Towards a qualified professional............THE STAGE MANAGER

Production manager (theatre)

The stage Manager

Theatrical production management is a sub-division of stagecraft. The production management team (consisting of a production manager and any number of assistants) is responsible for realizing the visions of the producer and the director or choreographer within constraints of technical possibility. This involves coordinating the operations of various production sub-disciplines (scenic, wardrobe, lighting, sound, projection, automation, video, pyrotechnics, stage management, etc.) of the presentation. 

           In addition to management and financial skills, a production manager must have detailed knowledge of all production disciplines including a thorough understanding of the interaction of these disciplines during the production process. This may involve dealing with matters ranging from the procurement of staff, materials and services, to freight, customs coordination, telecommunications, labor relations, logistics, information technology, government liaison, venue booking, scheduling, operations management, mending delay problems and workplace safety.

Towards a qualified professional........ACTING

Acting

ACTING SCENE

A CHARACTER

Acting is the work of an actor or actress, which is a person in theatre, television, film, or any other storytelling medium who tells the story by portraying a character and, usually, speaking or singing the written text or play.
Most early sources in the West that examine the art of acting (Greek: ὑπόκρισις, hypokrisis) discuss it as part of rhetoric.
Definition and history

One of the first actors is believed to be an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria. An apocryphal story says that Thespis stepped out of the dithyrambic chorus and spoke to them as a separate character. Before Thespis, the chorus narrated (for example, "Dionysus did this, Dionysus said that"). When Thespis stepped out from the chorus (year 12 BC), he spoke as if he was the character (for example, "I am Dionysus. I did this"). From Thespis' name derives the word thespian.
Acting requires a wide range of skills, including vocal projection, clarity of speech, physical expressivity, emotional facility, a well-developed imagination, and the ability to interpret drama. Acting also often demands an ability to employ dialects, accents and body language, improvisation, observation and emulation, mime, and stage combat. Many actors train at length in special programs or colleges to develop these skills, and today the vast majority of professional actors have undergone extensive training. Even though one actor may have years of training, they always strive for more lessons; the cinematic and theatrical world is always changing and because of this, the actor must stay as up to date as possible. Actors and actresses will often have many instructors and teachers for a full range of training involving, but not limited to, singing, scene-work, monologue techniques, audition techniques, and partner work.
Professional actors
 Actor
A professional actor is someone who gets paid for acting. Not all people working as actors in film, television or theatre are professionally trained. For example, John Okafor did not have any training before taking up acting.
 

 

Training/Acting Systems

 Drama school
Conservatories typically offer two- to four-year training on all aspects of acting. Universities will offer three- to four-year programs, where a student is often able to choose to focus on drama, while still learning about other aspects of theatre. Schools will vary in their approach, but in North America the most popular method taught derives from the "system" of Constantin Stanislavski, which was developed and popularised in America by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and others. The ambiguously termed method acting came about through iterations of Stanislavski's system by Strasberg. Part of this style of training includes actors memorizing lines to be able to work off-book, a term that means being able to work without a script. Other approaches may include a more physical approach, following the teachings of Jerzy Grotowski and others, or may be based on the training developed by other theatre practitioners including Sanford Meisner. Other classes may include mask work, improvisation, and acting for the camera. Regardless of a school's approach, students should expect intensive training in textual interpretation, voice and movement. Although there are some teachers who will encourage the improvisation as technique in order to free the actor of limitations in rehearsal. Harold Guskin's approach or "taking it off the page" as he calls it is steeped in this philosophy. Applications to drama programs and conservatories are through auditions in the United States. Anybody over the age of 18 can usually apply to drama school.
Training may also start at a very young age. Acting classes and professional schools targeted at the under-18 crowd are offered in many locations. These classes introduce young actors to different aspects of acting and theatre, including scene study.
Amateur actors

Reading rehearsal

Amateur actor

Amateur actors are actors who do not require payment for performances. Although there are some paid professional actors who do amateur work for multiple reasons. Some may be for educational purposes or even charity events.
Improvisation

Improvisation was created by Viola Spolin after working with Neva Boyd at a Hull House in Chicago, Illinois. She was Boyds student from 1924 to 1927. Improv was created on the realization that adults do not play games. Spolin felt that playing games were good exercises and can benefit in future acting. With improv, people can find true expressive freedom since they don't ever know how the situation is going to turn out. When one continues to operate with an open mind they will have a real sense of spontaneity rather than pre-planning a response. You perform a character of your own making, and with that character and the others working with you, you create a new and spontaneous piece. Improv is also used to cover up if an actor or actress makes a mistake.
Semiotics of Acting

Simiotics of acting

Semiotics of Acting is the actor’s ability to transform into a convincing character in front of the audience. The audience no longer sees the actor as a performer, but sees a character as a completely different being. Once this shift occurs, the actor becomes a semiotic device communicating a set of signs to the audience. A character’s signification can represent a multitude of different meanings to the audience. This may or may not be intended by the actor, who has limited control over how the audience will “read” the character. For example, if the actor is playing a character diagnosed with cancer, the audience may not just see a cancer patient, but may instead see a character similar to other cancer victims or survivors they have known. The actor’s performance, like any text, must be read by the audience.
However, the actor is judged by giving a convincing and believable performance. The actor’s performance is mediated by particular semiotic signs including facial expression, emotion, and vocabulary. All these examples are known as performance signs. Performance signs are simple codes that the audience must decode during the actor's performance. It is the actor’s job to deliver those codes effectively to the audience. If the audience does not find the character believable, then the actor has failed in their performance. Like other forms of communication, non-verbal or visual clues are tremendously important. Acting teacher Sanford Meisner once said, “An ounce of emotion is worth a pound of words.” Great actors master performance signs in order to win over an audience.
Acting involves two forms of communication: intrascenic (communication between characters) and extrascenic (communication between the characters and the audience). Both intrascenic and extrascenic communication must work in order for the audience to read the semiotic signs of the actor’s performance. The characters must have intrascenic skills – “good chemistry” – in a scene in order for the audience to understand the performance.
The actor represents the text of the script as performance signs. Actors bring the text to life through performance and through the personal qualities they may contribute to the narrative of script. Actors represent the ideas of the text, but also create a new visually dimensioned reality through their performance.
Becoming an actor representing semiotic signs can be a very difficult process. One must understand the performance signs, the audience, and human emotion.

