Commercial Film Production Research Articles

Picturing the past: the rise and fall of the British costume film

Historical feature film, 1933-39 - political restraints Korda and Balcon - aristocratic and bourgeois symbolism Dean, Wilcox and others - the politics of the market-place lowbrow and middlebrow responses in the 1930s highbrow interventions in the war years commercial film production and history, 1939-45 a middle-class view of history - Ealing, 1939-45 history and the working class - Gainsborough, 1942-50 wartime and postwar responses to historical film the postwar period - context and constraints monopoly and history - Rank Film, 1945-50.

What makes the picture talk: AT&T and the development of sound motion picture technology

The development of technological system that brought sound to motion pictures in the 1920s at AT&T's Bell Laboratories and its predecessor, the Western Electric Engineering Department, is described. The telephone company had set out to perfect the national telephone network. Among the technologies developed in this effort were amplifiers, loud speaking telephones (i.e. loudspeakers), condenser microphones, and electrical sound recording and reproduction. In 1922, all the pieces necessary for the addition of sound to movies were in place except for a means to synchronize sound and picture, a task then given to a team of engineers. By 1924, AT&T has produced a complete working system. Western Electric established a subsidiary in 1927 to work with the motion picture industry to develop commercial sound film production, and with the theater owners to equip thousands of theaters to show sound films.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Production Planning for Navy Training Films&lt;!--&lt;xref ref-type="other" rid="fn1-10.5594_J07394"&gt;*&lt;/xref&gt;--&gt;

Navy training film production procedures have been developed through nearly 2 years of production experience in the special problems of making films for the Navy. Procedures are designed to permit full use of commercial, industrial, and Navy film production facilities, and, at the same time, to insure full Navy control of film content, presentation, and security. — The production of a successful Navy training film requires close coöperation among the Navy activities requesting films, the Training Film Branch, and the film producer. Coordination of effort is established and maintained by means of a schedule of production which provides all contributors with a series of definite checking points. As each check point is reached, all persons concerned review progress and approve or disapprove plans for subsequent action. The established procedure for production reduces the time and cost of production, clarifies thinking in terms of the training purpose of the film, and assigns specific responsibility for each stage of film development. Only when these aims are accomplished can a training film meet the Navy standard of excellence.