MOMI Visit: Reflection

Visiting the Museum of the Moving Image helped me better understand how intricate film production is. The extremely long list of jobs people perform on and off the set made the complexity of creating an award winning moving image clear to me.

One of the first demo’s I saw was a clip of the film: The Great Train Robbery. Not only was this film shot on various locations, but it was edited in post – and was the first to do so. Additionally, this film is of great importance because it featured a close up, which was something people have never seen before. Once the audience first saw a close up of a man shooting a gun towards the camera, they actually got frightened and thought they were getting shot at.

Nowadays, close ups are used to better show emotion on a character’s face. Without them, all shot would be all the same – long shots portraying the characters and the setting, but lacking a deeper connection between the characters that make up the scene. Furthermore, the addition of different locations helped include a larger setting. This not only makes the film more interesting, but creates depth and space in the motion picture. Editing serves to piece all the bits together. Without it, the story would be lost and the audience would be left confused.

Learning that The Great Train Robbery was the first to feature these crucial tools was very interesting to me. Of course, in today’s age, when we watch our favorite films or television series we don’t necessarily react to close ups the way the audience of The Great Train Robbery had. We don’t even mind them or realize them because of the film’s seamless editing. But without these features, films would be less three dimensional and dull even if those phenomena had not been introduced in The Great Train Robbery.