A home movie is a short amateur film or video typically made just to preserve a visual record of family activities, a vacation, or a special event, and intended for viewing at home by family and friends. Originally, home movies were made on photographic film in formats that usually limited the movie-maker to about three minutes per roll of costly camera film. The vast majority of amateur film formats lacked audio, shooting silent film.
The 1970s saw the advent of consumer camcorders that could record an hour or two of video on one relatively inexpensive videocassette which also had audio and did not need to be developed the way film did. This was followed by digital video cameras that recorded to flash memory, and most recently smartphones with video recording capability, made the creation of home movies easier and much more affordable to the average person.
The technological boundaries between home-movie-making and professional movie-making are becoming increasingly blurred as prosumer equipment often offers features previously only available on professional equipment.
The development of home movie-making has depended critically on the availability of equipment and media formats (film stock, video tape, etc.) at prices affordable to consumers. The introduction of film formats suitable for amateur hobbyists began early in the history of cinematography.
17.5 mm format
The 17.5mm "Birtac" format was patented by Birt Acres in 1898.[7] This format split the standard 35mm film into two strips half as wide and could be loaded into the camera in daylight. Since the film frames were also half the height of 35mm frames, the Birtac format used only 25% of the amount of film stock used by 35mm. The camera doubled as a printer and projector, so equipment costs were also reduced.
9.5 mm format
In 1922, the French firm Pathé Frères introduced a new film format 9.5mm wide which put the sprocket holes between the frames instead of along the sides of the film, allowing the images to occupy nearly the entire width. The resulting frames were nearly as large and clear as with the slightly later 16mm format, which devoted much of its width to the stabilizing perforations. Used both for making home movies and for showing shortened "cinema-at-home" versions of professionally made feature films, it enjoyed popularity for several decades in Europe, including the UK, but was virtually unknown in the US.
Safety film and the 16 mm format
Of importance in making motion picture film practical for home use was the manufacturing option of safety film in the 1920s. The nitrate film used by professionals required caution in handling and projection because it is highly flammable. Nitrate film badly stored has been known to spontaneously combust.
The 16mm format, which used only safety film, was introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1923[7] and became a standard in the non-professional market. Although 16mm had the advantage that users were not tied to one equipment manufacturer, and there were obvious cost advantages compared to standard 35mm, the advent of an even smaller and cheaper format ultimately relegated 16mm to professional users, particularly in the educational market.
In 1932, Kodak introduced another new format, 8mm, now called "Standard8" or "Regular8", which put four frames into the area occupied by one standard 16mm frame. The film usually came in 16mm wide "Double8" form, which ran through the camera in two passes (one in each direction) and was slit in half after processing. The "Straight8" variant came already cut to 8mm width. In either case, the amount of film stock used per frame was again reduced by 75%. This finally brought home movies within the reach of the average family. The smaller format also made possible smaller and more portable cameras and projectors.
The introduction of Kodachrome color reversal film for 16mm in 1935, and for 8mm in 1936, facilitated home color cinematography. The availability of reversal film, both black-and-white and Kodachrome, was very important to the economics of home movie-making because it avoided the expense of separate negatives and positive prints.
Super 8 and Single-8 film formats
The original 8mm format was largely superseded within a few years of Kodak's 1965 introduction of Super8 film. The Super8 format used the same film width as standard 8mm, but the perforations were smaller, making room for larger frames that yielded a clearer image. In addition, Super8 film came in cartridges for easier loading into the camera. High-end Super 8 also could be purchased with a magnetic audio track, allowing for synchronized sound home movies.[8]Single-8, a competing product from Fujifilm, was also introduced in 1965. It used the same new format as Super8 but on a thinner polyester base and in a different type of camera cartridge.
Home video-making
The introduction of the BetaVCR in 1975 and VHS in 1976 heralded a revolution in the making of home movies. Videocassettes were extremely inexpensive compared to film and they could even be erased. This had the effect of greatly increasing the hours of footage of most family video libraries. It took a few years before consumer video cameras and portable VCRs were introduced, and later combined to create camcorders, but by that time, many consumers already had the playback equipment in their homes.
Omnipresence and controversy
Portability and small size of digital home movie equipment, such as smartphones, has led to the banning of such devices from various places, due to privacy and security concerns.
Pornographic movies of celebrities have been rumoured to exist for many years, but the ease of creating home movies on video has resulted in several celebrity sex tapes becoming available to the public, often without the permission of participants. The honeymoon video of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee from 1998 was the first highly publicized example.[9]
Portability of digital equipment helps fuel other controversies as well, such as the incident on November 17, 2006, in which comedian Michael Richards got into a racist war of words with an audience member during his comedy club act.[10] Large parts of the incident were captured on the camera phone of another audience member and broadcast widely.
Home movies have played important roles in controversial criminal investigations. The prime example is the Zapruder film of the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, accidentally captured on Kodachrome film with an 8mm home movie camera. The film became crucial evidence for the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination.[11] At first, only black-and-white enlargements of individual film frames were published, and the most gruesome frame was withheld. The public did not actually see the images in motion for many years. The first showing on network television occurred in 1975.
