HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD CLASSICAL CINEMA STYLE (HCC)
“So what exactly is Hollywood Classical Cinema and why should I care?” you may wonder. Please allow me to share some background and insight into the magic of HCC and then tie in how that approach to meeting audience expectations could have a positive impact on your bottom line.
Originally film cameras were given to bored housewives to keep them out of their husband’s hair. Then a few men saw the potential to make money and developed it into an industry. In the early days of motion pictures, audiences were amused by simple presentations because the technology was so new (like the earliest videogame, Pong—which would be no match for Call of Duty).
- One of the earliest films released in a theater is Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, which filmed a train approaching the camera head-on. It appeared to audiences that the train was going to crash into the theater, and some were so naïve about the technology that they actually fled the theater in fear.
- Some of you may be familiar with Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese (a true cinephile). It featured Georges Méliès’s The Black Imp, which used editing in a way that dazzled audiences of the early 1900s. The Imp (and some of the furniture) seemed to disappear and move magically from place to place using what we know as jump cuts today.
- At the center of cinema’s evolution was storytelling and character development. Orson Welles brought these two crowd-pleasers together seamlessly with Citizen Kane. However, the film’s appeal wasn’t solely based only on storytelling and character development—how characters were presented and how the story unfolded were also vital factors. Welles brought together many different techniques and blended them together to create an “invisible” style that is referred to as Hollywood Classical Cinema. The invisible style used all the production elements to underscore the narrative without distraction so that the audience could and would focus solely on the story and characters.
The moral of the story is that you can be Porter or Georges Méliès and simply have fun with a new technology, or you can be Orson Welles and influence multiple generations all over the world. So the question is: Do you want to be a leader or left behind? It is true that many of today’s most-viewed web videos feature big boobs and flaming farts, but that is comparable to hobbies for those desperate Edwardian housewives. Web video is rapidly becoming a major business that influences how business is done and with whom. So the real question is: Do you want to positively influence your prospects and your bottom line?
Did you know?
You Can Effectively Engage Your Audience with a Web Video
Click-thru rates increase by 96% when video is embedded in an e-newsletter. Consumers who view a video product demo while shopping are 85% more likely to make a purchase. –Dan Piech of comScore, OMMA January 2011.