So now there was a real possibility of having films of more than two or three minutes, and this led to the making of The Great Train Robbery - the very first movie made. It only lasted 11 minutes but was an absolute sensation, and there were cases of people watching the movie and actually fainting when the character fired a gun at the camera! Almost overnight movies became a craze, and by 1905 people in America were lining up to see movies in `store theatres', as they were called then.
I guess the next big step in terms of development of technology was to have people actually talking on the film, and the first step towards this was in 1926 when sound effects were first used on a film. It wasn't until the following year however that the first 'talkie', as they were called then, was made. This film featured actors speaking only during parts of the film and was called The Jazz Singer, and it wasn't until 1928 that the first all-talking film was produced, and this was called The Lights of New York. Unfortunately, the sound on this early film was not very good and I believe they put subtitles on the film - that is, they printed the dialogue along the bottom of the film to compensate for this poor sound quality. Now, with the addition of sound, moving pictures became far more difficult to make ...