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Movies Transcript
Hi, how are you doing? Thanks for coming to watch this talk. I haven’t made one of these videos in absolutely ages. What with one thing and another. So, I’m going to try and get back into the swing of it. We’ll see how I go. I’ve said that before. Anyway, don’t forget, after you listen to this talk, if you click the link in the description below here, you can find the transcript for this talk. You can also find the audio. You can also find questions, multiple choice and essay type. And you can find all the answers. You can also download all of that for free. The audio is an MP3 and the questions as a word document. So please, after you listen to this talk, go there and try the questions. Practice writing a bit as well. The more you practice, the better your English is going to get.
OK. Today I’m going to talk to you for ten minutes about movies. Are you ready? Here we go. Three, two, one, go. OK, movies. You like movies, I’m sure. I love movies. I love going to the movie theater and watching movies. There’s nothing I like better than sitting there with a big tub of popcorn watching a film. So why are they called movies? Well, the expression “movies” comes from “moving pictures”, and that’s basically what a movie is. It’s a series of moving pictures, moving photographs. Obviously, if you take one photograph, it doesn’t move. But if you take many photographs of an object that’s slowly moving and you play them very, very fast, you see a moving picture. And that’s what a movie is.
A basic movie is 24 photos in one second or 24 frames per second, as people say. So, if I took 24 photos of something moving like this and then played it fast, you would see motion. Here’s an early version of that. This is 24 photos of a horse moving. Can you see? It’s a bit jerky. It’s not very clear, but it’s an old movie. Now, that 24 second frame rate, that also explains why this happens. Can you see the helicopter moving? It’s floating as if by magic. Its rotor blades are not spinning. Why is that? Well, that’s because of the speed of the film. The camera is taking one photo after another. It’s taking 24 photographs in a second. The helicopter’s rotors are spinning at exactly the same speed. So basically, the camera takes a photo. The rotors spin once. The camera takes another photo. The rotors spin once, another photo, the rotor spins once, and another photo. That’s why it looks like the rotors are not moving. That’s very interesting. You can see it a lot in other things. You can see it in car tires as well. When cars are driving in movies, after a while, it starts to look as though the car tires are spinning backwards. That’s again for the same reason.
All right. Oh, talking too much. Let’s have a look at the history of the movies. We have to go back to 1620 here. We’re going to talk about a man called Christiaan Hyugens, who’s Dutch. I hope I pronounced that right. He was a great scientist, one of the greatest scientists ever. He was … He did a lot of work with optics, mechanics. He discovered Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. He studied Saturn’s rings. He invented the pendulum clock. The old grandfather clock. He invented that. But one thing he did that we’re going to talk about today was he invented something called a magic lantern. A lantern is a light. Of course, it projects light onto a wall. Well, he made a magic lantern using lenses. He managed to get the magic lantern to project a picture painted on glass onto a wall. So basically, that’s the first case of something being projected onto a wall. That’s the first type of movie camera, I suppose.
Now, we’re going to skip forward a couple of hundred years now. 1833 is the next date we’re going to look at. A man called Simon Stampfer. He invented something called the Zoetrope. Now, what a Zoetrope does, it basically uses the idea that if you put a lot of images that are slightly changed together, it becomes motion. What a zoetrope did, it spins. It’s a disc of pictures that spin. And you look through slots. And the picture on the other side of the slot slowly changes. And when you look through the slot, you see motion. That was, I suppose, a kind of movie. Well, it is a moving picture, I suppose. Then 1877, a Frenchman called Charles Emile Reynard. He invented something called a praxinoscope. Now, that’s very similar to a zoetrope, but this time he combined it with the magic lantern, and he projected the images onto a screen. So he had the same idea of a lot of moving pictures drawn by hand that were projected onto a screen. People actually paid money to come and watch this. So I suppose this is the first kind of movie theater, you might say.
