The Earliest Films

All of these earlier films are similar in that they're made in black and white, they contain no sound, and they generally last for less than a minute. They were all made by Edison and his company, and I presume he used his early invention of the Kinetograph to film them. Each short film is rather grainy, and the footage consists of one uninterrupted shot that has little to none camera movement. I think early filmmakers shot in this style because the concept of the motion picture was so new that just capturing people in motion was enough to entertain an audience. When comparing these early films to modern movies, they are so different because none of the films had camera or editing techniques that are so common in cinema today, like close-up framing or combining shots to tell a story.