In the early 1900s, most motion picture patents were held by Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, and filmmakers were often sued to stop their productions. To escape this, independent filmmakers fled to Hollywood. The distance from the Edison Trust made it easier to work on their films without the tight control and patent enforcement. The reliable sunshine and temperature also made Hollywood a more suitable place to make films year-round.

In the late 19th century, Auguste Lumière and his brother, Louis Lumière, created what is considered to be the first motion picture – the film La Sortie Des Ouvriers De L’Usine Lumière (1895), which is also known as “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”.

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Phantom rides were an early genre of film, popular towards the end of the 19th century. It involved a camera being fixed to the front or the back of a moving vehicle, to show the progress of the vehicle, and give the audience the sensation of travel, as well as taking in some exotic or picturesque scenery.

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The Sick Kitten (1903) is a short silent film directed by George Albert Smith, starring two young children tending to a sick kitten. This ground-breaking British film was the first to use a close-up shot in history.

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Life Of An American Fireman (1903), is a short, silent film made by Edwin S. Porter. As one of the earliest American narrative films, it depicts the rescue of a woman and child from a burning building. The revolutionary film was the first to use ‘continuity editing’, by cutting between locations to follow the story.

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Florence Lawrence is often referred to as the ‘first film star’ in Hollywood, whose name was used to promote her films. Before her, actors and actresses worked anonymously, out of fear that stage managers would refuse to hire them if they were found to be working in films and because movie executives didn’t want their players to become well known and start demanding higher salaries.

During the ‘Golden Age’ of cinema, there were four cinemas with one screen each in Jersey. But now, due to multiplex cinema chains, there is only one cinema, ‘Cineworld’, which has ten screens. The number of cinemas declined due to the invention of televisions, since audiences could now watch films from the comfort of their own home.

Roger Shepard is an American cognitive scientist and author of the ‘Universal Law Of Generalization’ (1987). The auditory illusion, Shepard tones, are named after him. He began his research on auditory illusions during his years at Bell Labs, where his colleague Max Mathews was experimenting with computerised music synthesis. Musicians and sound-effect designers use Shepard tones to create special effects.

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Shepard Tone – a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower.

Cut – The most common editing technique where two pieces of film are spliced together so that the film ‘cuts’ from one image to another.

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Fade – Can begin in darkness and gradually assume full brightness or the image may gradually get darker. A fade often implies that time has passed or may signify the end of the scene.

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Dissolve – Similar to a fade in which one image is slowly replaced by another. It can create a connection between images.

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Wipe – A new image wipes off the previous image. A wipe is more fluid than a cut and quicker than a dissolve.

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Flashback – Cut or dissolve to action that happened in the past.

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Shot-Reverse-Shot – A shot of one subject, then another, then back to the first. It is often used for conversation or reaction shots.

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Cross Cutting – Cuts between actions that are happening simultaneously. This technique is also called parallel editing. It can create tension or suspense and can form a connection between scenes.

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Eye-Line Match – Cut to an object, then to a person. This shows what a person is looking at and can reveal a character’s thoughts.

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Graphic Match – Occurs when the shapes, colours and/or overall movement of two shots match in composition, either within a scene or across a transition between two scenes.

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Match On Action – Refers to film editing techniques where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot’s action.

Wes Anderson – an American director and screenwriter known for the distinctive visual aesthetic of his quirky comedies.

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Edgar Wright – an English director and screenwriter who collaborates with many of the same people he has worked with in the past (specifically Simon Pegg and Nick Frost). He is known for satirical genre films with a unique editing style of rapid, dramatic montages.

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Guillermo Del Toro – a Mexican director and screenwriter known for creating horror/fantasy films that have emotional and thematic complexity.

Auteur – a French word used to describe a film director who influences their films so much that they rank as their author. Auteur directors generally have a certain style from film-to-film and often perform other roles besides directing such as: writing, editing, and acting in their own films.

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Andrew Sarris, a film critic for The New York Times, set out a complete definition for auteurs according to three main criteria:

1. Technical competence: Auteurs have to be at the top of their craft in terms of technical filmmaking abilities and should always have a hand in multiple components of filmmaking.

2. Distinguishable personality: Auteurs are separated from other technically gifted directors with their unmistakable personality and style – you can see shared filming techniques and consistent themes being explored between an auteur’s films.

3. Interior meaning: Auteurs make films that have layers of meaning and have more to say about the human condition. They go beyond the pure entertainment films produced by large studios, to instead reveal the filmmaker’s unique perspectives and thoughts on life.