Thread: Read how movie camera works!

The principles behind a movie camera lie in an optical illusion known as persistence of vision. When individual images--each just a little different from the last--are flashed past us at high speeds, our eyes lose the ability to differentiate between them, and they appear to move. Numerous devices such as flip books and zoetropes made use of this phenomenon before the coming of the movie camera, but it wasn't until the advent of photography that the concept could be explored in serious depth.

Every movie camera keeps its film hidden from the light until the cameraman is ready to expose it. The film strip then passes in front of a shutter, which is placed behind the camera lens. The shutter opens very briefly, exposing the image in front of the lens which is then captured on the film. This process wouldn't work without a stop-motion device, which freezes the film for a fraction of a second just as it is exposed.

The shutter and film strip need to be synchronized for the resulting image to be clear. Otherwise, it just looks like a big blur. Sprocket holes on the side of the film itself allow it to be pulled across the shutter at a uniform speed. Each exposure captures a single image--slightly different than the one before as the object being filmed moves in front of the camera. Standard speed for most cameras is 24 frames per second; at that rate, the completed film appears to move as a normal speed when it is projected onto a wall.

Thank you very much for the share. Like others I didn't realise how complicated it was!

Originally Posted by CaptainAmazing

I always thought it was so much more simply then that haha just like adding a filter to it

I thought the same until I read this article. Really makes you think about the amount of effort that actually goes into the films that we either say were crap, average or awesome.