Prof. O Donnell

GeorgiDimitrov

JMC 363

Prof. O’Donnell

Spring 2017

Final paper

Finance

Nowadays everything is measured in money and could be bought with money. That is why it is not a surprise that the funding of the documentaries has always been a big debate. In the past finding finance for creating a movie was a huge problem.

The very first documentaries from the end of XIX century reveal the harsh history. In 1895 the Lumiere brothers created the first motion picture. Until then no one has ever made something like this. Because, back then, the cameras were something extraordinary and something never seen before they were really expensive and only small portion of people could afford them. The price of the equipment is the main reason why until the start of World War I only a few movies were produced yearly. The finance was coming from rich people who could afford buying the equipment and they those are the very first directors after all. Within the years the technology developed and the quality of the filming equipment drastically improved. This allowed many new companies to enter the production business and create their products. This on the other hand lowered the prices and made cameras way more affordable.

With the beginning of World War I many people were needed as operators to follow the actions and inform the rest of the world. After that, in the second quarter of the XX century many international filmmaking organizations were created such as British Film Institute, National Film Board of Canada and others. The purpose of these organizations was to stimulate and educate young people to direct and create new documentaries. These organizations used not only money from sponsors, but a big portion of their budget was subsided by the Government.

After the Second World War the interest in the documentaries has raised. The interviews in these movies created a huge interest in the viewers worldwide, because they were with veterans who revealed their experience, with civilian survivors expressing their emotions and with the world leaders Churchill, Chamberlain, Roosevelt and Stalin. One of the most influential directors of that period areRobert J. Flattery, John Grierson, Richard LaCock, Luis Buñuel and others. With all their hard work their raised the popularity of the documentary cinema on a world level and money from cinematic projections were earned.

The decade between 1960’s and 1970’s has been a really dynamic and controversial. The colored cinema was something normal and the TV’s became part of every household. The movie production was in upsurge and new filmmaking institutions such as American Film Institute, International Documentary Association, and Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries International were formed and the financing in the filmmaking sector increased.

As a conclusion we must admit one thing – the progress of documentary filmmaking is tremendous and one of the main reasons for that is the good financing. When we keep in mind the fact, that one century ago you should be very rich persona to have camera and only a few movies were created yearly, and now that almost everyone can afford to have his own equipment and to shoot a homemade movie the progress is just amazing. And if back then the directors should subsided themselves to create a film, now there are numerous Documentary Filmmaking Organizations with funds such as American Documentary Film Festival, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, BRITDOC and etc. which provide great amount of money for successful directors.

Works Cited:

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2: PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 02 Feb. 2016.Web. 04 May 2017.

3: Encyclopædia Britannica. Robert Sklar and David A. Cook."History of the motion picture".Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. 22 Mar. 2010. May 04, 2017

Emergent Technologies

We live in developing times. Everything today is so dynamic it is not a surprise that today’s super cool gadget is tomorrow’s old fashion one. The technology is developing with such a high speed that we hardly even pay attention. The technological jump, which the human civilization made for the past 3 decades, is equivalent to the one done for the past 2 millenniums before that. If before that reaching someone who is elsewhere on Earth was by the telephone, now we have Internet access everywhere and after pushing 1 button and three seconds later we are connected with him. Thus it is not a surprise that if we had the most recent technology back then, many things would be different.

The attacks on the World Trade Center Towers in 9-11-01 was something that shocked the whole world and marked a black point in history. It was filmed by many people who became witnesses of this catastrophe. Sadly, the technology back then wasn’t developed as it is now, and there were no smartphone with 20 megapixels cameras, Go pro’s with great resolution and etc. The only available cameras at that time were the single photo cameras predicted for tourism and their resolution was really poor. Because of the lack of clear evidences proving whether the attacks were truly a terrorist deed, there are still speculations today.

If something like this is about to happen in other big city, heavily populated, it would be way harder, almost impossible. The reason behind this are many, but the most important ones are the following: first of all, the incident of 9/11 changed the whole global policy and forced the global leaders in the face of United States, Great Britain, Russia and etc. to invest a tremendous sum of money into technology to prevent further attacks. This investment resulted in development of the GPS systems on Earth to such extend that every electronic device could be tracked down at any single moment. Also the inspections of the border police are so tight, you can’t even transport bottles freely. Thus it is impossible to “capture” a plane and crush it down somewhere.

Second main reason is the World Wide Web, or in other words the Internet. Today everybody is connected with the Internet and everybody can upload information online. The Social Medias are so popular they have more than 4 billion active users. If something extraordinary happens, the news would spread in just a few minutes and after that the whole world would know. The smartphones today have such a great cameras that they would be able to record everything in detail, so there would be no speculations about what had happened. There would be thousands of “Live Videos” from the hot point streaming what is going on.

As a conclusion I would say that technology has a huge impact on us. It is a two edged knife because it helps the human race to prevent catastrophes and incidents, but it also has enslaved the single person. We are so into the smartphones and the other social media tools that the human contact and eye to eye communication is almost forgotten. We should be very careful how and for what we use technology, because from our alley it could turn into our biggest enemy.

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