The changes within the film industry 1990-2004 (with works cited)

Essay by Ippala101College, UndergraduateA, December 2004

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Technological and Social Change in Hollywood

A Brief History of Film

Film, as an industry, came to be in 1893 with the creation of the world's first film production studio, the Black Maria, in West Orange, New Jersey. Thomas Edison built the studio on the grounds of his laboratories, for he was the inventor of the first camera and projection equipment: the kinetograph and kinetescope, respectively.

A French magician named Georges Melies was the first person to use artificially arranged scenes to tell a narrative story in his film Cendrillon (1899). The 1930s gave way to the introduction of sound in film. Consequently, movies took on a role as a form of entertainment.

Technological Advances

DreamWorks SKG, the entertainment company formed in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, is the industry leader in digital animation. In February 1995, the New York Times reported that Silicon Graphics Inc.

was likely to invest in a computerized digital studio with DreamWorks. That was a wise choice for Silicon; DreamWorks proceeded to produce colossal hits in the animation genre, such as Ants (1998) and Shrek (2001). DreamWorks proved that digital animation evolved from drawn characters to having characters completely computer-generated. The difference is apparent with the success of movies such as Shrek, the first ever winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated feature film in 2002.

Ten years ago, the film industry's biggest problem was trying to introduce digital options to its filmmakers. Now, the industry faces a bigger problem: the stealing of its work by Internet piracy. But not everyone in the industry agrees that the Internet can be viewed as an enemy. Film producer Peter Guber predicted "an 'enormous' future for the business-to-business applications of moving-image media over the Internet as an adjunct to existing communications." Guber...