Who invented sound in movies

He managed to achieve this by synchronizing movie playback with independent phonograph that was reproducing pre-recorded sound on wax cylinder. Even though Don Juan was very popular, it did not manage to recoup its high production cost.

However, Warner Bros. And now we have reached The Jazz Singer. So, surely The Jazz Singer was the next Vitaphone release, right? Well, maybe after The First Auto? Something to remember before we continue: Vitaphone records were catalogued, and multiple were used for each film, just like multiple reels would be used. Try this. Alright, enough trashing of The Jazz Singer. Al Jolson was a recognizable name and the figurehead of this film that could sell tickets.

Not only that, but his chit-chat could be found too, which was definitely something audiences would want imagine not knowing what the earliest celebrities sounded like, only to finally have your first answer. You can check out such moments below. Okay, so it was a feature film with both a recorded score and the talking and singing included as well.

What if a studio took a gamble with the phonofilm years earlier, and heavily marketed the premiere of that film? Without the? Marriage is a sacrilege and a mockery. Though Edison did not invent film, he always conceived that this visual medium and his phonograph would mesh to make sound film, and was busy trying to invent sound film almost from the birth of cinema? Inventors and entrepreneurs needed to overcome several problems before sound could be accepted.

First, silent film audiences seemed perfectly happy with silent movies, perhaps because the movies were never completely silent, almost always accompanied by music of some kind: from a multipieced pit orchestra for big openings, to a single piano, or even a guitar if no one in a small town could play the larger instrument. Early on, when film prints traveled from small town to small town in the American heartland, they were often narrated by a live raconteur, who would explain the action on-screen to audiences.

Also, by the s, silent film writing, acting, photography, and music had reached an aesthetic pinnacle: very subtle emotional and plot nuances could be conveyed without the use of any accompanying dialogue. In fact, as the era of sound film drew to a close, filmmakers were able to convey their stories with a bare minimum of intertitles. The Jazz Singer was not the first commercially released sound film.

Warner Brothers and Vitaphone had earlier been releasing "shorts" in which people sang and told jokes, and released a feature-length film called Don Juan , which contained a musical score, in , the year before Al Jolson sang "Mammy" on film. In fact, Jolson's talking was in large measure an accident: The film-makers simply couldn't shut the irrepressible entertainer up be-fore his musical numbers. More important than audience satisfaction with silence, however, was the technological difficulty of matching sound and visuals in such a way that everyone in the audience could hear.

In other words, the problems were synchronization and amplification. Two of those corporations formed a third, Vitaphone, which produced the first commercially viable sound system, essentially a very large phonograph platter hooked up to a film projector with large leather belts, like straps or harnesses. Soon this clumsy apparatus was replaced by the now-standard strip of celluloid prepped for sound that runs down the side of the film strip, so that the two modes remain in synch. Even after its invention, sound presented a host of problems.

The early sound cameras and equipment were big and noisy, and had to be kept in their own soundproof room, called a "blimp. So very early sound films tended to be very static because actors had to speak to a static mike, and cameras movement no longer had that graceful and supple fluidity it had been developing for 30 years. A recording of an orchestra accompanied the action on screen, and the record also included some sound effects, like clashing swords and ringing bells, that were synchronized perfectly with the action on screen.

Don Juan was a big success and Thomas Edison's dream of combining the phonograph and the movies finally came true. The Warner brothers celebrated their success and planned to make additional Vitaphone movies. Meanwhile, the other movie-makers in Hollywood shook their heads and said, "It's just a fad. But it wasn't just a fad, and as the Warner brothers made more and more Vitaphone movies, sound movies became even more popular.

There were silent adventure stories with recorded orchestral music like Don Juan, and there were also short films where famous singers and comedians sang songs and told jokes.

Moviegoers lined up to see them all. In the Warner brothers made a movie starring a famous singer named Al Jolson.

In this movie, The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson's character sang songs and in one scene he also talked and kidded with the woman who played his mother. Audiences really liked this scene, and the Warner brothers realized that people did indeed want to hear the actors talk. The rest of Hollywood, too, finally realized that this was not just a fad, and they all now rushed into making sound movies themselves. But it was hard to catch up. In order to make sound movies, you had to buy a lot of expensive new equipment for recording sound, and you had to find and hire people who knew how to use it.

If your studio was in a noisy location, near traffic or with airplanes flying overhead, you had to construct a special new building that would keep out all that noise. Some actors had funny-sounding voices or heavy accents that made them hard to understand.

Their voices would not work for sound movies, so new actors with good voices had to be found and turned into movie stars. Actors now had to memorize their lines ahead of time and stand still when they spoke, to ensure that the microphones would catch the sounds of their voices. And directors could no longer shout out instructions to the actors while the cameras were rolling.

The microphones were very sensitive and could even pick up the whirring noise of the cameras. To keep that noise off the recording, the cameras—and cameramen—were put inside special boxes that muffled the sounds.

Cameramen sweated inside these boxes like turkeys being roasted in an oven, and they also complained that they weren't able to move their cameras around any more since that, too, made unwanted noises.

Everyone who worked to make movies had to learn a whole new way to do their job when sound movies were made. Workers in the theaters also had to re-learn their jobs.

Projectionists worked in a tiny booth way up high at the back of theater, running the films through the projection machines that brought the films to life on screen. These men now had to operate phonographs as well as projectors, so their job became twice as difficult. Sometimes when a record was played, the needle would skip, or jump around, in the groove and the synchronization between the sound and the picture would be lost.