. Voiceovers are used in video games and on-hold messages, as well as for announcements and information at events and tourist destinations, it may be read live for events such as award presentations. Voiceover is added in addition to any existing dialogue, it is not to be confused with the process of replacing dialogue with a translated version, called dubbing or revoicing. In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Ishmael narrates the story, he sometimes comments on the action in voiceover, as does Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard and Eric Erickson in The Counterfeit Traitor.
Voiceover technique is used to give voices and personalities to animated characters. Noteworthy and versatile voice actors include Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, Don Messick, Paul Frees, June Foray. Charactering techniques in voiceovers are used to give personalities and voice to fictional characters. There has been some controversy with charactering techniques in voiceovers with white radio entertainers who would mimic black speech patterns. Radio made this racial mockery easier to get away with because it was a non-confrontational platform to express anything the broadcasters found fit, it became the ideal medium for voice impersonations. Characterization has always been popular in all forms of media. In the late 1920s radio started to stray away from reporting on musicals and sporting events, radio began to create serial talk shows as well as shows with fictional storylines; the technique of characterization can be a creative outlet to expand on film and radio, but it must be done carefully. In film, the filmmaker places the sound of a human voice over images shown on the screen that may or may not be related to the words that are being spoken.
Voiceovers are sometimes used to create ironic counterpoint. Sometimes they can be random voices not directly connected to the people seen on the screen. In works of fiction, the voiceover is by a character reflecting on his or her past, or by a person external to the story who has a more complete knowledge of the events in the film than the other characters. Voiceovers are used to create the effect of storytelling by a character/omniscient narrator. For example, in The Usual Suspects, the character of Roger "Verbal" Kint has voiceover segments as he is recounting details of a crime. Classic voiceovers in cinema history can be heard in The Naked City. Sometimes, voiceover can be used to aid continuity in edited versions of films, in order for the audience to gain a better understanding of what has gone on between scenes; this was done when the film Joan of Arc, starring Ingrid Bergman, turned out to be far from the box-office and critical hit, expected, it was edited down from 145 minutes to 100 minutes for its second run in theaters.
The edited version, which circulated for years, used narration to conceal the fact that large chunks of the film had been cut out. In the full-length version, restored in 1998 and released on DVD in 2004, the voiceover narration is heard only at the beginning of the film. Film noir is associated with the voiceover technique; the golden age of first-person narration was during the 1940s. Film noir used male voiceover narration but there are a few rare female voiceovers. In radio, voiceovers are an integral part of the creation of the radio program; the voiceover artist might be used to remind listeners of the station name or as characters to enhance or develop show content. During the 1980s, the British broadcasters Steve Wright and Kenny Everett used voiceover artists to create a virtual "posse" or studio crew who contributed to the programmes, it is believed. The American radio broadcaster Howard Stern has used voiceovers in this way; the voiceover has many applications in non-fiction as well. Television news is presented as a series of video clips of newsworthy events, with voiceover by the reporters describing the significance of the scenes being presented.
Television networks such as The History Channel and the Discovery Channel make extensive use of voiceovers. On NBC, the television show Starting Over used Sylvia Villagran as the voiceover narrator to tell a story. Live sports broadcasts are shown as extensive voiceovers by sports commentators over video of the sporting event. Game shows made extensive use of voiceovers to introduce contestants and describe available or awarded prizes, but this technique has diminished as shows have moved toward predominantly cash prizes; the most prolific have included Don Pardo, Johnny Olson, John Harlan, Jay Stewart, Gene Wood and Johnny Gilbert. Voiceover commentary by a leading critic, historian, or by the production personnel themselves is ofte
Thought
Thought encompasses an "aim-oriented flow of ideas and associations that can lead to a reality-oriented conclusion". Although thinking is an activity of an existential value for humans, there is no consensus as to how it is defined or understood; because thought underlies many human actions and interactions, understanding its physical and metaphysical origins, effects has been a longstanding goal of many academic disciplines including philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, biology and cognitive science. Thinking allows humans to make sense of, represent or model the world they experience, to make predictions about that world, it is therefore helpful to an organism with needs and desires as it makes plans or otherwise attempts to accomplish those goals. The word thought comes from Old English þoht, or geþoht, from stem of þencan "to conceive of in the mind, consider"; the word "thought" may mean: a single product of thinking or a single idea the product of mental activity the act or system of thinking the capacity to think, imagine, so on the consideration of or reflection on an idea recollection or contemplation half-formed or imperfect intention anticipation or expectation consideration, care, or regard judgment, opinion, or belief the ideas characteristic of a particular place, class, or time the state of being conscious of something tending to believe in something with less than full confidence Definitions may or may not require that thought take place within a human brain, take place as part of a living biological system, take place only at a conscious level of awareness, require language, is principally or only conceptual, involve other concepts such as drawing analogies, evaluating, imagining and remembering.