Towards a qualified professional.... Cinematography..

Cinematography

film strip

The cinematographer

Cinematography (from Greek: κίνημα, kinema "movements" and γράφειν, graphein "to record") is the science or art of motion picture photography by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as film stock.
Typically, a lens is used to repeatedly focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into real images on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure creating multiple images. With an electronic image sensor, this produces an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a video file for subsequent display or processing. The result with photographic emulsion is series of invisible latent images on the film stock, which are later chemically "developed" into a visible image. The images on the film stock are played back at a rapid speed and projected on a screen creating the illusion of a movie.
Cinematography is employed in many fields of science and business as well as its more direct uses for recreational purposes and mass communication.
Etymology
The word "cinematography" was created from the Greek roots κίνημα (kinema) i.e. "motion" and γραφή (graphé) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning drawing motion.

History
Precursors
In the 1830s, moving images were produced on revolving drums and disks, with independent invention by Simon von Stampfer (stroboscope) in Austria, Joseph Plateau (phenakistoscope) in Belgium, and William Horner (zoetrope) in Britain.
William Lincoln patented a device that showed animated pictures called the “wheel of life” or “zoopraxiscope”. In it, moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit.
On June 19, 1873, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed a horse named "Sallie Gardner" in fast motion using a series of 24 stereoscopic cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each camera shutter was controlled by a trip wire triggered by the horse's hooves. They were 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by the horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second. Although it was never played back at speed to create motion, this was the first step towards motion pictures.
Nine years later, in 1882, French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey invented a chronophotographic gun, which was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, recording all the frames of the same picture.
The late nineteenth to the early twentieth century brought rise to the use of film not only for entertainment purposes, but for scientific exploration as well. French biologist and filmmaker Jean Painleve lobbied heavily for the use of film in the scientific field, as the new medium was more efficient in capturing and documenting the behavior, movement, and environment of microorganisms, cells, and bacteria, than the naked eye. The introduction of film into scientific fields allowed for not only the viewing "new images and objects, such as cells and natural objects, but also the viewing of them in real time",whereas prior to the invention of moving pictures, scientists and doctors alike had to rely on hand drawn sketches of human anatomy and its microorganisms.

Film cinematography

Film stock
The experimental film Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed by Louis Le Prince on October 14, 1888 in Roundhay, Leeds, England, is the earliest surviving motion picture. This movie was shot on paper film.
W K. L. Dickson, working under the direction of Thomas Alva Edison, was the first to design a successful apparatus, the Kinetograph, patented in 1891. This camera took a series of instantaneous photographs on standard Eastman Kodak photographic emulsion coated onto a transparent celluloid strip 35 mm wide. The results of this work were first shown in public in 1893, using the viewing apparatus also designed by Dickson, the Kinetoscope. Contained within a large box, only one person at a time looking into it through a peephole could view the movie.

A film strip

Film strip

In the following year, Charles Francis Jenkins and his projector, the Phantoscope, made a successful audience viewing while Louis and Auguste Lumière perfected the Cinématographe, an apparatus that took, printed, and projected film, in Paris in December 1895. The Lumière brothers were the first to present projected, moving, photographic, pictures to a paying audience of more than one person.
In 1896, movie theaters were open in: France (Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nice, Marseille); Italy (Rome, Milan, Naples, Genoa, Venice, Bologna, Forlì); Belgium (Brussels); and Great Britain (London).
In 1896, Edison showed his improved Vitascope projector, the first commercially successful projector in the U.S.
Cooper Hewitt invented mercury lamps which made it practical to shoot films indoors without sunlight in 1905.
The first animated cartoon was produced in 1906.
Credits began to appear at the beginning of motion pictures in 1911.
The Bell and Howell 2709 movie camera invented in 1915 allowed directors to make close-ups without physically moving the camera.
By the late 1920s most of the movies produced were sound films.
Wide screen formats were first experimented with in the 1950s.
By the 1970s, most movies were color films. IMAX and other 70mm formats gained popularity. Wide distribution of films became commonplace, setting the ground for "blockbusters."
Film cinematography dominated the motion picture industry from its inception until the 2010s, when digital cinematography became dominant. Film cinematography is still used by some directors, especially in specific applications or out of fondness of the format.

Black and white
From its birth in the 1880s, movies were predominantly monochrome. Contrary to popular belief, monochrome doesn't always mean black and white; it means a movie shot in two-tone color. Since the cost of color films was substantially higher, most movies were produced in monochrome until the 1970s. Almost all short silent films from the 1880s to the 1910s, almost all feature-length silent films from the 1910s to the 1920s, and most feature-length sound films from the 1920s to the 1970s, were produced in monochrome.
In the 1970s, cinema mostly switched over to color films as they became more economical and viable. Monochrome cinematography is still used by cinematographers for artistic reasons or for specific applications.

Color
Color motion picture film
After the advent of motion pictures, a tremendous amount of energy was invested in the production of photography in natural color. The invention of the talking picture further increased the demand for the use of color photography. However, in comparison to other technological advances of the time, the arrival of color photography was a relatively slow process.
Early movies were not actually color movies, since they were shot monochrome and hand-colored or machine-colored afterwards. (Such movies are referred to as colored and not color.) The earliest such example is the hand-tinted Annabelle Serpentine Dance in 1895 by Edison Manufacturing Company. Machine-based tinting later became popular. Tinting continued until the advent of natural color cinematography in the 1910s. Many black and white movies have been colorized recently using digital tinting.
In 1902, Edward Raymond Turner produced the first films with a natural color process rather than using colorization techniques.In 1908, kinemacolor was introduced. In the same year, the short film A Visit to the Seaside became the first natural color movie to be publicly presented.
In 1917 technicolor was introduced. Kodachrome was introduced in 1935. Eastmancolor was introduced in 1950 and became color standard for rest of the century.
In the 2010s, color films were largely superseded by color digital cinematography.

