One thing that must be stressed heavily in this section is that the existence of movies, or cinema in general, did not (and I repeat DID NOT) get created by a guy with low self-esteem, working long hours one night, attempting to discover the law of the motion of the universe and then by some accidental move, discovered how to make pictures move.
No. Despite what the majority of movies show, THIS great idea did not come from one sudden light bulb moment. It came with plenty of trial and error. Year after year, attempt after attempt, and all the sweat, blood and tears happily included.
Unfortunately, it's beginning was not an extreme act of chivalry, like the discovery of a hidden code in a secret cave somewhere. But it was quite a process. So, I think, that in order for a movie nerd to become a fully educated movie nerd, we must start from the very beginning.
Where are my doodlers? My artists? My creators of anything creative at all...? If you fit into ANY one of these categories you have definitely seen this.
That's right. THE FLIP BOOK. Things just got real, y'all. Do you realize how awesome this is? Ok, check this out. The reason why a flip book even works (and your eyeballs don't just see them as individual pictures) is because when your eye looks at the picture, in the one mili-second that it takes your mind to process it, you have already flipped to the next page, eventually repeating the same process. This causes your mind to blur all the pictures together and create 'motion'. Now take that same concept and apply it to film! Think of a camcorder as being some incredibly fast camera. It may work very similar, only that it takes about 24 pictures a second, or it may even record the information, not as pictures, but as numbers. Either way, the pictures get blended to make the 'moving picture!' Ok, so thats how film works, but how did it start? Well the idea of somehow capturing motion was something that had been explored for decades, and even attempted in the forms of optical toys called the Phenakistoscope and the Zoetrope. Both of these work by putting several different pictures on a ring or circular platform, each picture then, has to be a consecutive motion of the previous one. When all is said and done, all you have to do is take your masterpiece and spin it! This will cause the images to blur with each other, as we talked about previously, giving the appearance of motion.
The beginning of film however, is not accredited to these optical illusion toys, but to a man by the name of Eadweard Muybridge. Yes. That really is his name. Honestly, I admire people from the old days, could you imagine having the 'norm' be names like Henrietta or Ottilie? How do you even pronounce that? Serious skills, wow. Eadweard Muybridge was an american photographer between 1872 and 1877. Britannica.com explains his story really well, so here it is: "...Muybridge was employed by Gov. Leland Stanford of California, a zealous racehorse breeder, to prove that at some point in its gallop a running horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once. Conventions of 19th-century illustration suggested otherwise, and the movement itself occurred too rapidly for perception by the naked eye, so Muybridge experimented with multiple cameras to take successive photographs of horses in motion. Finally, in 1877, he set up a battery of 12 cameras along a Sacramento racecourse with wires stretched across the track to operate their shutters. As a horse strode down the track, its hooves tripped each shutter individually to expose a successive photograph of the gallop, confirming Stanford’s belief. When Muybridge later mounted these images on a rotating disk and projected them on a screen through a magic lantern, they produced a “moving picture” of the horse at full gallop as it had actually occurred in life"
After him came a man named, Étienne-Jules Marey. He too took instant and continuous pictures of movement, however, he did it with one camera instead of several.
You must realize that the discoveries of Muybridge and Marey were soley for the purposes of scientific research, not the improvement of the arts. That came much later.
So. You may or may not know a guy by the name of Thomas Edison (Ok, scratch that. Everybody knows who he is.) and you may or may not know that he invented a machine called the phonograph, and the light bulb, and you know, irrelevant things.
What does that have to do with film? Absolutely nothing. But. It was in Thomas Edison's lab that the discovery of a 'moving picture' began to take shape as entertainment rather than science.
Thomas Edison hired a man by the name of William Kennedy Laurie Dickinson who invented the Kinetoscope.
"These were a device, adapted from the escapement mechanism of a clock, to ensure the intermittent but regular motion of the film strip through the camera and a regularly perforated celluloid film strip to ensure precise synchronization between the film strip and the shutter. Dickson’s camera, the Kinetograph, initially imprinted up to 50 feet (15 metres) of celluloid film at the rate of about 40 frames per second" (Britannica.com).
This machine sold for big bucks and was replicated to appear in places like penny arcades, hotel lobbies, and amusement parks. The Kinetoscope spread worldwide, and into the hands of the Lumiere brothers. These brothers took this invention and made several advancements to it, eventually creating the first commercially viable projector, also known as, the Cinematographe.
Fancy, I know. Unlike the Kinetograph which wighed about 1,000 pounds, the cinematographe weighted about 40, making it really lightweight and easily portable.
But, as usually happens, this discovery got old. People got used to it. Yes, it was still profitable, but it was not as widely pursued anymore. Then came the Vitascope, also an invention of Edison's, also known as, "Edison's Greatest Marvel". Basically a closer step to modern projectors today.