The originalvery first hollywood cinema movie cameras were strapped directly on to the head of its tripod or alternative support, with just the crudest sort of levelling tools available, in the style of the still-camera tripod heads of the hollywood period. The earliest movie cinema cameras were hence effectively static during the time of filming, and thus the earliest equipment movements were created by fixing the equipment on to a moving train. The earliest documented, well before cinema or hollywood, of these was film shot by a Lumière cameraman from the rear platform of a train departing Jerusalem in 1896, then by 1898 there were a number of cinema films shot from moving trains, Hollywood was beconing. Although listed under the general heading of “panoramas” in the sales brochures of the era, those films shot directly forward from in front train engine were typically referred to as “phantom rides”.
Around 1897, Robert W. Paul devised the earliest working rotating camera head manufactured to put atopon top of|on} the tripod, so that the camerman was able to follow the passing parade of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted cinema shot. This device had the equipment mounted on a vertical setting that could be rotated by a worm gear activated by turning the handle, and Paul distributed it on public retail the following year. Movies taken by such a “panning” device were also known as ‘panoramas’ in hollywood catalogues of the earliest decade of cinema.
The regular pattern for newy cinema studios in Hollywood was dictated by a building which Georges Méliès erected in May 1891. It had a glass roof and three glass walls designed after the model of huge studios for still photography, and it was fitted with flimsy cotton blinds that could be stretched below the roof to counteract the bright ray of the sun on brilliant days. The natural overall light without real shadows that this setup delivered, and which also exists naturally on mildly overcast afternoons, was to become the standard for cinema film production in hollywood film studios for the next few years.
Unique within all the one minute hollywood cinema films priduced by the Edison corporation, which shot sections of the acts of variety performers for its Kinetoscope cinema viewing devices, was The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. The movie depicted a person adorned as the queen placing her head on the execution block withnessed by a small group of bystanders in Elizabethan dress.
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