Film stock is an analog medium that is used for recording motion pictures or animation. It is recorded on by a movie camera, developed, edited, and projected onto a screen using a movie projector. It is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film. The emulsion will gradually darken if left exposed to light, but the process is too slow and incomplete to be of any practical use. Instead, a very short exposure to the image formed by a camera lens is used to produce only a very slight chemical change, proportional to the amount of light absorbed by each crystal. This creates an invisible latent image in the emulsion, which can be chemically developed into a visible photograph. In addition to visible light, all films are sensitive to X-rays and high-energy particles. Most are at least slightly sensitive to invisible ultraviolet (UV) light. Some special-purpose films are sensitive into the infrared (IR) region of the spectrum.
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film ; other common film gauges include 8 and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical film-making, or for low-budget motion pictures. It also existed as a popular amateur or home movie-making format for several decades, alongside 8 mm film and later Super 8 film. Eastman Kodak released the first 16 mm "outfit" in 1923, consisting of a camera, projector, tripod, screen and splicer, for US$335. RCA-Victor introduced a 16 mm sound movie projector in 1932, and developed an optical sound-on-film 16 mm camera, released in 1935.
8 mm film is a motion picture film format in which the film strip is eight millimetres (0.31 in) wide. It exists in two main versions – the original standard 8 mm film, also known as regular 8 mm, and Super 8. Although both standard 8 mm and Super 8 are 8 mm wide, Super 8 has a larger image area because of its smaller and more widely spaced perforations.
Super 8 mm film is a motion-picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement over the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format.
9.5 mm film is an amateur film format introduced by Pathé in 1922 as part of the Pathé Baby amateur film system. It was conceived initially as an inexpensive format to provide copies of commercially made films to home users, although a simple camera was released shortly afterwards.
135 film, more popularly referred to as 35 mm film or 35 mm, is a format of photographic film used for still photography. It is a film with a film gauge of 35 mm (1.4 in) loaded into a standardized type of magazine – also referred to as a cassette or cartridge – for use in 135 film cameras. The engineering standard for this film is controlled by ISO 1007 titled '135-size film and magazine'.
120 is a film format for still photography introduced by Kodak for their Brownie No. 2 in 1901. It was originally intended for amateur photography but was later superseded in this role by 135 film. 120 film survives to this day as the only medium format film that is readily available to both professionals and amateur enthusiasts.
127 is a roll film format for still photography introduced by Kodak in 1912.
126 film is a cartridge-based film format used in still photography. It was introduced by Kodak in 1963, and is associated mainly with low-end point-and-shoot cameras, particularly Kodak's own Instamatic series of cameras.
110 is a cartridge-based film format used in still photography. It was introduced by Kodak in 1972. 110 is essentially a miniaturized version of Kodak's earlier 126 film format. Each frame is 13 mm × 17 mm, with one registration hole. Cartridges with 12, 20, or 24 frames are available on-line. Production variations sometimes have allowed for an additional image.
Kodachrome is the brand name for a color reversal film introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935. It was one of the first successful color materials and was used for both cinematography and still photography. For many years, Kodachrome was widely used for professional color photography, especially for images intended for publication in print media.
A movie camera is a type of photographic camera that rapidly takes a sequence of photographs, either onto film stock or an image sensor, in order to produce a moving image to display on a screen. In contrast to the still camera, which captures a single image at a time, the movie camera takes a series of images by way of an intermittent mechanism or by electronic means; each image is a frame of film or video. The frames are projected through a movie projector or a video projector at a specific frame rate to show the moving picture. When projected at a high enough frame rate, the persistence of vision allows the eyes and brain of the viewer to merge the separate frames into a continuous moving picture.
In photography, reversal film or slide film is a type of photographic film that produces a positive image on a transparent base. Instead of negatives and prints, reversal film is processed to produce transparencies or diapositives. Reversal film is produced in various sizes, from 35 mm to roll film to 8×10 inch sheet film.
Ektachrome is a brand name owned by Kodak for a range of transparency, still, and motion picture films previously available in many formats, including 35 mm and sheet sizes to 11 × 14 inch size. Ektachrome has a distinctive look that became familiar to many readers of National Geographic, which used it extensively for color photographs for decades in settings where Kodachrome was too slow. In terms of reciprocity characteristics, Ektachrome is stable at shutter speeds between ten seconds and 1/10,000 of a second.
Digital cinematography is the process of capturing (recording) a motion picture using digital image sensors rather than through film stock. As digital technology has improved in recent years, this practice has become dominant. Since the mid-2010s, most movies across the world are captured as well as distributed digitally.
A Super 8mm camera is a motion picture camera specifically manufactured to use the Super 8mm motion picture format. Super 8mm film cameras were first manufactured in 1965 by Kodak for their newly introduced amateur film format, which replaced the Standard 8 mm film format. Manufacture continued until the rise in popularity of video cameras in the mid-1970s. In 2014 the first new Super 8mm camera in 30 years was introduced by the Danish company Logmar Camera Solutions. Most other cameras readily available are from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Standard 8 mm film, also known as Regular 8 mm film, Double 8 mm film, or simply as Standard-8, Regular-8 or Double-8 is an 8 mm film format originally developed by the Eastman Kodak company and released onto the market in 1932.
The Zapruder film is a silent 8mm color motion picture sequence shot by Abraham Zapruder with a Bell & Howell home-movie camera, as United States President John F. Kennedy's motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. It captured the assassination of the President.
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