Motion Pictures Attempts to depict motion might be as old as Paleolithic cave paintings, where
7.2.4 Motion Pictures Attempts to depict motion might be as old as Paleolithic cave paintings, where
animals in motion were sometimes shown with extra legs superimposed. The 1912, Marcel Duchamp painting of Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 was a continuation of this tradition of superposition to give a sense of motion. Most children have seen the common “flip book,” featuring a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to be animated. Its success depends on the human physiology of “persistence of vision,” so that a rapid succession of pictures, preferably more than 20 per second, fuses into an appearance of continuous motion. Zoetrope is a wheel-of-life or magic lantern device that consists of a cylinder with many slits cut vertically in the sides, and gives glimpses of a sequence of drawings painted on the inside. When the cylinder rotates, such as by a stream of hot air from a candle underneath, an illusion of motion is produced. When a sequence of photographs taken in rapid succession is available, it can be displayed by the linear flip book or the cylindrical zoetrope as a one-second motion picture. The critical invention needed for longer motion recording was a mechanism to record the sequence of a greater number of images, and another mech- anism to project longer sequences.
In 1872, Leland Stanford asked Eadweard Muybridge, a noted photographer, to settle a question about a galloping horse—whether all four legs leave the ground at the same time, and whether at that moment the four legs are splayed far apart or bunched together under the belly. Muybridge developed a scheme for instantaneous motion picture with up to 30 photographic cameras placed 0.3 m apart, all facing a white wall. Between the wall and cameras was a series of strings, each of which triggered an electromagnetic shutter of the camera. With this elaborate setup, he recorded a horse galloping. After reviewing all these pho- tos, singly and with a machine, he showed that, indeed, all four hooves were off the ground and bunched together under the belly. He subsequently produced
11 volumes of publications containing 20,000 photographs of animals and humans in motion.
A satisfactory motion picture needs to record action at a minimum of
30 pictures/s, so that a movie that is only 1 min long would need 1800 pictures. If the individual pictures are only 25 mm long, the total length of these pictures glued together would be 45 m. In 1891, Thomas Edison patented the “Kinetoscope camera,” or a peep-hole viewer, which was installed in penny arcades for people to watch simple short films. The first motion picture was called Cinematographe, produced in 1892 by the brothers August and Louis Lumiere, and was shown in Paris in 1895. They introduced the iconic film perforations on the side of a film strip as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. The first movie film was 17 m long, which was hand cranked through a projector and ran for 50 s.