4The "Staging" of Movies — Cinema and theater share many of the same techniques and much of the same terminology, yet from its birth, cinema was seen as different from theater and the traditional arts, and many have used the important distinctions with theater to better understand cinema.

4The Cinematographe and Other Movie Cameras — The 1995 film Lumière et Compagnie (Lumière & Company) celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of Auguste and Louis Lumière's contribution to the birth of cinema. The Lumière brothers shot short, factual films such as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) on their own handmade, hand-cranked, wooden camera.

4Nonfiction Films: Direct Cinema — Direct cinema uses handheld cameras and doesn't use scripts or interviewers: the camera simply "hangs out" "behind the scenes" with celebrities, politicians, artists, or other subjects.

4Factual and Dramatic Aspects of Documentary Film — We tend to assume that a wide separation exists between fact and fiction, historical reality and crafted story, truth and artifice. The difference, however, is never absolute in any film.

4Evolution of Animation Techniques — While there are countless possible types and combinations of animation, three basic types are used widely today: hand-drawn, stop-motion, and digital.