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Film

Explorer · ages 7 and underAdapted from Wikipedia
A still from an early film, 'The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,' made in 1896 by the Lumière brothers. It shows a train pulling into a station, one of the first movies ever shown to audiences.

What Is a Film?

A film is a work of art. It uses moving images to share stories, feelings, and ideas. Since the 1930s, most films have had sound that goes along with the pictures. Some films also use special effects to make things look magical.

Films are made by recording people and things with cameras. They can also be made with animation. A film is made of many single pictures called frames. When these pictures are shown quickly, one after another, our eyes see smooth movement.

How Films Began

Films grew from older ideas about pictures that move. Early films were only a few minutes long. In 1895, the first paid public showings of films took place. Later, actors like Charlie Chaplin became well known to people all over the world.

Films Around the World

Films can reach people everywhere. Pictures need no translation, and dubbing or subtitles help people understand the words. Much of the American film industry is based in Hollywood, California. Bollywood, in Mumbai, makes the largest number of films in the world.

Film Awards

Films entertain, teach, and inspire people. The Academy Awards, also called "the Oscars," are the most important film awards in the United States.

Quiz time!

3 questions about Film

Question 1 of 3

What is a film?

Pictures

A spinning disc from 1833, designed by Simon Stampfer. When spun and viewed through slits, its pictures blend into a simple animation, one of the earliest ways people made moving pictures.
An illustration of Ottomar Anschütz's electrotachyscope, an early device that helped lead to the invention of motion pictures, as shown in an 1889 issue of American Scientific.
Salah Zulfikar, an Egyptian actor who appeared in many films and television shows.
Filmmaker Russ Meyer and film critic Roger Ebert pose together in a black-and-white photo from 1970.
The entrance to the Filmstudio Babelsberg, a famous film studio in Potsdam, Germany.
Misr Studio in Egypt, photographed in 1935.
Auguste (left) and Louis Lumière, French inventors and film pioneers, pictured in this historical photograph from 1895.
An animated horse in a running motion, drawn by tracing over old 19th-century photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge.
A sequence of photographs showing a galloping horse, taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878. Together the frames show how a horse moves its legs when it runs fast.
A Bolex 16 mm film camera, a type of movie camera once widely used by filmmakers to record moving pictures on film.
Egyptian actress Mona Zaki taking part in a campaign to raise awareness about breast cancer in 2015.

Keep exploring

Animation
Charlie Chaplin
Subtitles
Mumbai

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Film, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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