Digital cinematography
In digital cinematography, the movie is shot on digital medium such as flash storage, as well as distributed through a digital medium such as a hard drive.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Sony began marketing the concept of "electronic cinematography," utilizing its analog Sony HDVS professional video cameras. The effort met with very little success. However, this led to one of the earliest digitally shot feature movies, Julia and Julia, being produced in 1987.[7] In 1998, with the introduction of HDCAM recorders and 1920 × 1080 pixel digital professional video cameras based on CCD technology, the idea, now re-branded as "digital cinematography," began to gain traction in the market.
Shot and released in 1998, The Last Broadcast is believed by some to be the first feature-length video shot and edited entirely on consumer-level digital equipment. In May 1999 George Lucas challenged the supremacy of the movie-making medium of film for the first time by including footage filmed with high-definition digital cameras in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In late 2013, Paramount became the first major studio to distribute movies to theaters in digital format, eliminating 35mm film entirely.
As digital technology improved, movie studios began increasingly shifting towards digital cinematography. Since the 2010s, digital cinematography has become the dominant form of cinematography after largely superseding film cinematography.

Aspects
Numerous aspects contribute to the art of cinematography, including:
Cinema technique
The first film cameras were fastened directly to the head of a tripod or other support, with only the crudest kind of leveling devices provided, in the manner of the still-camera tripod heads of the period. The earliest film cameras were thus effectively fixed during the shot, and hence the first camera movements were the result of mounting a camera on a moving vehicle. The first known of these was a film shot by a Lumière cameraman from the back platform of a train leaving Jerusalem in 1896, and by 1898 there were a number of films shot from moving trains. Although listed under the general heading of "panoramas" in the sales catalogues of the time, those films shot straight forward from in front of a railway engine were usually specifically referred to as "phantom rides".
In 1897, Robert W. Paul had the first real rotating camera head made to put on a tripod, so that he could follow the passing processions of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in one uninterrupted shot. This device had the camera mounted on a vertical axis that could be rotated by a worm gear driven by turning a crank handle, and Paul put it on general sale the next year. Shots taken using such a "panning" head were also referred to as "panoramas" in the film catalogues of the first decade of the cinema.
The standard pattern for early film studios was provided by the studio which Georges Méliès had built in 1897. This had a glass roof and three glass walls constructed after the model of large studios for still photography, and it was fitted with thin cotton cloths that could be stretched below the roof to diffuse the direct ray of the sun on sunny days. The soft overall light without real shadows that this arrangement produced, and which also exists naturally on lightly overcast days, was to become the basis for film lighting in film studios for the next decade.

Image sensor and film stock
Cinematography can begin with digital image sensor or rolls of film. Advancements in film emulsion and grain structure provided a wide range of available film stocks. The selection of a film stock is one of the first decisions made in preparing a typical film production.
Aside from the film gauge selection — 8 mm (amateur), 16 mm (semi-professional), 35 mm (professional) and 65 mm (epic photography, rarely used except in special event venues) — the cinematographer has a selection of stocks in reversal (which, when developed, create a positive image) and negative formats along with a wide range of film speeds (varying sensitivity to light) from ISO 50 (slow, least sensitive to light) to 800 (very fast, extremely sensitive to light) and differing response to color (low saturation, high saturation) and contrast (varying levels between pure black (no exposure) and pure white (complete overexposure). Advancements and adjustments to nearly all gauges of film create the "super" formats wherein the area of the film used to capture a single frame of an image is expanded, although the physical gauge of the film remains the same. Super 8 mm, Super 16 mm and Super 35 mm all utilize more of the overall film area for the image than their "regular" non-super counterparts. The larger the film gauge, the higher the overall image resolution clarity and technical quality. The techniques used by the film laboratory to process the film stock can also offer a considerable variance in the image produced. By controlling the temperature and varying the duration in which the film is soaked in the development chemicals, and by skipping certain chemical processes (or partially skipping all of them), cinematographers can achieve very different looks from a single film stock in the laboratory. Some techniques that can be used are push processing, bleach bypass and cross processing.
Most of modern cinema uses digital cinematography and has no film stocks[but the cameras themselves can be adjusted in ways that go far beyond the abilities of one particular film stock. They can provide varying degrees of color sensitivity, image contrast, light sensitivity and so on. One camera can achieve all the various looks of different emulsions. Digital image adjustments such as ISO and contrast are executed by estimating the same adjustments that would take place if actual film were in use, and are thus vulnerable to the camera's sensor designers perceptions of various film stocks and image adjustment parameters.

Filters

Filters, such as diffusion filters or color-effect filters, are also widely used to enhance mood or dramatic effects. Most photographic filters are made up of two pieces of optical glass glued together with some form of image or light manipulation material between the glass. In the case of color filters, there is often a translucent color medium pressed between two planes of optical glass. Color filters work by blocking out certain color wavelengths of light from reaching the film. With color film, this works very intuitively wherein a blue filter will cut down on the passage of red, orange and yellow light and create a blue tint on the film. In black-and-white photography, color filters are used somewhat counter intuitively; for instance a yellow filter, which cuts down on blue wavelengths of light, can be used to darken a daylight sky (by eliminating blue light from hitting the film, thus greatly underexposing the mostly blue sky), while not biasing most human flesh tone. Certain cinematographers, such as Christopher Doyle, are well known for their innovative use of filters. Filters can be used in front of the lens or, in some cases, behind the lens for different effects.

