Research forInitial Assignment

Sarah Kavanagh 3809                   BTEC Creative Media Production                          01/09/14

Diplomas and Subsidiary Diploma: Initial Assignment

1. Joseph Plateau

Joseph Plateau was a physicist born in Brussels in 1801. He was the first man to display the illusion of a moving image. He was extremely intelligent from a young age, considered a child prodigy at the age of six for his reading knowledge. His parents were killed when he was fourteen years old and the trauma of his loss made him very ill.

In 1832, Plateau and his sons introduced the Phenakistoscope which is a spindle viewer. It was also invented independently in the same year by Simon von Stampfer who called his invention a stroboscope. As a famous Pioneer, Plateau had inspirations from other inventor’s work from Michael Faraday and Peter Mark Roget. The invention consisted of two disks that spun in opposite directions from each other.

At first it was a toy which was called the Faraday’s wheel until later he named it the Phenakistoscope.

On 27 August 1840 he married Augustine–Thérèse–Aimée–Fanny Clavareau: they had a son a year later, in 1841. His daughter Alice Plateau married Gustaaf Mensbughe 1871, who became his collaborator and later his first biographer.

He was such an influential man at the time and still is today, as he has made a massive impact toward animation. If it weren’t for his skills, we may not have the wonderful animation we now have today.

He died in Ghent in 1883 at the age of 81.

Links: Wikipedia, Animation Geek, Early Visual Media.

2. William Horner

William George Horner, born in 1786 was a British mathematician. He was a school master, headmaster and school keeper, who taught classics as well as maths. He wrote many documents on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, and also focused on optics. His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designation Horner's method, in particular respect of a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819. The modern invention of his zoetrope, under the name Daedaleum in 1843, has been attributed to him. 

A zoetrope is one of several pre-cinema animation devices that produce the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or pictures showing progressive phases of that particular movement/motion. The name 'zoetrope' comes from the greek words for 'life' and 'turning.'

The zoetrope consistes of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images form a set of sequences pictures or photographs. As it spins, the user sees a rapid series of images. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from merging together and the user is able to see the motion before their eyes. 

The zoetrope has been used in many hit films in including the famous children's film 'Toy Story' by Pixar Animation Studios. 

Horner died in England at the age of 51.

Links: Wikipedia, Encyclopedia, Film History.

3. Emile Reynaud

Charles-Emile Reynaud was born in 1844. He was a french inventor, known for creating the first animated cartoons. He created the Praxinoscope  in 1877 and the Theatre Optique in December 1888. He projected his first animated film in public, Pauvre Pierrot in Paris in 1892. 

The Praxinoscope - like the zoetrope, also used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. It improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, places so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. The pictures looked brighter and less distorted than the images that the zoetrope showed. 

Reynaud's late years were tragic after 1910 when his creations were outmoded by the Cinematograph. He was very poor and threw the greater part of his irreplaceable work into the Seine in a moment of anger. 

The public had forgotten his "Théatre Optique" shows, which had been a celebrated attraction at the Musée Grevin between 1892 and 1900. He died in a hospice on the banks of the Seine where he had been cared for since 29 March 1917.

4. Edward Muybridge

Edward Muybridge was the man who famously proved that a horse can fly! He proved this amazing theory by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras. The theory and the experiment that he carried out proved indisputably for the first time wheat no eye has ever seen before - that a horse lifts all four of its hooves off the ground at one point in its action of running. Seeking a means of sharing his groundbreaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his pictures as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.

Muybridge was British - born in Kingston upon Thames, U.K, but emigrated to the United States in the 1850s. He is probably one of the most influential photographers of all time, creating world-famous images of animals and humans in motion. 

Dramatically, he was accused of murdering his wife's lover, and a great scandal broke out.

Muybridge died at the age of 74, in 1904 in Kingston upon Thames.

Links: Tate Website.

5. Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was born in 1847. He was an American inventer and business man. He created many devices that have greatly influenced life today such as the phonograph, the light bulb and the motion picture camera. His nickname was 'The Wizard of Menlo Park' as he created so many interesting and modern inventions, and was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass, production and large scale team work to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. 

The key to Edison's fortunes was a telegraphy. With knowledge gained from years of working as a telegraph operator, he learned the basics of electricity. This allowed him to make his early fortune with the stock tickers, the first electricity based broadcast system. Edison patented the sound recording and reproducing phonograph in 1878. Edison was also granted a grand patent for the motion camera or "Kinetograph." He did the electromagnetic design, while his employee W.K.L Dickson, a photographer worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the credit for the invention belongs to Dickson.
Edison build a Kinetoscope in 1891, sometimes referred to as a peep-hole viewer; which was soon installed in many penny arcades for people to look through and watch short films.
The Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope were both publicly exhibited May 20th 1891.
Having achieved many things in life, Edison died aged 84 in New Jersey, U.S.A, a very influential man, who greatly impacted the world with his fantastic inventions.


Links: Wikipedia, American History, Encyclopaedia


6. The Lumiere Brothers


The Lumiere Brothers were named Auguste and Louis Jean and they were born in 1862 and 1864. They are credited to be the first film makers in history. The patented the cinematograph, which contrary to Edison's 'peep show' Kinetoscope, the former allowed viewing by multiple parties at once, like current cinema. Their first film, Sortie de l'Usine, shot in 1894, is considered the first real motion picture in history. Curiously, their surname is French for light!
It was not until their father retired in 1892, that the two brothers began making moving pictures. They patented a number of significant processes leading up to their film camera, most famously film perforations, as a means of advancing the film through the camera and the projector.