A motion picture, usually called a movie or film, is a series of many thousands of still images which, when projected on to a screen in quick succession, creates the effect of moving images. A movie is created by shooting actual scenes with a movie camera, by taking pictures of drawings or models (traditional animation), or by CGI (computer-generated imagery) and computer animation. The first movie was shown in Paris in 1895. Since then, cinema has become popular all over the world. Thousands of people work in the movie industry, involved in every part of making a movie, from working the cameras or acting in front of them to making costumes and writing the script.

The first movies

In 1891 American inventor Thomas Alva Edison built a machine called the Kinetoscope to show films shot by his Kinetograph, which was one of the first movie cameras. It was the first successful moving-picture machine, although only one person at a time could view through an eyepiece as the sequence of photographs on a strip of film wound past. Just four years later in 1895, two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, gave the first public cinema show in a café in Paris. The movies showed scenes of everyday life in the city.

Until around the start of the 21st century, film was the primary method for recording and projecting movies. Thousands of photographs called frames were recorded on a long roll of photographic film. The frames were taken in quick succession by a movie camera (or cine-camera). A revolving shutter inside the camera opened to let light hit the film, creating the image for a frame. Then it closed and the film was moved into position for the next frame. This sequence was repeated again and again to photograph 24 frames every second until a whole reel of film was made. A movie projector did the reverse of a camera. It shone a bright light through the film and focused the rays on to a screen, creating an enlarged image. It showed the frames in quick succession, which created the illusion of movement.

From the mid-1990s, digital video cameras increasingly took over from tape-based cameras for home video recording and low-budget independent film-making. It was not until the start of the 21st century that improvements in digital movie cameras made it possible for digital to replace film in big-budget movie production. Released in 2003, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, directed by Robert Rodriguez, was one of the first big-budget movies to be shot in digital high-definition video. It used Sony's CineAlta camera, which shoots at 24 frames per second and can record on to tapes, discs and flash memory cards.

The highest-grossing movie of all time, Avatar (2009), was shot using digital cameras and could also be projected digitally. For digital projection, movies are supplied to a cinema as a digital file, then screened using a computer server linked to a digital projector. Cinemas are rapidly converting to digital projection.