Lens

Lenses can be attached to the camera to give a certain look, feel, or effect by focus, color, etc.
As does the human eye, the camera creates perspective and spatial relations with the rest of the world. However, unlike one's eye, a cinematographer can select different lenses for different purposes. Variation in focal length is one of the chief benefits. The focal length of the lens determines the angle of view and, therefore, the field of view. Cinematographers can choose from a range of wide-angle lenses, "normal" lenses and long focus lenses, as well as macro lenses and other special effect lens systems such as borescope lenses. Wide-angle lenses have short focal lengths and make spatial distances more obvious. A person in the distance is shown as much smaller while someone in the front will loom large. On the other hand, long focus lenses reduce such exaggerations, depicting far-off objects as seemingly close together and flattening perspective. The differences between the perspective rendering is actually not due to the focal length by itself, but by the distance between the subjects and the camera. Therefore, the use of different focal lengths in combination with different camera to subject distances creates these different rendering. Changing the focal length only while keeping the same camera position doesn't affect perspective but the camera angle of view only.
A zoom lens allows a camera operator to change their focal length within a shot or quickly between setups for shots. As prime lenses offer greater optical quality and are "faster" (larger aperture openings, usable in less light) than zoom lenses, they are often employed in professional cinematography over zoom lenses. Certain scenes or even types of filmmaking, however, may require the use of zooms for speed or ease of use, as well as shots involving a zoom move.
As in other photography, the control of the exposed image is done in the lens with the control of the diaphragm aperture. For proper selection, the cinematographer needs that all lenses be engraved with T-Stop, not f-stop, so that the eventual light loss due to the glass doesn't affect the exposure control when setting it using the usual meters. The choice of the aperture also affects image quality (aberrations) and depth of field.
Depth of field and focus
Focal length and diaphragm aperture affect the depth of field of a scene — that is, how much the background, mid-ground and foreground will be rendered in "acceptable focus" (only one exact plane of the image is in precise focus) on the film or video target. Depth of field (not to be confused with depth of focus) is determined by the aperture size and the focal distance. A large or deep depth of field is generated with a very small iris aperture and focusing on a point in the distance, whereas a shallow depth of field will be achieved with a large (open) iris aperture and focusing closer to the lens. Depth of field is also governed by the format size. If one considers the field of view and angle of view, the smaller the image is, the shorter the focal length should be, as to keep the same field of view. Then, the smaller the image is, the more depth of field is obtained, for the same field of view. Therefore, 70mm has less depth of field than 35mm for a given field of view, 16mm more than 35mm, and video cameras even more depth of field than 16mm. As videographers try to emulate the look of 35 mm film with digital cameras, this is one issue of frustration - excessive depth of field with digital cameras and using additional optical devices to reduce that depth of field.
In Citizen Kane (1941), cinematographer Gregg Toland and director Orson Welles used tighter apertures to create every detail of the foreground and background of the sets in sharp focus. This practice is known as deep focus. Deep focus became a popular cinematographic device from the 1940s onwards in Hollywood. Today, the trend is for more shallow focus.
To change the plane of focus from one object or character to another within a shot is commonly known as a rack focus.

Aspect ratio and framing
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. This can be expressed either as a ratio of 2 integers, such as 4:3, or in a decimal format, such as 1.33:1 or simply 1.33.
Different ratios provide different aesthetic effects. Standards for aspect ratio have varied significantly over time.
During the silent era, aspect ratios varied widely, from square 1:1, all the way up to the extreme widescreen 4:1 Polyvision. However, from the 1910s, silent motion pictures generally settled on the ratio of 4:3 (1.33). The introduction of sound-on-film briefly narrowed the aspect ratio, to allow room for a sound stripe. In 1932 a new standard was introduced, the Academy ratio of 1.37, by means of thickening the frame line.
For years, mainstream cinematographers were limited to using the Academy ratio, but in the 1950s, thanks to the popularity of Cinerama, widescreen ratios were introduced in an effort to pull audiences back into the theater and away from their home television sets. These new widescreen formats provided cinematographers a wider frame within which to compose their images.
Many different proprietary photographic systems were invented and utilized in the 1950s to create widescreen movies, but one dominated film: the anamorphic process, which optically squeezes the image to photograph twice the horizontal area to the same size vertical as standard "spherical" lenses. The first commonly used anamorphic format was CinemaScope, which used a 2.35 aspect ratio, although it was originally 2.55. CinemaScope was used from 1953 to 1967, but due to technical flaws in the design and its ownership by Fox, several third-party companies, led by Panavision's technical improvements in the 1950s, dominated the anamorphic cine lens market.Changes to SMPTE projection standards altered the projected ratio from 2.35 to 2.39 in 1970, although this did not change anything regarding the photographic anamorphic standards; all changes in respect to the aspect ratio of anamorphic 35 mm photography are specific to camera or projector gate sizes, not the optical system. After the "widescreen wars" of the 1950s, the motion-picture industry settled into 1.85 as a standard for theatrical projection in the United States and the United Kingdom. This is a cropped version of 1.37. Europe and Asia opted for 1.66 at first, although 1.85 has largely permeated these markets in recent decades. Certain "epic" or adventure movies utilized the anamorphic 2.39.
In the 1990s, with the advent of high-definition video, television engineers created the 1.78 (16:9) ratio as a mathematical compromise between the theatrical standard of 1.85 and television's 1.33, as it was not practical to produce a traditional CRT television tube with a width of 1.85. Until that point, nothing had ever been originated in 1.78. Today, this is a standard for high-definition video and for widescreen television.

Lighting
Light is necessary to create an image exposure on a frame of film or on a digital target (CCD, etc.). The art of lighting for cinematography goes far beyond basic exposure, however, into the essence of visual storytelling. Lighting contributes considerably to the emotional response an audience has watching a motion picture.

Camera movement
Cinematography can not only depict a moving subject but can use a camera, which represents the audience's viewpoint or perspective, that moves during the course of filming. This movement plays a considerable role in the emotional language of film images and the audience's emotional reaction to the action. Techniques range from the most basic movements of panning (horizontal shift in viewpoint from a fixed position; like turning your head side-to-side) and tilting (vertical shift in viewpoint from a fixed position; like tipping your head back to look at the sky or down to look at the ground) to dollying (placing the camera on a moving platform to move it closer or farther from the subject), tracking (placing the camera on a moving platform to move it to the left or right), craning (moving the camera in a vertical position; being able to lift it off the ground as well as swing it side-to-side from a fixed base position), and combinations of the above. Early cinematographers often faced problems that were not common to other graphic artists because of the element of motion.
Cameras have been mounted to nearly every imaginable form of transportation.
Most cameras can also be handheld, that is held in the hands of the camera operator who moves from one position to another while filming the action. Personal stabilizing platforms came into being in the late 1970s through the invention of Garrett Brown, which became known as the Steadicam. The Steadicam is a body harness and stabilization arm that connects to the camera, supporting the camera while isolating it from the operator's body movements. After the Steadicam patent expired in the early 1990s, many other companies began manufacturing their concept of the personal camera stabilizer.

