George Walton Lucas Jr. is an American filmmaker and philanthropist. Lucas is best known for creating the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic and THX. He served as chairman of Lucasfilm, before selling it to The Walt Disney Company in 2012. Lucas is one of history's most financially successful filmmakers and has been nominated for four Academy Awards. Lucas personally directed or conceived ten of the 100 highest-grossing movies at the North American box office, adjusted for ticket-price inflation. Lucas is considered to be one of the most significant figures of the 20th-century New Hollywood movement, and a pioneer of the modern blockbuster. Despite this, he has remained an independent filmmaker away from Hollywood for most of his career.
Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC is an American film and television production company founded by filmmaker George Lucas in 1971 in San Rafael, California, though most of the company's operations were moved to San Francisco in 2005. It has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios since 2012 and is best known for creating and producing the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, as well as its leadership in developing special effects, sound, and computer animation for films.
The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in many films and TV series, beginning in 1951 with the film Distant Drums. The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion. The sound is named after Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 Western in which the character gets shot in the thigh with an arrow. This was its first use following its inclusion in the Warner Bros. stock sound library, although The Charge at Feather River was the third film to use the effect. The scream is believed to be voiced by actor Sheb Wooley. It was featured in all of the original Star Wars films.
A sound editor is a creative professional responsible for selecting and assembling sound recordings in preparation for the final sound mixing or mastering of a television program, motion picture, video game, or any production involving recorded or synthetic sound. The sound editor works with the supervising sound editor. The supervising sound editor often assigns scenes and reels the sound editor based on the editor's strengths and area of expertise. Sound editing developed out of the need to fix the incomplete, undramatic, or technically inferior sound recordings of early talkies, and over the decades has become a respected filmmaking craft, with sound editors implementing the aesthetic goals of motion picture sound design.
A sampler is an electronic musical instrument that records and plays back samples. Samples may comprise elements such as rhythm, melody, speech, sound effects or longer portions of music.
Charles Joseph Parrott, known professionally as Charley Chase, was an American comedian, actor, screenwriter and film director. He worked for many pioneering comedy studios but is chiefly associated with producer Hal Roach. Chase was the elder brother of comedian/director James Parrott.
A trailer is a commercial advertisement, originally for a feature film that is going to be exhibited in the future at a movie theater or cinema. It is a product of creative and technical work.
Filmmaking or film production is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, beginning with an initial story, idea, or commission. Production then continues through screenwriting, casting, pre-production, shooting, sound recording, post-production, and screening the finished product before an audience, which may result in a film release and exhibition. The process is nonlinear, as the director typically shoots the script out of sequence, repeats shots as needed, and puts them together through editing later. Filmmaking occurs in a variety of economic, social, and political contexts around the world, and uses a variety of technologies and cinematic techniques to make theatrical films, episodic films for television and streaming platforms, music videos, and promotional and educational films.
A stock sound effect is a prerecorded sound effect intended to be reused with an entertainment product, as opposed to creating a new and unique sound effect. It is intended to work within a sound effect library.
Waves Audio Ltd. is an Israeli developer and supplier of professional digital audio signal processing technologies and audio effects, used in recording, mixing, mastering, post production, broadcast, and live sound. The company's corporate headquarters and main development facilities are located in Tel Aviv, with additional offices in the United States, China, and Taiwan, and development centers in India and Ukraine. In 2011, Waves won a Technical Grammy Award.
Monogram Pictures Corporation was an American film studio that produced mostly low-budget films between 1931 and 1953, when the firm completed a transition to the name Allied Artists Pictures Corporation. Monogram was among the smaller studios in the golden age of Hollywood, generally referred to collectively as Poverty Row. Lacking the financial resources to deliver the lavish sets, production values, and star power of the larger studios, Monogram sought to attract its audiences with the promise of action and adventure.
The following is a complete list of the 220 Our Gang short films produced by Hal Roach Studios and/or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer between 1922 and 1944, numbered by order of release along with production order.
Sounddogs.com, Inc. is a commercial online library of sound effects based in Marina Del Rey, California, with offices in Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay. It is the first and largest online sound effects and production music library on the Internet launched in May 1997. As of 2016, 708,636 sound effects and production music tracks are available for immediate download or on hard drive or CD. Downloads are available in AIFF, WAV, and MP3 formats. Sounddogs started as a sound design and editorial company in 1990 and has contributed to more than 150 feature films and earned multiple awards and nominations from the BAFTA Award, Primetime Emmy Award and Golden Reel Awards. As of 2022, there are over 1 million sound files of sound effects and production music.
Warner Chappell Music, Inc. is an American music publishing company and a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group. Warner Chappell Music's catalog consists of over 1.4 million compositions and 150,000 composers, with offices in over 40 countries.
A film – also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick – is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound and, more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and the art form that is the result of it.
Reel FX Animation, formerly known as Reel FX Creative Studios, is an American Visual effects and computer animation studio with studios in Dallas, Texas, Hollywood, California, and Montreal, Quebec.
Wylie Stateman is an American sound director, supervising sound editor, sound designer, and post production media entrepreneur. Stateman has supervised over 150 sound projects, resulting in 9 Academy Award nominations, 6 BAFTA Awards, 3 Primetime Emmy Awards, and over 30 Motion Picture Sound Editor Awards. He also received a Science Technology award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1994 for Audio Track’s Advanced Data Encoding (ADE) System. In 2021 he won an Emmy Award for his sound design in Netflix’s original series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’.
GenArts, Inc. was a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based developer of visual effects software for the film, broadcast, and advertising industries. Genarts special effects software was used in the production of many movies, commercials, television shows, newscasts, and music videos. GenArts software and plugins integrated visual effects such as glows, lightning, fire, and fluids into post-production video editing software from companies like Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, and The Foundry.
A sound follower, also referred to as separate magnetic, sepmag, magnetic film recorder, or mag dubber, is a device for the recording and playback of film sound that is recorded on magnetic film. This device is locked or synchronized with the motion picture film containing the picture. It operates like an analog reel-to-reel audio tape recording, but using film, not magnetic tape. The unit can be switched from manual control to sync control, where it will follow the film with picture.
Vitaphone Varieties is a series title used for all of Warner Bros.', earliest short film "talkies" of the 1920s, initially made using the Vitaphone sound on disc process before a switch to the sound-on-film format early in the 1930s. These were the first major film studio-backed sound films, initially showcased with the 1926 synchronized scored features Don Juan and The Better 'Ole. Although independent producers like Lee de Forest's Phonofilm were successfully making sound film shorts as early as 1922, they were very limited in their distribution and their audio was generally not as loud and clear in theaters as Vitaphone's. The success of the early Vitaphone shorts, initially filmed only in New York, helped launch the sound revolution in Hollywood.
