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The History of Short Film

Logically, short films started long before movies and other long forms of films. In the late 1800s, Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson worked on a machine that would show moving photographs. It was called a Kinetoscope and was ready to present in 1894. However, it was much different than the big motion pictures we know today. The Kinetoscope could only show one person at a time, and the person had to look through it like binoculars for only a few seconds.

On the other hand, in Europe, the Lumiere brothers worked on another way to show photographs on a projector that could show multiple viewers at once. Although unconfirmed, it was said that the project was so new to the audience that the audience got scared and thought the train shown on the projector was coming straight at them.

The rise of movies and short films was quick. In a few years, filmmakers found that they could make stories using cuts. This led to an abundance of genres, such as romance, action, and comedy. One of the biggest pushes in film history was how many minutes could be used in a film. It jumped from a few seconds to more than an hour.

Charlie Chaplin was one of the most famous actors in the 1910s and 1920s. His short films like Laughing Gas (1914) and The Champion (1915) were massive hits that made him very well known. When he switched to long feature films, he still did very well for himself as he knew his audience.