Unlike many forms of art—and art industries—the craft of filmmaking doesn’t stretch back thousands of years. Filmmaking is relatively a new invention, and as such its history is very traceable and clear. For example, if you look back at the earliest moving pictures you can find familiar names like Cooke Optics baked into the very core essence of the filmmaking craft.This also means that film and video is still very much an art form in progress. Every film and video project you undertake is part of this developing history. With a focus on the future let’s take a look at the rich history of Cooke Optics and how the company that started in 1893 is still innovating new and transformative lenses for filmmakers of all types today.The Birth of a LegendInvention has been in the Cooke DNA right from inception over 120 years ago. It began when H. Dennis Taylor, an optical manager of T. Cooke & Sons of York, attempted to eliminate the distortion at the outer edge of lenses destined for astronomical telescopes. In 1893 Taylor designed and patented the Cooke Triplet (British patent no. 1991) – an elegant solution to the design issues that plagued lens designers of the era. A year later, the first Cooke photographic stills lens was engineered and sold under the Cooke brand name. The Triplet was not only the blueprint for lenses at Cooke but a design used almost universally for lenses of intermediate aperture worldwide. When the first silent movies rolled...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Friday, 6 December, 2024