Special effects
The first special effects in the cinema were created while the film was being shot. These came to be known as "in-camera" effects. Later, optical and digital effects were developed so that editors and visual effects artists could more tightly control the process by manipulating the film in post-production.
In 1896 movie The Execution of Mary Stuart. This showed a person dressed as the queen placing her head on the execution block in front of a small group of bystanders in Elizabethan dress. The executioner brings his axe down, and the queen's severed head drops onto the ground. This trick was worked by stopping the camera and replacing the actor with a dummy, then restarting the camera before the axe falls. The two pieces of film were then trimmed and cemented together so that the action appeared continuous when the film was shown.
This film was among those exported to Europe with the first Kinetoscope machines in 1895, and was seen by Georges Méliès, who was putting on magic shows in his Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris at the time. He took up filmmaking in 1896, and after making imitations of other films from Edison, Lumière, and Robert Paul, he made Escamotage d'un dame chez Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady). This film shows a woman being made to vanish by using the same stop motion technique as the earlier Edison film. After this, Georges Méliès made many single shot films using this trick over the next couple of years.
Double exposure
The other basic technique for trick cinematography involves double exposure of the film in the camera, which was first done by George Albert Smith in July 1898 in the UK. Smith's The Corsican Brothers (1898) was described in the catalogue of the Warwick Trading Company, which took up the distribution of Smith's films in 1900, thus:
"One of the twin brothers returns home from shooting in the Corsican mountains, and is visited by the ghost of the other twin. By extremely careful photography the ghost appears *quite transparent*. After indicating that he has been killed by a sword-thrust, and appealing for vengeance, he disappears. A 'vision' then appears showing the fatal duel in the snow. To the Corsican's amazement, the duel and death of his brother are vividly depicted in the vision, and overcome by his feelings, he falls to the floor just as his mother enters the room."
The ghost effect was done by draping the set in black velvet after the main action had been shot, and then re-exposing the negative with the actor playing the ghost going through the actions at the appropriate point. Likewise, the vision, which appeared within a circular vignette or matte, was similarly superimposed over a black area in the backdrop to the scene, rather than over a part of the set with detail in it, so that nothing appeared through the image, which seemed quite solid. Smith used this technique again in Santa Claus (1898).
Georges Méliès first used superimposition on a dark background in La Caverne maudite (The Cave of the Demons) made a couple of months later in 1898, and elaborated it with multiple superimpositions in the one shot in Un Homme de têtes (The Four Troublesome Heads). He created further variations in subsequent films.
Frame rate selection
Frame rate
Motion picture images are presented to an audience at a constant speed. In the theater it is 24 frames per second, in NTSC (US) Television it is 30 frames per second (29.97 to be exact), in PAL (Europe) television it is 25 frames per second. This speed of presentation does not vary.
However, by varying the speed at which the image is captured, various effects can be created knowing that the faster or slower recorded image will be played at a constant speed.
For instance, time-lapse photography is created by exposing an image at an extremely slow rate. If a cinematographer sets a camera to expose one frame every minute for four hours, and then that footage is projected at 24 frames per second, a four-hour event will take 10 seconds to present, and one can present the events of a whole day (24 hours) in just one minute.
The inverse of this, if an image is captured at speeds above that at which they will be presented, the effect is to greatly slow down (slow motion) the image. If a cinematographer shoots a person diving into a pool at 96 frames per second, and that image is played back at 24 frames per second, the presentation will take 4 times as long as the actual event. Extreme slow motion, capturing many thousands of frames per second can present things normally invisible to the human eye, such as bullets in flight and shockwaves travelling through media, a potentially powerful cinematographical technique.
In motion pictures the manipulation of time and space is a considerable contributing factor to the narrative storytelling tools. Film editing plays a much stronger role in this manipulation, but frame rate selection in the photography of the original action is also a contributing factor to altering time. For example, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times was shot at "silent speed" (18 fps) but projected at "sound speed" (24 fps), which makes the slapstick action appear even more frenetic.
Speed ramping, or simply "ramping", is a process whereby the capture frame rate of the camera changes over time. For example, if in the course of 10 seconds of capture, the capture frame rate is adjusted from 60 frames per second to 24 frames per second, when played back at the standard movie rate of 24 frames per second, a unique time-manipulation effect is achieved. For example, someone pushing a door open and walking out into the street would appear to start off in slow-motion, but in a few seconds later within the same shot the person would appear to walk in "realtime" (normal speed). The opposite speed-ramping is done in The Matrix when Neo re-enters the Matrix for the first time to see the Oracle. As he comes out of the warehouse "load-point", the camera zooms in to Neo at normal speed but as it gets closer to Neo's face, time seems to slow down, foreshadowing the manipulation of time itself within the Matrix later in the movie.
Other special techniques
G.A. Smith initiated the technique of reverse motion and also improved the quality of self-motivating images. This he did by repeating the action a second time, while filming it with an inverted camera, and then joining the tail of the second negative to that of the first. The first films using this were Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy and The Awkward Sign Painter, the latter which showed a sign painter lettering a sign, and then the painting on the sign vanishing under the painter's brush. The earliest surviving example of this technique is Smith's The House That Jack Built, made before September 1901. Here, a small boy is shown knocking down a castle just constructed by a little girl out of children's building blocks. A title then appears, saying "Reversed", and the action is repeated in reverse, so that the castle re-erects itself under his blows.
Cecil Hepworth improved upon this technique by printing the negative of the forwards motion backwards frame by frame, so that in the production of the print the original action was exactly reversed. To do this, Hepworth built a special printer in which the negative running through a projector were projected into the gate of a camera through a special lens giving the same-size image. This arrangement came to be called a "projection printer", and eventually an "optical printer". With it Hepworth made The Bathers in 1900, in which bathers who have undressed and jumped into the water appear to spring backwards out of it, and have their clothes magically fly back onto their bodies.
The use of different camera speeds also appeared around 1900. Robert Paul's On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus (1899), had the camera turn so slowly that when the film was projected at the usual 16 frames per second, the scenery appeared to be passing at great speed. Cecil Hepworth used the opposite effect in The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder (1901), in which a naïve Red Indian eats a lot of the fizzy stomach medicine, causing his stomach to expand and then he then leaps around balloon-like. This was done by cranking the camera faster than the normal 16 frames per second giving the first "slow motion" effect.
Personnel
In descending order of seniority, the following staff are involved:
•    Director of Photography also called cinematographer
•    Camera Operator also called cameraman
•    First Assistant camera also called focus puller
•    Second Assistant camera also called clapper loader
In the film industry, the cinematographer is responsible for the technical aspects of the images (lighting, lens choices, composition, exposure, filtration, film selection), but works closely with the director to ensure that the artistic aesthetics are supporting the director's vision of the story being told. The cinematographers are the heads of the camera, grip and lighting crew on a set, and for this reason they are often called directors of photography or DPs. The ASC defines cinematography as:a creative and interpretive process that culminates in the authorship of an original work of art rather than the simple recording of a physical event. Cinematography is not a subcategory of photography. Rather, photography is but one craft that the cinematographer uses in addition to other physical, organizational, managerial, interpretive and image-manipulating techniques to effect one coherent process. In British tradition, if the DOP actually operates the camera him/herself they are called the cinematographer. On smaller productions it is common for one person to perform all these functions alone. The career progression usually involves climbing up the ladder from seconding, firsting, eventually to operating the camera.
Directors of photography make many creative and interpretive decisions during the course of their work, from pre-production to post-production, all of which affect the overall feel and look of the motion picture. Many of these decisions are similar to what a photographer needs to note when taking a picture: the cinematographer controls the film choice itself (from a range of available stocks with varying sensitivities to light and color), the selection of lens focal lengths, aperture exposure and focus. Cinematography, however, has a temporal aspect (see persistence of vision), unlike still photography, which is purely a single still image. It is also bulkier and more strenuous to deal with movie cameras, and it involves a more complex array of choices. As such a cinematographer often needs to work co-operatively with more people than does a photographer, who could frequently function as a single person. As a result, the cinematographer's job also includes personnel management and logistical organization. Given the in-depth knowledge a cinematographer requires not only of his or her own craft but also that of other personnel, formal tuition in analogue or digital filmmaking can be advantageous.

