Curated category
Film and video terminology
- StoryboardIn the early 1930s, Walt Disney Productions developed the storyboard process as it is known today. Before this moment, most filmmakers shot their films like…
- B movieThe B movie has two lives, and they contradict each other. The first life: a cheap filler film, stapled to the bottom of a double bill, ignored by critics…
- Box-office bombThe phrase box-office bomb once meant a massive hit. In the early days of cinema, a film that exploded at the box office earned this label.
- Independent filmIndependent film carries a word that sounds simple enough: independent. But in 1908, when the Motion Picture Patents Company locked up every major patent…
- CartoonThe cartoon began its life not in a newspaper or a children's Saturday morning lineup, but in Renaissance Italy, as a large, careful drawing on heavy paper…
- Key frameKey frames are the hidden architecture of almost every moving image you have ever watched. In animation, in film, in the video on your phone, two or three…
- Short filmShort films have existed as long as cinema itself, yet most people have never intentionally sat down to watch one. The very first films shown publicly in…
- Live actionLive action is the form of cinematography that uses real photography rather than animation, and for most of film history it was simply how movies were made.
- Blockbuster (entertainment)Blockbuster is a word that began not in Hollywood but in the skies over wartime Europe. In the early 1940s, American newspapers were already using the term…
- Direct-to-videoDirect-to-video names a film distribution method so familiar today that it barely registers as a choice. A movie skips theaters entirely and lands directly…
- Film frameA film frame is a single still image, one of the many that make up a complete moving picture. At 24 frames per second, a two-hour film contains more than…