GEORGES MILES - A TRIP TO THE MOON

Georges Miles was a French illusionist and film director in the earliest days of cinema, he pioneered many technical developments in the earliest days of cinema, he was a prolific innovator in the use of special effects, and his creative inventive ways of filming revolutionised the farming industry. He use many techniques such as multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves and substitution spices.

All his sets were made by him and his team, they filmed in a huge greenhouse to let the light in every angle, this is apparent in the films he creates by the flickering transference between slightly lighter and darker viewpoints of each scene. He was also the first filmmaker to use storyboards. There was no colour in films back then so the scenes were painted in afterwards creating a very unique and artistic effect.

One of his earliest projects “A trip to the Moon” is one of the most recognisable and influential films ever made, one image of the moon with a missal in its eye is still used to this day.

There is no narration or voices, only an acoustic backing track sounds like violins. It begins in what I imagine is a roomful of professors, and looks a bit like a wizard with a big white beard draws plans on the board, I think he is the head professor. There is a lot of moving about and the screen flickers little while before anything actually happens. Man draws a diagram of the missal heading towards the moon and all the professors start to argue and fight. It seems the head professor is trying to convince them of his plan. Interestingly they change costume onset as a part of the film, this ends this first scene.

The second scene the building the missal, a pattern begins to emerge each scene seems to be cluttered with many people all moving doing different things no focus on one person individually. Another scene shows the man using a spyglass to look out the window at an industrial landscape with many smoking chimneys, we then go to the end of the missal and people are climbing inside, it takes a little while to get in. Then the missal is pushed by a few women in skimpy costumes and a watch as it is shot toward the moon, when it hits the moon it creates the iconic image but we still see around today.

People get out of the missal and with back toward Earth. The lingering sleeping bags and go to sleep. Stars appear with people’s faces on them, a woman sits on the moon minutes knows waking people up. This really is a beautiful piece of film you can just see the effort that went into making it all the scenes all the costumes all the props.

They then explore through a magical woodland face something of Alice in Wonderland, they have a disagreement with this alien man so they hit it with domestic and it puts in a smoke, they do this to a couple more but then they get captured. They then take them to the alien man King and the big professor kills him in a puff of smoke, many runaway attacking aliens a vehicle. The get back in the missal and head back home. One alien holds onto the bottom of the missal and goes with it.

You can tell this has been filmed in a fish tank or something when it falls into the sea, then it arrives home with a marching band. Then the alien appears in everybody cheers and throws of their hats. There is a statue built of the professor and they dance around it this is how the film ends.

There are two versions of this film one is black and white and one with painted scenes. The one with painted scenes is amazing, the scenes are painted similarly but not exactly alike so you get this flickering colour effect, the colours of are not bright vivid in your face, they are subtle shades of pastel and primary colours. The colours complement film beautifully. I really love his films, they’re so pretty and artistic also their great forgetting ideas, some of the special effects he creates look extremely low budget and manageable to do myself such as dropping things in a fish tanks and what look like cut out card scene. These are great short films to get inspiration from. I want my own film to be mostly a collection of images that I have either painted or drawn myself and it’s a film of the collage I created with minimal actual human acting or natural scenery, I think this will give it a nice artistic quality.