History, an Overview

by Glenn C. Koenig

How has the place of media in our culture influenced us?

Go back in time, for a moment, before the moving picture came into common use. What we call movies today were preceded by live productions on stage.

Stage productions engage in what we call a 'suspension of disbelief.' That is, while watching a play or musical, in order to enjoy yourself, you concentrate on the story being told rather than on the fact that you are sitting in a room in a building. You 'forget,' on purpose, that essentially you looking at people who are pretending to be other people, doing so within surroundings that are fake, intended to look like somewhere else (scenery and props).

When movies were developed and came into common use, more or less between 1880 and 1920, naturally they were often used to present plays, now referred to as 'screen plays.' A whole new set of techniques could be used to tell the story, including taking the camera to different locales, recording action on film in a different order from that of the story line, focusing the viewer's attention on a small portion of the scene by controlling the camera's position and lens setting, and so on.

But what remained the same is the viewer's suspension of disbelief. While watching a movie, you're still sitting in a room (or perhaps someplace else, now with portable movie playback devices) 'forgetting' that 'it's only a movie' in order to enjoy believing in the story.
So, just as in a stage production, everything that takes place 'behind the scenes' is carefully hidden from view, for to expose it would interrupt your enjoyment of the story. It would 'bring you back' so to speak, from the 'dream' that what you're watching is real.

As it turns out, documentary film production, newsreels (which stemmed from documentary work), and eventually newscasts on TV, all have borrowed, to an extent, this 'behind the scenes' mentality. The result is that the 'means of production' are typically hidden from viewers, from 'Gone With the Wind' to 'This Old House.'

Finally, during the 1970s and 1980s, television news crews began to include brief shots of other television news crews, on the scene of a press conference, for instance. One reason for this was to give the audience an idea of the 'environment' in which the 'news-making person' was speaking (i.e. they were 'facing the cameras'). We also began to see boom microphones in the shot, arms holding out audio recorders and microphones, lecterns with multiple microphones mounted on them, etc.

At around the same time, the 'making of the movie' documentary has come into vogue, as an adjunct to a major motion picture. Here, we see directors being interviewed, actors discussing their roles 'off camera' (and obviously 'on a different camera'), and actual movie scenes being rehearsed or shot. These are now often included on DVD releases as 'extras.' So, we get to see a shot of the 'big camera' which is being used to make 'the movie,' from the point of view of the 'little documentary camera' being used to make the 'movie about the movie.'

But by and large, most people have grown up knowing little to nothing about what it actually takes to produce moving image works because they have never been exposed to it, have never tried it, never practiced it, never even taken a class in school about it. Because we have spent many hours of our lives actively trying to 'forget about' cameras, microphones, mixing consoles, editing systems, and the like, we have ended up with very little knowledge of these things when it's time for one of us to produce something ourselves, using similar tools.

Today, you can graduate from College and still not even know how to hold a microphone properly. People are spending hours today in courses on the use of presentation computer software (aka "PowerPoint") and yet their knowledge of audio and video technology, both for direct presentation or recording, remains terribly lacking.

So, I end up with the results of all this when someone calls me on the phone and asks me to 'tape' something that makes little or no sense. They ask questions that later they themselves are embarrassed to admit they asked. I end up trying to compensate, over the phone in 45 minutes, for a life long lack of knowledge and experience in this area.

This is one reason I now make myself available, on a freelance basis, to educate people of all ages and from all walks of life in a basic familiarization with media theory for the real world and some of the technology available now to make use of it.

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