Towards a qualified professional.....THE AUDIO ENGINEER

THE AUDIO ENGINEER TESTING SOUNDS.

Audio engineer

THE AUDIO ENGINEER ADJUSTING THE GAIN

An audio engineer is concerned with the recording, manipulation, mixing and reproduction of sound. Many audio engineers creatively use technologies to produce sound for film, radio, television, music, electronic products and computer games.Alternatively, the term audio engineer can refer to a scientist or professional engineer who holds a B.Sc. or M.Sc. who designs, develops and builds new audio technologies working within the field of acoustical engineering.
Audio engineering concerns the creative and practical aspects of sounds including speech and music, as well as the development of new audio technologies and advancing scientific understanding of audible sound.
Research and development
Audio Engineers who carry out research and development invent new technologies, equipment and techniques, to enhance the process and art. They might design acoustical simulations of rooms, shape algorithms for audio signal processing, specify public address systems, carry out research on audible sound for video game console manufacturers, and other advanced fields of audio engineering. They might also be referred to as acoustic engineers
Education
 Audio engineering schools
Audio engineers working in research and development may come from backgrounds such as acoustics, computer science, broadcast engineering, physics, acoustical engineering and electronics. Audio engineering courses at university or college fall into two rough categories: (i) training in the creative use of audio as a sound engineer, and (ii) training in science or engineering, which then allows students to pursue a career developing audio technologies. Such courses give you a good knowledge of technologies, but do not have sufficient mathematical and scientific content to allow you to get a job in research and development in the audio and acoustic industry.
Audio engineers in research and development usually possess a bachelor's degree or higher qualification in acoustics, physics, computer science or another engineering discipline. They might work in acoustic consultancy, specializing in architectural acoustics.Alternatively they might work in audio companies (e.g. headphone manufacturer), or other industries which need audio expertise (e.g. automobile manufacturer), or carry out research in a university. Some positions, such as faculty (academic staff) require a Doctor of Philosophy. In Germany a Toningenieur is an audio engineer who designs, builds and repairs audio systems.
Sub-disciplines
The listed subdisciplines are based on PACS (Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme) coding used by the Acoustical Society of America with some revision.
 Audio signal processing
Audio engineers develop algorithms to allow the electronic manipulation of audio signals. These can be processes at the heart of much audio production such as reverberation, Auto-Tune or perceptual coding (e.g. mp3). Alternatively, the algorithms might carry out echo cancellation on Skype, or allow audio tracks to be categorised or identified through Music information retrieval (e.g. Shazam).

 Architectural acoustics
Acoustic diffusing mushrooms hanging from the roof of the Royal Albert Hall.
Architectural acoustics is the science and engineering of achieving a good sound within a room. For audio engineers, architectural acoustics can be about achieving good speech intelligibility in a stadium or enhancing the quality of music in a theatre. Architectural Acoustic design is usually done by acoustic consultants.

Electroacoustics( Sound reinforcement system)
The Pyramid Stage
Electroacoustics is concerned with the design of headphones, microphones, loudspeakers, sound reproduction systems and recording technologies. Examples of electroacoustic design include portable electronic devices (e.g. mobile phones, portable media players, and tablet computers), sound systems in architectural acoustics, surround sound in movie theater and vehicle audio.
 Musical acoustics
Musical acoustics is concerned with researching and describing the science of music. In audio engineering, this includes the design of electronic instruments such as synthesizers; the human voice (the physics and neurophysiology of singing); computer analysis of audio; music therapy, and the perception and cognition of music.
 Psychoacoustics
Psychoacoustics is the scientific study of how humans respond to what they hear. At the heart of audio engineering are listeners who are the final arbitrator as to whether an audio design is successful, such as whether a binaural recording sounds immerse.
 Speech
The production, computer processing and perception of speech is an important part of audio engineering. Ensuring speech is transmitted intelligibly, efficiently and with high quality; in rooms, through public address systems and through mobile telephone systems are important areas of study.