Definitions of thought may be derived directly or indirectly from theories of thought. "Outline of a theory of thought-processes and thinking machines" – thought processes and mental phenomena modeled by sets of mathematical equations Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking – a theory built on analogies The Neural Theory of Language and Thought – neural modeling of language and spatial relations ThoughtForms – The Structure and Limitations of Thought – a theory built on mental models Unconscious Thought Theory – thought, not conscious Linguistics theories – The Stuff of Thought – The linguistic and cognitive theory that thought is based on syntactic and linguistic recursion processes Language of thought hypothesis – A syntactic composition of representations of mental states – Literally, the'Language of Thought'. What is most thought-provoking in these thought-provoking times; the phenomenology movement in philosophy saw a radical change in the way in which we understand thought.
Martin Heidegger's phenomenological analyses of the existential structure of man in Being and Time cast new light on the issue of thinking, unsettling traditional cognitive or rational interpretations of man which affect the way we understand thought. The notion of the fundamental role of non-cognitive understanding in rendering possible thematic consciousness informed the discussion surrounding artificial intelligence during the 1970s and 1980s. Phenomenology, however, is not the only approach to thinking in modern Western philosophy. Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties and their relationship to the physical body the brain; the mind–body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body. The mind–body problem concerns the explanation of the relationship that exists between minds, or mental processes, bodily states or processes.
The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, how—or if—minds are affected by and can affect the body. Human perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at one's various sensory organs from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in one's mental state causing one to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants; the question is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties. A related problem is to explain how someone's propositional attitudes can cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract in the correct manner; these comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning. Poetry has a long history, dating back to prehistorical times with the creation of hunting poetry in Africa, panegyric and elegiac court poetry was developed extensively throughout the history of the empires of the Nile and Volta river valleys; some of the earliest written poetry in Africa can be found among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE, while the Epic of Sundiata is one of the most well-known examples of griot court poetry. The earliest Western Asian epic poetry, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient Greek attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama and comedy.
Attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects; the use of ambiguity, symbolism and other stylistic elements of poetic diction leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Figures of speech such as metaphor and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm; some poetry types are specific to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter.
Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself, sometimes altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. In today's globalized world, poets adapt forms and techniques from diverse cultures and languages; some scholars believe. Others, suggest that poetry did not predate writing; the oldest surviving epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer, was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and on papyrus. A tablet dating to c. 2000 BCE describes an annual rite in which the king symbolically married and mated with the goddess Inanna to ensure fertility and prosperity. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe. Other ancient epic poetry includes the Iliad and the Odyssey. Epic poetry, including the Odyssey, the Gathas, the Indian Vedas, appears to have been composed in poetic form as an aid to memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.
Other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the Shijing, were lyrics; the efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in "poetics"—the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as China's through her Shijing, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. More thinkers have struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in content spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, rap. Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to assess the quality of poetry. Notably, the existing fragments of Aristotle's Poetics describe three genres of poetry—the epic, the comic, the tragic—and develop rules to distinguish the highest-quality poetry in each genre, based on the underlying purposes of the genre.
Aestheticians identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry, dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. Poets and aestheticians distinguished poetry from, defined it in opposition to prose, understood as writing with a proclivity to logical explication and a linear narrative structure; this does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks narration, but rather that poetry is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the logical or narrative thought process. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic "Negative Capability"; this "romantic" approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential into t
Solo performance
A solo performance, sometimes referred to as a one-man show or one-woman show, features a single person telling a story for an audience for the purpose of entertainment. This type of performance comes in many varieties, including autobiographical creations, comedy acts, novel adaptations, poetry and dance. In 1996, Rob Becker’s Defending The Caveman became the longest running solo play in the history of Broadway. Solo performance is used to encompass the broad term of a single person performing for an audience; some key traits of solo performance can include the lack of the fourth wall and audience participation or involvement. Solo performance does not need to be written and produced by a single person-- a solo performance production may utilize directors, writers and composers to bring the piece to life on a stage. An example of this collaboration is Eric Bogosian in the published version of his show Wake Up And Smell the Coffee, by Theatre Communications Group, New York City, it is assumed that individuals have told stories in front of other members of their tribe or society for thousands of years.
