Movies of the 1990's

Movies of the 1990's

It is felt by many that movies produced before the 1990's are thought to have been done with a great attention to detail. However, the improvement in graphics, known as Computer Generated Images (CGI), has changed the way many movies are produced and has caused an increase in revenues. Movies in the categories of Animation, Horror, Action, and Sci-Fi, in particular have benefitted from this.

In the category of Animation movies like "The Lion King", "Hercules", and "Toy Story 1&2" used the advancement in CGI with great results. Unlike their predecessors, in which it took years to make just a few minutes of film, now it takes a few years to make a whole movie (90 minutes minimum time). Some of the methods that were used or, at least one method was stop motion (or action) photography, this is where you would take a picture of the subject move the subject just a little bit, take another picture and so forth until the scene was complete. Then you would film the pictures one by one, speeding up the frames until the movement was smooth. This method took days or weeks to get just a few minutes of film.

Another trick was using clay-mation, or clay animation; this is like the stop action photography except instead of using pictures you would use clay figures. The last know method was by using glass plates to paint the scene on then do the stop-motion photography to make the scene, (this was how some of the early Disney films were done).so as compared to the newer films those of that time frame cost more to make, at that time, and brought in more money when viewed. Some of the early movies only cost a few cents to go and watch, where as today it costs about $10.00 on average to go to a movie theater and watch a film. Also back then there was no DVD's or CD's to watch them on let alone being able to play them at home. Take for example the movie "Snow White" the first production was in 1937 and the cost was a staggering $1.5 million and brought in only $3.5 million in revenue. Whereas the film "The Lion King" was made in 1994 and cost $45 million to make and brought in $312,855,561 in revenue; Films like "Hercules" and the "Toy Story" films each cost $85 million / $99,112,101 (Hercules); (no budget on file) $191,796,233 (Toy Story); $90 million budget $245,852,179. So as can be seen with the improvements to the way the movies were being made caused a drastic increase in production costs and revenues.

This "big" improvement was brought on when the computer industry took off and made it a bit cheaper to make, and that was Computer Generated Images or CGI. This allowed the film makers to take the storyboards that the story of the film is first drawn on and put it on a computer where all types of things could be done to it. Even though the technology increased you would think that