A movie, also known as a movie motion picture, video, or short video, is a creative work of visually artistic art designed to simulate actual experiences, ideas, stories, senses, beauty, or mood through the utilisation of moving pictures. The term ‘motion picture’ is derived from the moving image that allows the viewer to see the story unfolding on the screen. Movies are an amalgamation of images – in the case of movies, both sound and visual. Since ancient times, movies have been used for a variety of functions, including religious, philosophical, social, and aesthetic purposes. Movies have become an integrated component of society with the mass media proliferation in recent years.
Movies are now so widespread that every country in the world has at least one major movie theater, which can be counted on to produce about two million films annually. Film production can be expensive, and the effects of indulging in extravagant and wasteful movie consumption on the environment are beginning to mount. In light of this, governments and producers of movies are increasingly attempting to use more environmentally friendly means of producing their celluloid brethren. Recent successes in this regard have resulted in a growing trend toward using green screen colours, or digital post-production techniques that blur the original colour of the film so that it appears white. Digital sound recording also allows movie producers to combine different scenes of varying lengths without having to re-record entire movies.
Movie theatres have been the most common medium of viewing motion pictures since the mid-nineteenth century, when they first appeared alongside the first automatic theaters. Although not particularly popular, the prevalence of these early silent films has given birth to the modern misconception that the entire process of watching a film is a form of passive entertainment, immune to the distracting activity of a live theatre. The advent of open-air cinemas – sometimes called movie theaters – changed the way the industry approached marketing and distribution. Modern movie marketing techniques continue to advance toward the development of more technologically-advanced, digitally enhanced techniques of producing and exhibition of films.