Early development of Film, Photography and Animation

Approximately 50 thousand years ago it is believed that cave men started to create still images in cave walls using minimal resources, lit torches, grease and dirt and sometimes even their own excretion.

 These images are very accurate as the cave men had to remember the image to full detail as they cant draw it before-hand or bring the animals with them, in some cases they even drew multiple images on top of each other to create movement.

Here is an example of the cave men drawings:

 

 

Much later on in time, around the 1600’s a man invented an item called the ‘magic lantern’ this is a projection device that has a concave mirror that receives light then projects it through a slide obtaining the image, the light goes through the lens and enlarges the image onto a plain wall.

These devices were used when telling stories so that the listener can have their story illustrated, sometimes they even had another image slide onto the projection to form a transformation.

The magic lantern required a funnel for the smoke to flow out, fire to produce light, however sometimes were inefficient to power the projection, and a lens to blow up the image onto the area.

This is an early picture of the magic lantern:

This is a modern day projector; to this day they still resemble the magic lantern and work in a very similar way.

Around 1825 a new device was invented called the thaumatrope,

This is an image with string attached to it, when you spin the image the two images combine with the persistence of vision, (an illusion if you like) where your eyes remember the last image you looked at and memorise an outline then

form both images together.

Here is an example of the images that flicker together;

In 1833 a modern version of the zoetrope  was created, a zoetrope is a device in a drum shape that contains replaceable strips of images, you look through a slit in the drum that is focused on just one part of strip and then when you spin the drum the image looks as if it is moving. 

Photography was first invented in 1840 to capture a still image of a person, exposion time was usually around 5 minutes so the person being photographed had been put in a head brace, most of the time photos were taken of dead as they didn’t move and to remember them with a picture, and sometimes the’re were dead babies.

Eadweard Muybridge, was the first man to create a moving image using 24 trip wired cameras and a galloping horse, he created this because he saw an advertisement in a newspaper saying” if anyone can tell me how many hooves on a horse touch the ground at full gallop I will give you $2000” so Eadweard decided to capture a galloping horse and prove it to this man and get his money,

Eadweard immigrated to the United States to express his photography, he made a very famous picture of Yosemite valley California

This photo that Eadweard took made him very famous, especially as it was he sitting on the edge looking over.

The hand cranked camera was a device used to capture images at a pace, the crank must be turned at the right speed otherwise it would seem the people are moving too fast or too slow, most of these cameras where hand held but most professional ones where used on tripods.

The first movie created was a train entering a train station, it doesn’t seem like much but at this time people were very fascinated, but after a while people got quite bored of the basic movies so a guy called George Melies changed things

George Melies was a French illusionist and film creator famous for creating double exposure movies where it would show him standing with his head on a table using two layers, he also started to create narratives so the films had stories behind them so they were entertaining to watch.

Willis O’Brien was the first guy to really develop stop-frame animation; he created the film well known King Kong, and the lost world. During this time he also competed in rodeos and developed an interest in dinosaurs while working as a guide to palaeontologists in Crater Lake region.