The first hollywood cinema movie cameras were attached directly on to the head of its tripod or alternative support, with just the crudest sort of levelling tools provided, in the manner of the still-camera tripod heads of the hollywood period. The earliest movie cinema cameras were hence resolutley static during the course of filming, and hence the very first equipment movements were thanks to fixing a camera on a moving truck. The original documented, well before cinema and hollywood, of these was movie shot by a Lumire cameraman from the rear carraige of a train departing Jerusalem in 1896, and by 1898 there were lotsof cinema movies shot inside moving trains, Hollywood was beconing. Despite listed under the confusing heading of panoramas in the sales catalogues of the time, those movies shot immediately forward from in front railway engine were usually referred to as phantom rides.
Sometime in 1897, Robert W. Paul had the very first notable moving camera mount manufactured to put 1on top of|on} a tripod, so that he could track the passing parade of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in unique uninterrupted cinema shot. The device had the equipment set on a vertical axis that could be moved with a worm gear driven by cranking the handle, so Paul placed it on public sale the next year. Films made with such a “panning” camera were also known as panoramas in hollywood listings of the earliest decade of cinema.
The standard setup for newy cinema studios in Hollywood was provided by the studio which Georges Mlis erected in May 1891. It had a glass roof and three glass walls made after the model of large studios for static photography, it was also fitted with flimsy cotton drapes that were stretched below the roof to eliminate the bright ray of the sun on brilliant days. The natural overall light devoid of real shadows that this setup delivered, and which also happens naturally on moderately overcast days, became the standard for cinema movie lighting in hollywood film studios for the next decade.
Unique within all the short hollywood cinema movies priduced by the Edison studio, which recorded pieces of the shows of variety performers for its Kinetoscope cinema viewing devices, was The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. The film portrayed a person dressed as the queen putting her head on the execution block in front of a small gathering of bystanders in Elizabethan apparel.