They would have orally passed down many of today's legends in this manner. So it is a style of performance, with us for generations developing through theatrical people such as Greek Monologists, the strolling Minstrels of Medieval England and the French Troubadors. Edgar Allan Poe both lectured and recited poetry as a platform performer between 1843 and 1849; the reading tours of Charles Dickens in Britain and America between 1858 and 1870 created a sensation. His American tour of 1867–68 was unparalleled until the arrival of the Beatles in the early 1960s. Solo performance enjoyed an unprecedented artistic and commercial vogue in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Literary historians associate the Victorian period with the highest development of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form. There were several discussions about the importance and distinction between the literary monologue and the performance monologue during the nineteenth century, this discussions confirms a continuous interchange between literature and performance, which may at times appear competitive but is more productive.
By the time the United States entered the 20th century, the number and variety of professional solo performances presented throughout the country had grown large. This renaissance of solo performance created ripples in the larger sense of American theatre. By the 1960s, the term performance art became popular and involved any number of performance acts or happenings, as they were known. Many performers, like Laurie Anderson, developed through these happenings and are still performing today; the backgrounds of solo performers over the decades range from vaudeville, poetry, the visual arts, cabaret and dance. Solo performers include Rob Becker, Lily Tomlin, Andy Kaufman, Rod Maxwell, Lord Buckley, Eric Bogosian, Whoopi Goldberg, Jade Esteban Estrada, Eddie Izzard, John Leguizamo, Marga Gomez, Anna Deavere Smith, Bill Hicks, Brother Blue and Lenny Bruce. Several performers have presented solo shows in tribute to famous personalities; the blueprint for this type of show may have been drafted by Hal Holbrook, who has performed as Mark Twain in his solo show, Mark Twain Tonight, more than 2,000 times since 1954.
Examples since that time include Julie Harris in the Emily Dickinson biography, The Belle of Amherst. A few actors adapted entire novels for the stage including Patrick Stewart who played all 43 parts in his version of A Christmas Carol, which played three times on Broadway and at The Old Vic in London. Solo performance may be autobiographical creations; this ranges from the intensely confessional but comedic work of Spalding Gray, the semi-autobiographical A Bronx Tale by Chaz Palminteri, or Holly Hughes' solo piece World without End, in which she attempts to make sense of her relationship with her mother who had died. Another example of this is In The Body of the World and performed by Eve Ensler in 2018. Still other shows may rally around a central theme, such as pop culture in Pat Hazel's The Wonderbread Years, relationships in Robert Dubac's The Male Intellect, the history of the New York City transit system in Mike Daisey's Invincible Summer, or fighting the system in Patrick Combs' Man 1, Bank 0.
These themes could be centered around a certain topic such as a political or social issue. Tim Miller explores the topic of gay culture and society surrounding the LGBTQ community in his production of My Queer Body. Karen Finley expressed her frustration with the standards women are held to and the issues surrounding them such as rape and abortion in her solo piece titled We Keep Our Victims Ready. Sometimes, solo shows are traditional plays written by playwr
Theatre
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, song and dance. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality and immediacy of the experience; the specific place of the performance is named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι. Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, many of its themes, stock characters, plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice Pavis defines theatricality, theatrical language, stage writing and the specificity of theatre as synonymous expressions that differentiate theatre from the other performing arts and the arts in general.
Modern theatre includes performances of musical theatre. The art forms of ballet and opera are theatre and use many conventions such as acting and staging, they were influential to the development of musical theatre. The city-state of Athens is, it was part of a broader culture of theatricality and performance in classical Greece that included festivals, religious rituals, law and gymnastics, poetry, weddings and symposia. Participation in the city-state's many festivals—and mandatory attendance at the City Dionysia as an audience member in particular—was an important part of citizenship. Civic participation involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators evidenced in performances in the law-court or political assembly, both of which were understood as analogous to the theatre and came to absorb its dramatic vocabulary; the Greeks developed the concepts of dramatic criticism and theatre architecture. Actors were either amateur or at best semi-professional; the theatre of ancient Greece consisted of three types of drama: tragedy and the satyr play.