Mixing sound live
Producer, engineer, and mixer Phil Ek has described audio engineering as the "technical aspect of recording—the placing of microphones, the turning of pre-amp knobs, the setting of levels. The physical recording of any project is done by an engineer ... the nuts and bolts." A variety of terms are used to describe audio engineers who install or operate sound recording, sound reinforcement, or sound broadcasting equipment, including large and small format consoles. Terms such as "audio technician," "sound technician," "audio engineer," "audio technologist," "recording engineer," "sound mixer" and "sound engineer" can be ambiguous; depending on the context they may be synonymous, or they may refer to different roles in audio production. Such terms can refer to a person working in sound and music production; for instance, a "sound engineer" or "recording engineer" is commonly listed in the credits of commercial music recordings (as well as in other productions that include sound, such as movies). These titles can also refer to technicians who maintain professional audio equipment. Certain jurisdictions specifically prohibit the use of the title engineer to any individual not a registered member of a professional engineering licensing body.
In German, the "Tontechniker" (audio technician) is the one who operates the audio equipment and the "Tonmeister" (sound master) is a person who creates recordings or broadcasts of music, who is both deeply musically trained (in classical and non-classical genres), and who also has a detailed theoretical and practical knowledge of virtually all aspects of sound.[citation needed]
Education
Audio engineering schools
Audio engineers come from backgrounds such as audio, fine arts, broadcasting or music. Some audio engineers working in production are autodidacts with no formal training.
Practitioners

At the front of house position, mixing sound for a band
In the recording studio environment, a sound engineer records, edits, manipulates, mixes, or masters sound by technical means in order to realize an artist's or record producer's creative vision. While usually associated with music production, an audio engineer deals with sound for a wide range of applications, including post-production for video and film, live sound reinforcement, advertising, multimedia, and broadcasting. In larger productions, an audio engineer is responsible for the technical aspects of a sound recording or other audio production, and works together with a record producer or director, although the engineer's role may also be integrated with that of the producer. In smaller productions and studios the sound engineer and producer are often the same person.
In typical sound reinforcement applications, audio engineers often assume the role of producer, making artistic and technical decisions, and sometimes even scheduling and budget decisions.
Sub-disciplines
There are four distinct steps to commercial production of a recording: recording, editing, mixing, and mastering. Typically, each is performed by a sound engineer who specializes only in that part of production.
•    Studio engineer – an engineer working within a studio facility, either with a producer or independently.
•    Recording engineer – engineer who records sound.
•    Assistant engineer – often employed in larger studios, allowing them to train to become full-time engineers. They often assist full-time engineers with microphone setups, session breakdowns and in some cases, rough mixes.[15]
•    Mixing engineer – a person who creates mixes of multi-track recordings. It is common for a commercial record to be recorded at one studio and later mixed by different engineers in other studios.
•    Mastering engineer – typically the person who mixes the final stereo tracks (or sometimes just a few tracks or stems) that the mix engineer produces. The mastering engineer makes any final adjustments to the overall sound of the record in the final step before commercial duplication. Mastering engineers use principles of equalization and compression to affect the coloration of the sound.
•    Game audio designer engineer – deals with sound aspects of game development.
•    Live sound engineer
o    Front of House (FOH) engineer, or A1. – a person dealing with live sound reinforcement. This usually includes planning and installation of loudspeakers, cabling and equipment and mixing sound during the show. This may or may not include running the foldback sound. A live/sound reinforcement engineer hears source material and tries to correlate that sonic experience with system performance.  Wireless microphone engineer, or A2. This position is responsible for wireless microphones during a theatre production, a sports event or a corporate event.
o    Foldback or Monitor engineer – a person running foldback sound during a live event. The term "foldback" is outdated and refers to the practice of folding back audio signals from the FOH (Front of House) mixing console to the stage in order for musicians to hear themselves while performing. Monitor engineers usually have a separate audio system from the FOH engineer and manipulate audio signals independently from what the audience hears, in order to satisfy the requirements of each performer on stage. In-ear systems, digital and analog mixing consoles, and a variety of speaker enclosures are typically used by monitor engineers. In addition most monitor engineers must be familiar with wireless or RF (radio-frequency) equipment and must communicate personally with the artist(s) during each performance.
o    Systems engineer – responsible for the design setup of modern PA systems which are often very complex. A systems engineer is usually also referred to as a "crew chief" on tour and is responsible for the performance and day-to-day job requirements of the audio crew as a whole along with the FOH audio system. This is a sound-only position concerned with implementation, not to be confused with the interdisciplinary field of system engineering which requires a college degree.
•    Re-recording mixer – a person in post-production who mixes audio tracks for feature films and/or television programs.
Equipment

Correcting a room's frequency response.
An audio technician is proficient with different types of recording media, such as analog tape, digital multitrack recorders and workstations, and computer knowledge. With the advent of the digital age, it is becoming more and more important for the audio technician to be versed in the understanding of software and hardware integration from synchronization to analog to digital transfers. Audio engineers in their daily work operate and make use of:
•    Amplifiers
•    Analog-to-digital converters
•    Digital audio workstations (DAW)
•    Digital-to-analog converters
•    Dynamic range compressions
•    Loudspeakers
•    Microphones
•    Mixing consoles
•    Music sequencers
•    Preamplifiers
•    Signal processors
•    Tape machines

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It is our utmost pleasure to introduce to you, a companion in entertainment and advertisement known as MTVIBES MEDIA. We are an info-tainment company resident in Nigeria. This company was founded in May 2010 through the concerted effort of a group of entertainment professionals who have the budding passion to redefine entertainment in Nigeria so as to beat a place in the world view. Rising from the urge to combat the act of God-fatherrism, victimization and fraud inherent in the industry, we have decided to give a place to talents who loose out of opportunities in the industry due to lack of sponsorship and expertise through the provision of proficiency training , skill acquisition and entertainment events.

