Evolution of Drama in Media: From Ancient Greece to Modern Cinema

History of Drama in the Media Industry:

Drama (moving image): Definition: Link: https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/drama

History of Drama: Developed in Ancient Greece, around 532 BC, when a priest of Dionysus, Thespis was the earliest actor. Dionysus was a Greek god of grape-harvesting, wine and theatre. It was his festivals that started the driving force behind the development of Greek theatre.

Conventions of Theatre Drama: These inlude: Slow Motion. Soliloquy. Added Narration. Use of an Aside. Breaking into song. (as in Musical Theatre) Using a chorus to comment upon the action. Splitting the stage so that different spaces represent different locations. Using placards (signs) to give additional information to the audience. Split role or multi role. Using music to underscore the drama.

Conventions of Audio Drama: These are the following: Music. Sound Effects. Dialogue. Voiceover.

Conventions of Film Drama: ? Conventional Settings. Conventional Events. Conventional Roles. The nature of the protagonist. The nature of the antagonist.

Beginning of Moving Image: The Kinetoscope was first used in 1891 towards the end of the 19th Century, in which the device was demonstrated by the Edison Company in the US. It was a selection of images going fast on the Kinetoscope, playing out as a movie. There was no dialogue back then as the films were silent, so the films had a live orchestra, sometimes lectures if the device was used in schools and lots of audience participation. By 1914, several national film industries were established, dominated by longer films combined with storytelling or narrative, proving that Europe, Russia and Scandinavia were as important as America. The Jazz Singer became the first feature-length movie to incorporate synchronized dialogue, used by the Warner Brothers Vitaphone system, which employed a separate record disc with each reel of film for the sound. The system proved to be unreliable and was soon replaced by a soundtrack that was optical and variable in density.

Timeline: May 1897. George Melies build one of the film studios. basic technique for trick cinematography was the double exposure of the film in the camera. July 1898. British film pioneer Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, one of the first films to feature more than one shot. 1898. The further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued at the Brighton School in England . 1899. 1900. Continuity of action across successive shots was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James Williamson, who also worked in Brighton .

Timeline: Continued.. G.A Smith pioneered the use of the close-up shot in his 1900 films As Seen Through a Telescope and Grandma's Reading Glass. He also introduced the use of subjective and objective point-of-view shots, the creation of dream-time and the use of reversing. 1900 1900 By that year, Brighton school films produced extended scenes of up to 5 minutes long. 1901 James Williamson concentrated on making films taking action from one place shown in one shot to the next shown in another shot in films like Stop Thief! . Most films of this period were what came to be called "chase films". The Path company in France also made imitations and variations of Smith and Williamson's films from that year onwards using cuts between the shots, which helped to standardize the basics of film construction. 1902 Several British films made in the first half of the year extended the chase method of film construction. 1903