Friday 4th February 2011
Self-Directed Study
Remembering I had recorded the BBC Imagine series that featured Muybridge I took to finding it off the digital planner & I had kept it for reference. Although I missed the start of the broadcast it still recorded enough to get a feel for the story of Muybridge & the influence he had & still has on the work of artists/photographers and animators still today.
Eadweard Muybridge
Featured in The Pixar Story, was a scene familiar from last term.
It was a shot of the Zoopraxiscope.
The zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures. Created by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879, it may be considered the first movie projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892-94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand. Some of the animated images are very complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement. The device appears to have been one of the primary inspirations for Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson's Kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system. Images from all of the known seventy-one surviving zoopraxiscope discs have recently been reproduced in the book Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest (The Projection Box, 2004).
Extract from the BBC Imagine website.
Pioneer photographer, forefather of cinema, showman, murderer - Eadweard Muybridge was a Victorian enigma. He was born and died in Kingston upon Thames, but did his most famous work in California - freezing time and starting it up again, so that for the first time people could see how a racing horse's legs moved. He went on to animate the movements of naked ladies, wrestlers, athletes, elephants, cockatoos and his own naked body, projecting his images publicly with a machine he invented and astounding audiences worldwide with the first flickerings of cinema. Alan Yentob follows in Muybridge's footsteps as he makes - and often changes - his name, and sets off to kill his young wife's lover. With Andy Serkis as Muybridge.
The Foundations of Cinema?
The attitudes of Animals in motion, Leland Standford
Turned to art to prove a scientific point.
Does he deserve the credit for the pictorial representation of movement?
Muybridge’s Experiments
Among the first applications of chronophotography were the investigations conducted in Paris by Professor J. Marey around 1870, which related human and animal motion by means of various mechanical devices. He called the photographic records chronographs. An American racehorse owner, Governor Leland Stanford of California, doubted the results of some of Marey’s investigations into the locomotion of racehorses—in particular the hypothesis that there was one instant when a trotting horse had all of its feet off the ground simultaneously. E. J. Muybridge, an English photographer living in San Francisco, was commissioned to confirm Marey’s findings.
Too Late! L
Looking on-line I just came across the exhibition that ran until the 16th January at Tate Britain. If I had known I would have loved to attend. Really pissed off! I’ll have to make to with the exhibition guide
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/eadweardmuybridge/room1.shtm
Other Muybridge Related Links:
Links to artists:
Jean-Louis-Ernest-Meissonier
Edgar Degas
http://www.impressionniste.net/degas_edgar.htm
