by: Stephanie Kubick
The beginning of film…
One of the world’s most used inventions would be the camera. The hunger for the ability to capture a precious moment, a monumental moment, or a simplistic memory guided man to a new form of technology. When the camera was made, it was a sensation. Finally, man kind was able to preserve a moment in time. Something to treasure. Something to look back on and remember the emotions and feelings that correlate with that moment.
Yet it was not enough.
Why couldn’t we capture motion? If we can capture a second in time, why cant we capture multiple? What good does one moment do, if in the next and the one after that, something better happens? Something more exciting. Something more special?
Eadweard Muybridge asked those questions in 1872 and decided to started experimenting. He “placed twelve cameras on a race horse track, spread thread across the track, and attached the thread into contact with a camera’s shutter. Once the horse ran across the track, it’s legs broke the threads, causing the cameras to operate in sequence. The ending results were 12 photos showing a horse’s gait. With an invention of his called the Zoopraxiscope, he was able to quickly project these images, creating what is known as motion photography and the first movie to ever exist.”
This was the beginning of everything we know of today relating to film. We have Mr. Muybridge to thank for our binges on Netflix, for our midnight premiers of the newest movie. Without him, where would we be?
Works Cited:
“Introduction to Film History.” History of Movie Making. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2016.
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