The History & Development Of Short Film

As I've picked to produce a short film as my project I need to document the history and development of the short film from creation until present day. This is a post that needed to be included as it is important to understand the history of something before you try to replicate it. It also allows me to evaluate how they've changed in different aspects such as the public's opinion of them and production value. This will help me and Josh when making our short as we can use this (and the conventions of a short film) to further improve our project as we can use the best parts and include these in ours.

1880: Eadweard Muybridge demonstrates his 'Zoopraxiscope' publicly which is a lantern that had a rotating disc that span quickly around it, allowing it to look as if the horses in the disc were running.

1894: Through the use of Thomas Edison's device, the kinetoscope. The first few films (now considered shorts due to their low running time) were created such as 'Autour D'une Cabine'. Usually the films were of everyday or basic tasks, for example 'Fred Ott's Sneeze'.

1895: The Lumiere Brothers, Auguste and Louis, had what is considered the first paying audience for a film as well as it's thought to be by many as the debut of motion pictures as a form of entertainment. The film that helped the brothers accomplish this was 'Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat' which was a silent fifty-second single shot of a train pulling into the station, as the title indicates.

1896: Brit Acres shows the first film to a British audience through the use of his newly designed film projector, the 'Kineopticon'. This was hosted at the Queen's Hall in London for the Royal Photographic Society.

1902: Thomas Lincoln Tally opens the first permanent movie theatre in Los Angeles, The Electric Theatre. Georges Melies releases his 13 minute long film 'A Trip To The Moon' the silent, black and white feature that includes multiple shots rather than the traditional one shot of the time.

1903: Edwin S Porter's film 'The Great Train Robbery' is released. It is now considered to be the first western and American action film. It's also regarded as a milestone in the film making industry as it contained many (at the time) unconventional techniques. These techniques included location shooting, composite editing, frequent camera movement and is one of the earliest examples of cross cutting.

1913-1915: In this time frame feature films became more popular meaning short films became a genre for a certain type of audience rather than the main source of entertainment. However, shorts were deemed as a more respectable even though, they often had to be played alongside a feature films, live acts and news reels as the audiences taste had adapted so they wanted more for their money meaning they wouldn't pay to just see 10 minutes of footage.

1927: The Jazz Singer is released and completely changes the scope of film making by being the first feature length film to have synchronised dialogue sequences. It's release instantly kick started the ascendance of the "talkies" popularity with commercial audiences but in turn this also resulted in the decline of the silent film era.

1928: Disney's "Steamboat Willie" premieres, marking the official introduction of Mickey Mouse. This animated short is the first film to include a soundtrack, completely created in post production, including sound effects, music, and dialogue.

1929: The first Annual Academy Awards, or Oscars, are distributed. The awards given out at this ceremony included Best: Picture, Director, Actor In A Leading Role, Actress In A Leading Role, Cinematography and Writing (Adapted Screenplay). However the categories Best Animated Short Film & Best Live Action Short Film weren't added to the Academy's Awards roster until 1931.

1939-1945 (WW2): Governments needed more people to enlist into the services to fight during the war so they started producing propaganda shorts. This was done through both playing to people's patriotism and glamourising army life so the potential enlistees had a positive imagine of the war. Below is an example of something men and women would be shown to convince them:

1960's-1980's: The sixties marked the end of short films being commercially shown in theatres as peoples taste in entertainment had changed and they no longer wanted to pay for shorts. However, shorts did come back into style in cinema chains by being shown in front of children's cartoon movies. This started in the 1980's and still continues till this day, mainly through "Pixar Short Stories".

2000-Now: Besides in front of cartoons and Oscar calibre shorts this type of film making had mostly disappeared since the 60's. They had also found a home at festivals (such as Sundance) in which new or up-and-coming directors decided to show their potential and skill. However, in recent years short films have come back into fashion with the rise of fan films since geek culture has become a new norm allowing more people to artistically express themselves through the median. These are typically made out of fun rather than for money so are usually uploaded to sites where people can view them for free such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Information was gathered from these two sites primarily:
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-life/7593291/The-long-history-of-short-films.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_film (Although Wikipedia isn't always reliable I used this source at first to find basic information and followed this up by using other sites).