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mtvibesmedia@yahoo.com

TUTORIALS.....towards the qualified professional..

Theatre director

A theatre director or stage director is a director/instructor in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production (a play, an opera, a musical, or a devised piece of work) by unifying various endeavours and aspects of production. The director's function is to ensure the quality and completeness of theatre production and to lead the members of the creative team into realising their artistic vision for it. The director therefore collaborates with a team of creative individuals and other staff, coordinating research, stagecraft, costume design, props, lighting design, acting, set design, stage combat, and sound design for the production. If the production he or she is mounting is a new piece of writing or a (new) translation of a play, the director may also work with the playwright or translator. In contemporary theatre, after the playwright, the director is generally the primary visionary, making decisions on the artistic concept and interpretation of the play and its staging. Different directors occupy different places of authority and responsibility, depending on the structure and philosophy of individual theatre companies. Directors utilize a wide variety of techniques, philosophies, and levels of collaboration.

The director in theatre history

In ancient Greece, the birthplace of European drama, the writer bore principal responsibility for the staging of his plays. Actors were generally semi-professionals, and the director oversaw the mounting of plays from the writing process all the way through to their performance, often acting in them too, as Aeschylus for example did. The author-director would also train the chorus, sometimes compose the music, and supervise every aspect of production. The fact that the director was called didaskalos, the Greek word for "teacher," indicates that the work of these early directors combined instructing their performers with staging their work.

In medieval times, the complexity of vernacular religious drama, with its large scale mystery plays that often included crowd scenes, processions and elaborate effects, gave the role of director (or stage manager or pageant master) considerable importance. A miniature by Jean Fouquet from 1460 (pictured) bares one of the earliest depictions of a director at work. Holding a prompt book, the central figure directs, with the aid of a long stick, the proceedings of the staging of a dramatization of the Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia. According to Fouquet, the director's tasks included overseeing the erecting of a stage and scenery (there were no permanent, purpose-built theatre structures at this time, and performances of vernacular drama mostly took place in the open air), casting and directing the actors (which included fining them for those that infringed rules), and addressing the audience at the beginning of each performance and after each intermission^.

From Renaissance times up until the 19th century, the role of director was often carried by the actor-manager. This would usually be a senior actor in a troupe who took the responsibility for choosing the repertoire of work, staging it and managing the company. This was the case for instance with Commedia dell'Arte companies and English actor-managers like Colley Cibber and David Garrick.

A portrait of Constantin Stanislavski by Valentin Serov

The modern theatre director can be said to have originated in the staging of elaborate spectacles of the Meininger Company under George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The management of large numbers of extras and complex stagecraft matters necessitated an individual to take on the role of overall coordinator. This gave rise to the role of the director in modern theatre, and Germany would provide a platform for a generation of emerging visionary theatre directors, such as Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt. Simultaneously, Constantin Stanislavski, principally an actor-manager, would set up the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia and similarly emancipate the role of the director as artistic visionary.

The French regisseur is also sometimes used to mean a stage director, most commonly in ballet. A more common term for theatre director in French is metteur en scène.

Post World War II, the actor-manager slowly started to disappear, and directing become a fully fledged artistic activity within the theatre profession. The director originating artistic vision and concept, and realizing the staging of a production, became the norm rather than the exception. Great forces in the emancipation of theatre directing as a profession were notable 20th century theatre directors like Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Yuri Lyubimov (Russia), Peter Brook, Peter Hall (Britain), Bertolt Brecht (Germany) and Giorgio Strehler (Italy).

A cautionary note was introduced by the famed director Sir Tyrone Guthrie who said "the only way to learn how to direct a play, is ... to get a group of actors simple enough to allow you to let you direct them, and direct"

A number of seminal works on directing and directors include Toby Cole and Helen Krich's 1972 Directors on Directing: A Sourcebook of the Modern Theatre, Edward Braun's 1982 book The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Growtowski and Will's The Director in a Changing Theatre (1976).

Directing education

Because of the relatively late emergence of theatre directing as a performing arts profession when compared with for instance acting or musicianship, a rise of professional vocational training programmes in directing can be seen mostly in the second half of the 20th century. Most European countries nowadays know some form of professional directing training, usually at drama schools or conservatoires, or at universities. In Britain, the tradition that theatre directors emerge from degree courses (usually in English literature) at the Oxbridge universities has meant that for a long time, professional vocational training did not take place at drama schools or performing arts colleges, although an increase in training programmes for theatre directors can be witnessed since the 1970s and 1980s. In American universities, the seminal directing program at the Yale School of Drama produced a number of pioneering directors with D.F.A. (Doctor of Fine Arts) and M.F.A. degrees in Drama (rather than English) who contributed to the expansion of professional resident theaters in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early days such programmes typically led to the staging of one major thesis production in the third (final) year. At the University of California, Irvine, Keith Fowler (a Yale D.F.A.) led for many years a graduate programme based on the premise that directors are autodidacts who need as many opportunities to direct as possible. Under Fowler, graduate student directors would stage between five and ten productions during their three-year residencies, with each production receiving detailed critiques.

As with many other professions in the performing arts, theatre directors would often learn their skills "on the job"; to this purpose, theatres often employ trainee assistant directors or have in-house education schemes to train young theatre directors. Examples are the Royal National Theatre in London, which frequently organizes short directing courses, or the Orange Tree Theatre and the Donmar Warehouse on London's West End, which both employ resident assistant directors on a one-year basis for training purposes.

Styles of directing

Directing is an artform that has grown with the development of theatre theory and theatre practice. With the emergence of new trends in theatre, so too have directors adopted new methodologies and engaged in new practices.

Once a show has opened (premiered before a regular audience), theatre directors are generally considered to have fulfilled their function. From that point forward the stage manager is left in charge of all essential production areas.