The origins of theatre in ancient Greece, according to Aristotle, the first theoretician of theatre, are to be found in the festivals that honoured Dionysus. The performances were given in semi-circular auditoria cut into hillsides, capable of seating 10,000–20,000 people; the stage consisted of a dancing floor, dressing scene-building area. Since the words were the most important part, good acoustics and clear delivery were paramount; the actors wore masks appropriate to the characters they represented, each might play several parts. Athenian tragedy—the oldest surviving form of tragedy—is a type of dance-drama that formed an important part of the theatrical culture of the city-state. Having emerged sometime during the 6th century BCE, it flowered during the 5th century BCE, continued to be popular until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. No tragedies from the 6th century BCE and only 32 of the more than a thousand that were performed in during the 5th century BCE have survived. We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus and Euripides.
The origins of tragedy remain obscure, though by the 5th century BCE it was institutionalised in competitions held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysus. As contestants in the City Dionysia's competition playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of plays, which consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play; the performance of tragedies at the City Dionysia may have begun as early as 534 BCE. Most Athenian tragedies dramatise events from Greek mythology, though The Persians—which stages the Persian response to news of their military defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE—is the notable exception in the surviving drama; when Aeschylus won first prize for it at the City Dionysia in 472 BCE, he had been writing tragedies for more than 25 years, yet its tragic treatment of recent history is the earliest example of drama to survive. More than 130 years the philosopher Aristotle analysed 5th-century Athenian tragedy in the oldest surviving work of dramatic theory—his Poetics. Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods, "Old Comedy", "Middle Comedy", "New Comedy".
Old Comedy survives today in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes, while Middle Comedy is lost. New Comedy is known from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander. Aristotle defined comedy as a representation of laughable people that involves some kind of blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster. In addition to the categories of comedy and tragedy at the City Dionysia, the festival included the Satyr Play. Finding its origins in rural, agricultural rituals dedicated to Dionysus, the satyr play found its way to Athens in its most well-known form. Satyr's themselves were tied to the god Dionysus as his loyal woodland companions engaging in drunken revelry and mischief at his side; the satyr play itself was classified as tragicomedy, erring
Audience
An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, theatre, video games, or academics in any medium. Audience members participate in different ways in different kinds of art. Media audience studies have become a recognized part of the curriculum. Audience theory offers scholarly insight into audiences in general; these insights shape our knowledge of just how audiences affect and are affected by different forms of art. The biggest art form is the mass media. Films, video games, radio shows and other formats are affected by the audience and its reviews and recommendations. In the age of easy internet participation and citizen journalism, professional creators share space, sometimes attention with the public. American journalist Jeff Jarvis said, "Give the people control of media, they will use it; the corollary: Don't give the people control of media, you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will." Tom Curley, President of the Associated Press said, "The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place."
In rhetoric, some audiences depend on circumstance and situation, are characterized by the individuals that make up the audience. Sometimes these audiences are subject to engage with the ideas of the speaker. Ranging in size and composition, this audience may come together and form a "composite" of multiple groups. An immediate audience is a type of audience, composed of individuals who are face-to-face subjects with a speaker and a speaker's rhetorical text or speech; this audience directly listens to, engages with, consumes the rhetorical text in an unmediated fashion. In measuring immediate audience reception and feedback, one can depend on personal interviews and verbal comments made during and after a rhetorical speech. In contrast to immediate audiences, mediated audiences are composed of individuals who consume rhetorical texts in a manner, different from the time or place in which a speaker presents text. Audiences who consume texts or speeches through television and internet are considered mediated audiences because those mediums separate the rhetor and the audience.
Such audiences are physically away from the audience and the message is controlled. Understanding the size and composition of mediated audiences can be difficult because mediums such as television and Internet can displace the audience from the time and circumstance of a rhetorical text or speech. In measuring mediated audience reception and feedback, one can depend on opinion polls and ratings, as well as comments and forums that may be featured on a website; this applies to may fields such as movies and much more. There are companies. Theoretical audiences are imagined for the purpose of helping a speaker compose, practice, or a critic to understand, a rhetorical text or speech; when a rhetor considers and deliberates over the content of the ideas they are conveying, it can be said that these individuals are addressing the audience of self, or self-deliberating. Scholars Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, in their book The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, argue that the rhetor "is in a better position than anyone else to test the value of his own arguments."
