You love to watch them - from sheer silly escapist popcorn fun to deep thought-provoking historical drams. But how much do you really know about the stories behind the films? Let's have a look...* Thomas Edison's company invented the Kinetograph in 1891, the first real motion picture camera. Strangely, though, they never actually got around to inventing a projector for actually playing the recorded images back.
* Their solution? They just bought the manufacturing rights to a projector called the Vitascope – and included a condition that Edison be credited as the inventor. Sneaky stuff.
* Many familiar movie sounds are actually audio illusions. The sound of crunching snow is actually ice layered with cornstarch. The sounds of birds flapping their wings in flgiht is made by leather gloves flapping. And the sound of a murmuring crowd is just several people saying “walla, walla, walla”.
* An IMAX projector weighs as much as a male hippo, costs $5million, and has a bulb so bright that, if pointed upward, it could be seen by astronauts on the International Space Station.
* Time reversal is a standard film trick. For example, when Moses parts the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, the moviemakers filmed water pouring into a tank and then ran the footage backward.
Source: Discover Magazine