Anyway, 1850s, instant photography. The camera starts to be … starts to advance. And we get instant photography, and that means we can take a lot of pictures faster. When cameras were first invented, it took a long time. You had to expose the film for a very long time to take the picture. But once we have instant photography, you can take pictures like that. Now, a man, in 1878, called Eadweard Muybridge, he made this video by basically putting cameras along the length of a horse racing track. As the horse ran past each camera, the camera triggered and took a picture of the horse at that point. Again, one of the first movies. OK. 1880, we have celluloid film developed. Celluloid film is wonderful in the fact that it’s flexible. Up until now, all photos were taken on solid plates. But now you can have flexible film. It makes it much easier to film a lot of photos quickly. Now, of course, the problems with celluloid film is its highly flammable. And that’s why we don’t have a lot of old movies left. They burned down. OK, so celluloid film makes cinematography a lot easier.
1890, we have something invented called the kinetoscope. Now, a Kinetoscope is a personal movie box. You have a long, reel of celluloid film inside the box. And you look down through an eyepiece and the film basically comes past the eyepiece on a motor. And you get a movie. That’s the very first kind of movie, I suppose. Here’s the type of movie they were playing.
What do you think? Pretty interesting? It’s some blacksmiths hammering some metal and then they stop to have a drink, a beer. Now, to us, this is like “what? People were watching this? People were paying to watch things like this?” But I mean, you can’t compare this to the movies we have today. This is the first time people ever saw moving pictures. Imagine how amazing that was for them. I would have paid to see that. I would have paid to see that.
Then, 1895, we have the Lumiere brothers. They start to project movies onto a cinema screen and they start to charge admission. They create possibly the world’s first movie theater, I suppose. Here’s one of their films. It’s a train coming into a train station. Again, don’t compare it to what we have now. This was amazing. People have never seen things like this before. Absolutely incredible. Okay, then we move on very quickly. 1900, we get editing. Up until now, people had just filmed. But from 1900 people learn how to cut and rejoin the celluloid film tapes to make movies. 1920s we get sound. Up until 1920, all movies were silent, of course. From the 1920s we get sound. And they were called “talkies” for quite a long time.
In 1935 we get color films, and then the quality starts to increase until we have the movies we have today, of course. Cameras over time have become better. The original cameras took 24 frames a second.
Cameras now can do 50, 60 frames a second. The best camera in the world can do one million frames a second, which means you can get images like this. Which you could not do with a regular camera, of course. OK. And that’s the history of movies. Very, very quickly, OK. I’ve got two minutes left.
Some statistics for you. Some interesting statistics. The longest movie in the world is a movie called The Innocence, which comes in at 21 hours and five minutes. The most expensive movie ever made in the world is the Pirates of the Caribbean on Stranger Tides, which cost, apparently, $422,000,000 to make. The highest grossing movie of all time is Avengers Endgame, which currently, in 2020, it’s June, is on about three billion dollars. But that could certainly change depending on when you’re watching this video. The highest paid actor in the world is Keanu Reeves. He was paid $250,000,000 for all of the Matrix films together. He’s also an amazingly generous person, I’ve heard. He gives most of his money away. He sounds like an absolutely wonderful person. Anyway …. Oh, last minute … Here we go.
Let’s talk about CGI. We can’t talk about movies without covering CGI. The very first movies, of course, were the train coming in, you just saw and the Blacksmiths. Movies today use CGI. CGI stands for computer generated imagery. Basically, stuff made on a computer. Now, computers, of course, started in about the Second World War, well before that, I suppose. But home computers came out, what, in the 1960s, 1970s? CGI became used in movies from about the 1970s, 1980s. Here’s an example of a movie called Tron, which came out in 1982. Look at the CGI in this one and now compare the CGI in Tron to the CGI in the Planet of the Apes over here? Obviously, chalk and cheese. Very, very different.
Then, of course, the Beauty and the Beast. Movies like this. Basically we … well, “we”? I can’t … Basically, experts today can create anything they want to for a movie. We use … I keep saying “we” … They use something called green screens. They use green screens or blue screens. What that does is an actor acts in front of a blue screen or a green screen, and afterwards the CGI artist, they just insert the cityscape or whatever is happening behind the actor over here. They use that color because it contrasts very well with clothes, I think … Time’s up. I’m going to continue, though … When you’re making a movie, the director or the CGI people will be very careful to make sure you don’t wear the same color as the screen behind you. Otherwise, those will disappear as well. Have a look at this one. This is The Avengers here. Green screen. And they’re also running on running machines, which I thought was quite interesting there.