The audience of self, while not serving as the ends to all rhetorical purpose or circumstance acts as a type of audience that not only operates as a function of self-help, but as instrument used to discover the available means of persuasion. The universal audience is an imagined audience that serves as an ethical and argumentative test for the rhetor; this requires the speaker to imagine a composite audience that contains individuals from diverse backgrounds and to discern whether or not the content of the rhetorical text or speech would appeal to individuals within that audience. Scholars Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca ascertain that the content addressed to a universal audience "must convince the reader that the reasons adduced are of a compelling character, that they are self-evident, possess an absolute and timeless validity"; the concept of the universal audience has received criticism for being idealistic because it can be considered as an impediment in achieving persuasive effect with particular audiences.
Yet, it still may be useful as an ethical guide for a speaker and a critical tool for a reader or audience. An ideal audience is a rhetor's imagined, intended audience. In creating a rhetorical text, a rhetor imagines is the target audience, a group of individuals that will be addressed, persuaded, or affected by the speech or rhetorical text; this type of audience is not imagined as the most receptive audience, but as the future particular audience that the rhetor will engage with. Imagining such an audience allows a rhetor to formulate appeals that will grant success in engaging with the future particular audience. In considering an ideal audience, a rhetor can imagine future conditions of mediation, size and shared beliefs among the audience to be persuaded. An implied audience is an imaginary audience determined by an auditor or reader as the text's constructed audience; the implied audience is not the actual audience, but the one that can be inferred by reading or analyzing the text. Communications scholar Edwin Black, in his essay, The Second Persona, presents the theoretical concep
Film
A film called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, or photoplay, is a series of still images that, when shown on a screen, create the illusion of moving images. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed in rapid succession; the process of filmmaking is both an industry. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, other visual effects; the word "cinema", short for cinematography, is used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, to the art of filmmaking itself. The contemporary definition of cinema is the art of simulating experiences to communicate ideas, perceptions, beauty or atmosphere by the means of recorded or programmed moving images along with other sensory stimulations. Films were recorded onto plastic film through a photochemical process and shown through a movie projector onto a large screen.
Contemporary films are now fully digital through the entire process of production and exhibition, while films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack. Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, they reflect those cultures. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens; the visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions through the use of dubbing or subtitles to translate the dialog into other languages; the individual images that make up a film are called frames. In the projection of traditional celluloid films, a rotating shutter causes intervals of darkness as each frame, in turn, is moved into position to be projected, but the viewer does not notice the interruptions because of an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after its source disappears.
The perception of motion is due to a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon. The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film has been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture and flick; the most common term in the United States is movie. Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, cinema. In early years, the word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen. Preceding film in origin by thousands of years, early plays and dances had elements common to film: scripts, costumes, direction, audiences and scores. Much terminology used in film theory and criticism apply, such as mise en scène. Owing to the lack of any technology for doing so, the moving images and sounds could not be recorded for replaying as with film; the magic lantern created by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s, could be used to project animation, achieved by various types of mechanical slides.
Two glass slides, one with the stationary part of the picture and the other with the part, to move, would be placed one on top of the other and projected together the moving slide would be hand-operated, either directly or by means of a lever or other mechanism. Chromotrope slides, which produced eye-dazzling displays of continuously cycling abstract geometrical patterns and colors, were operated by means of a small crank and pulley wheel that rotated a glass disc. In the mid-19th century, inventions such as Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope and the zoetrope demonstrated that a designed sequence of drawings, showing phases of the changing appearance of objects in motion, would appear to show the objects moving if they were displayed one after the other at a sufficiently rapid rate; these devices relied on the phenomenon of persistence of vision to make the display appear continuous though the observer's view was blocked as each drawing rotated into the location where its predecessor had just been glimpsed.
Each sequence was limited to a small number of drawings twelve, so it could only show endlessly repeating cyclical motions. By the late 1880s, the last major device of this type, the praxinoscope, had been elaborated into a form that employed a long coiled band containing hundreds of images painted on glass and used the elements of a magic lantern to project them onto a screen; the use of sequences of photographs in such devices was limited to a few experiments with subjects photographed in a series of poses because the available emulsions were not sensitive enough to allow the short exposures needed to photograph subjects that were moving. The sensitivity was improved and in the late 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge created the first animated image sequences photographed in real-time. A row of cameras was used, each, in turn, capturing one image on a photographic glass plate, so the total number of images in each sequence was limited by the number of cameras, about two dozen at most. Muybridge used his system to analyze the movements of a wi
