Technical Innovations That Changed Cinema Forever

Two-time academy award winner Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Life Of Pi) has never been a director who does what is expected of him, yet his latest movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk might be the first project to have surprised even him.

The immersive and thought-provoking action drama film tells the story of a soldier returning home from Iraq after heavy fighting and having to come to grips with being lauded by hordes of war-glory-high civilians.

The film is, also, technically ground-breaking. Shot at 120 frames per second (instead of the usual 24) in 3D and at 4K resolution, Billy Lynn has more than four times the amount of visual information on-screen than your standard Hollywood flick.

The ambitious shoot meant Lee had to re-learn a lot of the basic principles of movie making. The super high definition format proved very revealing, with a lot of Lee’s tried and true movie magic techniques, such as ethereal lighting and using focus to direct the audience’s gaze, becoming too obvious. With risk comes reward, though. Lee has made movie history.

More thoughtful than most technology focused productions, what makes Billy Lynn‘s innovation more impressive than say Avatar‘s, is that Lee uses the technology to heighten emotion and audience engagement, instead of just crafting action. Not to say there isn’t plenty of action, as the battle scenes, told through flashback, are some of the most immersive and visceral captured on camera since Saving Private Ryan, showing audiences just what it is like fighting on the front lines of today’s wars.

So with the film’s revolutionary approach in mind, we thought we should mark its release on 4K Ultra HD, 3D, Blu-ray, DVD and Digital with a look back at other film innovations that changed cinema forever.

High FPS Shooting

So first let’s have a bit of a recap on frame rate for anyone not intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of film technology. The moving images we see on a screen are actually a series of images or frames played one after the other to give the illusion of motion, and the frame rate is the number of frames that flash up on the screen every second. The more frames the less blur and the more real the image looks essentially allows directors to craft even more realistic scenes and sequences. Still very much in the early days of its development, it’s hard to say how this will affect film-makers to come, although if Lee’s experience is anything to go by, they may have a lot of re-learning to do.

Synchronous Sound

It’s hard to imagine, but there was actually a point in history where people thought adding sound to movies would ruin them. This, of course, was the hey day of silent films, which with their exaggerated acting and cartoonish action was hardly going to make the transition into talking pictures comfortably. We all know how this played out (go see The Artist if you want a highly entertaining play-by-play). Synchronous sound, that is, sound that matches the action on screen, changed cinema forever after the huge hit that was Al Jolson’s starring turn in The Jazz Singer. Combining sound effects, dialogue, a score and live singing, the film’s revolutionary sound design would go onto to set the standard for Hollywood productions from then on, with today’s films largely still following that same formula.

Matte Painting

This is the art of painting in landscapes or sets into the background of a shot. The set is painted either directly onto a backdrop or onto a pane of glass which is then inserted in the shot. This is the technique that made the amazing landscapes in films like The Princess Bride, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and of course Star Wars possible. More than that though, matte painting continued to the tradition of trick photography and allowed film makers to free themselves from the constraints of reality and let their imaginations run wild.

Colour Film

Can you imagine what it would be like going to the cinema today without colour film? Pretty bleak right. And while there are a lot of film makers our there today seemingly hell bent on draining all the colour out of their movies via grading in post production (Zack Synder I’m looking at you), it’s safe to say that colour film along with synchronous sounds are the two founding innovations the contemporary film industry is built upon. From the early days of colorists having to paint in colours directly onto the film to today’s digital cameras that can allow you to adjust the colours before you even get it into the editing suite, colour film truly transformed film from a narrative medium with visual elements to a visual one that told a story, allowing for more nuance of expression through the camera and not just the actors.

3D

Whatever you thought of James Cameron’s Avatar, there is no way of getting around the cultural impact it and its use of 3D had. Almost every cinema these days offers 3D movies and most of the major blockbusters coming out of Hollywood are shot on the format (or converted to it in post production, which never ends well). Allowing directors to add another layer of depth to their films, the era of 3D being used as a cartoonish gimmick to make objects pop out of the screen is long gone. Instead, 3D is now used to immerse audiences into the film, with the best 3D being used subtly and often going largely unnoticed, much as Lee has used in Billy Lynn, so don’t go in expecting to see bullet casing and rifle barrels come poking out of the screen.

Non-linear Editing

Where once upon a time editors had to undertake the incredibly laborious task of cutting the actual film together by hand using sellotape and a splicer, non-linear digital editing has made it possible for film makers to edit feature films on a laptop. More than just make life easier for the poor under appreciated editors of the world though, non-linear editing has had a direct impact on the way films are made. All you need to do is look at any classic action film and compare the number of cuts in it to a contemporary action film. The locked off long shots of the old style are now lost to the fast cuts from multiple angles that dominates films today thanks to cuts these days being done with the click of a mouse instead of at a machine.

Miniatures

Watching back over classic sci-fi films like Blade Runner and Star Wars, even though you can tell when they are using miniatures, to me it’s still far more impressive than CGI will ever be. Miniatures are more than just a gimmick though as their use along with matte painting is what opened up the possibility of telling grand sci-fi and epic fantasy stories through film. As the forerunners of CGI and the other VFX that pepper pretty much every studio release these days, miniatures played a key role in pushing the boundaries of what was possible in film and expanded the medium into the world conquering industry it is today.

Smart Phones

Now this one might be a bit controversial, but it’s hard to overlook to the huge proliferation of films shot on smart phones in recent years. Films like Tangerine (below) have proven that one can make compelling, important and engaging cinema on a phone, as long as you have a good story to tell. Also, it doesn’t hurt that the resolution on these new smart phones is comparable to most film cameras these days. And while film buffs may scoff at the notion of a film shot on a phone, there is no denying that the ease of access has dramatically increased the number of fringe voices who have been able to tell their stories. After all, technology is great, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible is important but none of it matters if there are no new voices to continue the work of directors like Lee.