Anyway, I’ve run out of time, so I’d better tie this talk up. CGI these days has reached the point where I don’t think we know what is real anymore. You can watch a movie and sometimes you’ll think, “Is that real?” But sometimes you won’t have any idea at all. I mean, look at these faces. Look at these people. These are all CGI. These are all created. They’re not real. When you watch a movie like The Avengers, you can see the people are real, or not real, but the city behind them, the things surrounding them, the spaceships. It looks completely real. That’s an amazing thing for movies, of course. We want to go and see movies that are real. We want to go and see movies that would be impossible to actually physically make. So that’s great. However, what about the news? What about other things in life? If CGI artists can make things look so realistic, what can we trust? How can we trust what we see? I’m going to leave you on that note.
Thank you for coming. Don’t forget, if you click on the link in the description below, you can go to my site and you can find the transcript, questions, all this stuff. Please go have a look. Anyway, thank you. I’ll see you next time. Bye.
Questions
1. Where does the word “movies” come from?
A: Movies are emotional and move people.
B: A shortened form of moving pictures.
C: You have to move to get to them.
2. Why does a helicopter look like it’s floating when it’s filmed?
A: the camera makes the helicopter’s rotors stop.
B: a camera takes still photos and things don’t move in photos.
C: its rotors spin at exactly the same rate as a camera films.
3. Christiaan Hyugens is Dutch? What country does he come from?
A: Denmark
B: Holland
C: Belgium
4. What is a magic lantern?
A: a device that can project a picture onto a wall
B: a lamp that can grant you three wishes
C: an early type of lighting system
5. What two ideas did Simon Stampfer combine?
A: a magic lantern and a praxinoscope
B: a praxinoscope and a pendulum
C: a magic lantern and a zoetrope
6. What was an advantage of celluloid film?
A: it is flammable
B: it is flabbergasting
C: it is flexible
7. How did a kinetoscope work?
A: a light projected an image from many different photographs onto a wall
B: a long reel of celluloid film was moved by a motor past an eye piece
C: a machine could cut different pieces of celluloid film together to make a movie
8. What was one of the things that the Lumiere brothers did?
A: they acted in movies
B: they made kinetoscopes
C: the charged admission
9. When did movies develop sound?
A: 1900s
B: 1920s
C: 1930s
10. How much did the Pirates of the Caribbean, on stranger tides, cost to make?
A: $422,000
B: $42,000,000
C: $422,000,000
11. What type of person is Keanu Reeves?
A: generous
B: vicious
C: mean
12. What does CGI stand for?
A: Computer Given Insiders
B: Computer Grown Ideas
C: Computer Generated Images
13. Steven says, “chalk and cheese”. What do you think that means?
A: Two things that are very similar
B: Two things that are not quite the same
C: Two things that are very different
14. What is a green screen used for?
A: so that CGI artists can add a background
B: so that the actors look beautiful
C: so that the actors clothes can be seen clearly
15. What worries Steven about CGI?
A: it makes movies too good
B: it spoils a movie because he would rather watch real scenes
C: it is so good that we won’t know what is real
16. At the end, Steven says, “I’m going to leave you on that note.” What does “on that note” mean?
A: it is a memo that people should write down
B: it is a final thought, like the final note in a piece of music
C: it is a piece of paper that he used for his script
17. Should the quality of CGI be limited so that it is not identical to reality?
18. There are a lot of similar action movies recently. Should Hollywood be forced to make more movies of certain genres?
19. Do you think movies have too much influence on people’s behavior?
20. Describe your favorite movie. Give reasons why it is your favorite.
Answers
1. B 2. C 3. B 4. A 5. C 6. C 7. B 8. C 9. B 10. C 11. A 12. C 13. C 14. A 15. C 16. B
17. Should the quality of CGI be limited so that it is not identical to reality?
No, I do not believe that any limits should be placed upon the quality of CGI simply because some people might be tempted to abuse it. This is because it is no different from any other technology and it benefits us to see what the experts are capable of doing.
This argument about placing limitations on an advancing technology could be said about any technology. You could say that we should limit the internet because governments could spy on us. We should limit space technology because governments could use it to attack each other. Just because an advancing technology could have negative effects, doesn’t mean it should be limited. Rather, society should be doing its best to ensure that the people who would use it for negative reasons, don’t have the power to do so. Which is better: to say that we should limit the technology so bad people can’t use it, or that we should limit the bad people? I know what I would say. If we have created a society where all people in power can be trusted, there would be no need for limitations.
