When filming has finished, an editor puts the moving pictures together in a way that tells the whole story within a set amount of time. Audio engineers and sound engineers record music and singing and join it with the moving pictures. When the movie is done, many copies of the movie are made by movie labs and put onto film reels. Then the reels are sent to cinemas. An electric machine called a projector shines a very bright light through the film, and people sitting in a dark room see it on a big screen.
A genre is a word for a type of movie or a style of movie. Movies can be fictional (made up), or documentary (showing 'real life'), or a mix of the two. Although hundreds of movies are made every year, there are very few that do not follow a small number of set plots, or stories. Some movies mix together two or more genres.
Most movies lose money but some make profits in the hundreds of millions, be they dollars, euro or pounds. In India movies have become an enormous part of the economy. The industry has always been dominated by a few major movie studios like MGM/UA, Warner Bros., Columbia, Lucasfilm, Paramount or Disney.
There are many large companies that provide all of the services needed to make movies, such as special effects, lighting, set building. Many of these employees belong to trade unions who say how much their members must be paid. A huge number of smaller companies also offer services, such as music studios (which record the music for original movie sound tracks) and CGI computer animation.
Finally there are movie distribution companies (which send movies around the world or around a country), and advertising companies who let people know about the movie and promote it (try to make people want to see the movie).
Movies with famous stars and large budgets (lots of money), are designed to have a wide appeal, so that hopefully millions of people will pay to see them. These most expensive movies are called blockbusters.
Special effects can add a huge amount to the cost of a movie, especially the newest CGI effects, but people have come to expect them and every blockbuster movie tries to outdo the last. Even in 2008, some movies cost up to $200 million to make.
Very successful movies can make many times that amount in profit, and that's why the studios keep producing them. This kind of movie will have a lot of promotion through television advertising, billboards and internet sites.
In blockbuster movies, there is usually a happy ending, in which all of the problems in the plot (story) are figured out or fixed and almost everyone (except the baddie) live happily ever after. Some movies have been so successful that the studios keep releasing more and more sequels, or movies with the same characters and basic plots.
At the opposite end of the scale to the blockbuster, there is the independent, art, or Indie movie. These are usually made by small movie companies, or even just a small group of people that do not have much money. An example is The Blair Witch Project, which cost only about $60,000, but which has so far taken perhaps $200 million in ticket and DVD sales. Movies like this are very unusual and usually become popular 'underground' (word of mouth advertising), so that they become cult, or popular but not mainstream.
Independent movies often tell more creative or unusual (strange) stories, or may have sad endings that do not appeal to the big studios, because they can not be sure how the public will react to them. They rarely make a lot of money, but if they are successful, the big studios will quickly try to get the people involved to sign a contract with them, by offering them a lot of money to make another movie. Often the new movie, with its big budget and its stars will be less successful than the first.
Holland
Holland is the name of a region in the western part of the Netherlands. Holland was a county of the Holy Roman Empire and later the leading province of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands (1581–1795).
Today, there is no country called "Holland". There are two provinces called "Holland" in the Netherlands: North Holland () and South Holland (). Those provinces were created in 1840. The earlier country and province of Holland used to be bigger, but some parts of that province were given to other provinces during the French occupation (1795-1813). For example, Willemstad became part of North Brabant, the islands of Vlieland and Terschelling were given to Friesland, and the island of Urk to Overijssel. But for a short time during that period (1806–1810), there "was" a country called "Holland", the Kingdom of Holland, which was in the central and northern Netherlands and East Friesland in Germany.
Many people use the name "Holland" to refer to all of the Netherlands, including the other ten provinces. That is not correct and is like calling the United Kingdom, "England" or "Great Britain". Some Dutch people who do not live in Holland do not like it when people call the entire country Holland. But they don't mind using "Holland" when you mean the Dutch national football team, which they are used to calling "Holland".
Isotope
The atoms of a chemical element can exist in different types that have very similar behavior, but weigh different amounts. These are called isotopes of the element. Atoms of the same element have the same number of protons, but different isotopes have different numbers of neutrons. Different isotopes of the same element have different masses because they have a different number of neutrons. Mass is the word for how much substance (or matter) something has. Things with different masses also have different weights.
Some isotopes are not stable so they change to another isotope or element by radioactive decay. These are called radioactive isotopes. Others are not radioactive. These are called stable isotopes.
Atoms of the same element have the same number of protons, which is called the atomic number. Different isotopes of an element have different numbers of neutrons. As a result, they also have different mass numbers, which is the number of protons plus the number of neutrons. An isotope is usually named by giving the element and the mass number. For example, the symbol for carbon is C and all carbon atoms have 6 protons. The most common isotope of carbon also has 6 neutrons, giving a mass number of 12, and it is written carbon-12 or C. The isotope of carbon that has 8 neutrons is written carbon-14 or C.
The word "isotope", meaning "at the same place", comes from the fact that isotopes of the same element are at the same place on the periodic table.
In any neutral atom, the number of electrons is the same as the number of protons. As a result, isotopes of the same element also have the same number of electrons and the same electronic structure. The way an atom acts is decided by its electronic structure, so isotopes of the same element have almost the same chemical behavior, such as the molecules it can form. It is very difficult to separate the isotopes of an element from a mixture of different isotopes because of how similar this behavior is.
Heavier isotopes react chemically more slowly than lighter isotopes of the same element. This "mass effect" is large for protium (H) and deuterium (H), because deuterium has twice the mass of protium. For heavier elements, the relative atomic weight ratio between isotopes is much less, so the mass effect is usually small.
Some isotopes are not stable so they change to a different isotope or element by radioactive decay. These are called stable isotopes, or radioactive isotopes. The average time it takes an isotope to decay is called the half-life. Other isotopes do not decay so they are not radioactive. They are called stable isotopes.