Media Players: Entertaining Us Through The Ages
You have been entertained with media player software for years, so it may be that you have not even noticed it. How could you, it looks so real. Everyone has a favorite or several favorite movies that they have to watch repeatedly; movies that they just cannot get enough of. Let us peek into how media player software has improved the experience of watching a movie today, and a little history on how we got here.
Going way back in time, media player history started around the 1700s when magicians in Europe entertained the royalty with a little smoking mirror. The magicians actually used lanterns to produced smoke. However, it seemed to entertain the court. Later on in the early 1800s, the ability to project images from far away onto a screen was invented. With man’s insatiable appetite to entertain, technology continued to develop. Silent films came into vogue and eventually fade, stop actions, CGI and Virtual Reality landed square on our square movie screens.
It is hard to believe that media player software is connected with magicians’ lanterns and silent films, but that is the path. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. There is no way to cover totally the entire film history that lead up to CGI today, but hitting the highlights is both interesting and entertaining.
Media players and digital software have taken off because of several films and has continued to grow in the movie industry. Of course, everyone should remember the first Star Wars movie, but it was not until the Star Wars, Episode I – The Phantom Menace in 1999 that CGI played a major role in the movie. Interestingly over 92 percent of the movie was nothing but CGI effects on the movie screen.
Other films led up to the popular media player inspired Phantom Menace movie. A full 10 years before was released a movie called The Abyss used media player software for the water scene of faces. In The Abyss, 3 – D special effects were used for the first time. Audiences were captivated by it. Virtual Reality was brought to screen in the Lawnmower Man movie in 1992. After that, the Walt Disney Company made their first film in 3 – D with the hit Toy Story in 1995.
It only got better as media player software guided the next movie, Titanic in 1997, into the outer stratosphere of technology. No one can forget the scenes of the ship crashing into the iceberg or the fateful breaking in half of the ship! In the new millennium, CGI got into the full swing of influencing children’s movies such as Shrek. The software and special effects were toned down before its release to the public. Why were they toned down? Because the characters in Shrek were so real, Disney felt it had no cartoon affect, and children might be turned off by the movie.
It is hoped that in this short review of movie history, anyone can see and understand the importance that media player technology has had on the entertainment industry. In the future, we might have to be warned that all characters in a movie are CGI and Virtual Reality created. What a concept to think about, and who knows when it will happen.