Also, in the event that these bad people do exist, we need to be able to see what they are capable of. Putting limits on CGI technology would only limit it in its public capacity. I am sure that research and development would continue for military applications. If we are worried that the powers that be are going to use the CGI to convince us that something is happening when it isn’t, we need to be reminded every time we go to the cinema of how good CGI has become and learn to constantly question everything that we see.
These are two of the main reasons why I do not think CGI, or any emerging technology, should be limited.
18. There are a lot of similar action movies recently. Should Hollywood be forced to make more movies of certain genres?
I disagree with the idea that Hollywood should be forced to make different kinds of movies because Hollywood, like any business, only produces the product that its customers demand.
Many people argue that Hollywood only produces violent movies, or doesn’t have enough female leads, or relies too much on CGI, or whitewashes history, and so on. These are all extremely valid arguments and you can find hundreds of movies to support each one of them. However, this is not necessarily the fault of Hollywood, but, rather, the fault of us as consumers. Hollywood only produces movies for one reason: money. I’m sure there are directors, writers, and actors who do it for the love of their art but, without the money, these movies would not get made. Hollywood is in it for the profit and the giant studios don’t really care in the slightest what kinds of movies they produce. As long as they are getting bums on seats, they will make anything. And that is why the fault lies squarely on our shoulders. Let’s use Coca-Cola as an example. Coca-Cola is a hugely successful drink, obviously. In 1985, the changed their recipe and introduced “new coke”. People didn’t like the change and stopped buying coke. What happened? Coca-Cola discontinued the drink and went back to the old recipe. Why? Because they are only in it for the money and if people don’t buy the product, they change the product. If we stopped watching action movies, or movies without believable female leads, movie studios would stop producing action movies or movies without believable female leads. We cannot blame them for producing what we want to buy.
Instead of forcing Hollywood to change the type of movies they produce, perhaps an education program to persuade people that they want to watch a different kind of movie would be a more successful approach.
19. Do you think movies have too much influence on people’s behavior?
I do believe that movies have a lot of influence on people’s behavior, but I do not think it is as much as other forms of media and I do not believe that it is the fault of the movies.
People are influenced by all forms of media in one way or another. Successful movies can certainly persuade people of a certain viewpoint or push across the writer’s idea, but whether or not people believe that idea is entirely up to them. I think movies are far less influential in this way than the mainstream news is these days. I think the wall to wall, 24 hour rolling news that we have these days is far more influential because it is constantly in our homes and it has the power of repetition. You only go to see a movie occasionally and people very rarely watch the same movie over and over again. When a news broadcaster wants to push an opinion, it is repeated every few minutes throughout the day and people are constantly exposed to it. This is a far more influential media than a movie.
Also, whether or not someone is influenced by a form of media, is ultimately down to their level of education. A highly educated population would, I assume, be able to question what they see on the news or in movies and be far less influenced. If we want to remove the influencing power of movies and the other forms of media, then we have to educate our populations to a higher level than we currently do.
20. Describe your favorite movie. Give reasons why it is your favorite.
I would have to say that my favorite movie, or rather my favorite group of movies, are superhero movies. I, obviously as a male, enjoy the idea of having superpowers, but, more than that, I am always drawn in by the feelings of turmoil that the main characters suffer through. All superheroes have to balance their regular lives with the powers they have and they have to decide to help at great personal sacrifice.
Many of the superheroes that we watch have an alter ego, a part of them that tries to exist in the normal world. Being a superhero makes them stand out and any of us just want to belong. There can be nothing lonelier than being a superhero, given them obvious justification for trying to live a normal life. How they reconcile the two halves of their lives can make fascinating viewing.
Also, most superheroes usually have to sacrifice this desire for a normal life in order to save humanity. There is usually some giant calamity which requires them to make enormous sacrifices in order to save everyone.
However, the main reason that I, and I think many people, like superhero movies is that the characters in the movies are just like us. As people, we are lonely, we want to fit in, we want to think we are special, and we have to make daily sacrifices. They are us.