Silent Film Analysis

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Silent movies were almost always accompanied by music, from a multipieced pit orchestra to a single piano or even a guitar. This is why silent film audiences seemed perfectly happy with silent movies. There was also technological difficulty of matching sound with visuals so that everyone in the audience could hear. The problems were synchronisation and amplification. A vitaphone was something that produced the first commercially viable sound system. This was then replaced by the now- standard strip of celluloid prepped for sound that runs on the side of the film strip, this makes the two modes remain in sync.

Even after this apparatus was invented, sound still presented quite a few problems. The early sound cameras and equipment were noisy …show more content…

Characteristics that allow film sound to be manipulated are as follows, sensitivity, nonspecificity and ambiguity. We are subjected to sounds all around us every day but the brain tends to filter out those that are not important to us at that moment in time. A microphone is not as selective. The filmmakers eliminate that for us, the viewers. A film sound track is made to not draw attention to itself unless it is a vital part of the plot. A sound track is comprised of three ingredients. The human voice, sound effects and music. These sound elements must be balanced and mixed to produce the desired dramatically creative …show more content…

The first known public exhibition of sound film was in Paris in 1900. Thomas Edison invented the Phonograph/Gramophone in 1877. It could both record sound and play it back. The earliest type of Phonograph recorded on a thin sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved metal cylinder. A stylus connected to a diaphragm indented the foil into the groove as the cylinder rotated. The arrangement explained is known as vertical or ‘’Hill-and-Dale’’ recording. The first synchronisation was a turning recording device marked with a white spot. When the white spot rotated the camera operator had to hand crank the camera to keep it in sync with the recording. For playback the method was then repeated but the projectionist was hand cranking the film projector. Later the 50 Hz or 60 Hz sine wave which was called a pilotone was recorded on a second parallel track of an audio

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