The Motion Picture, Part 1

on to the motion picture. And I wanted to start with a question that might be a stupid question, but it's something that I often think about when I go to the movies, and it's that when you go to the movies, you sit down to see a motion picture. The basic media that you're viewing is a succession of still images that are perceived by the brain, is continuous visual motion and audio that accompanies it. And so that in itself is pretty neutral, right like that that it

could show you any number of sights and sounds. But what we came to view for some reason as the motion picture, the thing you go see in a theater most of the time these days, is something like a visual novel or a visual short story. It's like a story shaped thing, and then you watch it for an hour and a half or two hours and then it's over.

And obviously there are lots of exceptions to this, and if you want to expand a video you I mean, god, I mean, there's a whole pool of different kinds of content out there, But the things we think of as movies are these stories. And I wonder why that is. Well, I mean, there's a lot of we said about just the importance of storytelling in human culture or something we've

talked about on Stuff to Blow your mind recently. I think that's that's a major factor, Like what do we what do we do with our art and our technology while we do human things? We we tell stories for starters. But it's interesting when you go back to the earliest days of the motion picture, I feel like you get a sense back then that it wasn't always necessarily gonna be this way, because yeah, it's some of the the

examples we're going to discuss in this episode. You see the more of the scientific direction of motion picture, the way that motion picture can be used to to unravel what is actually going on in the world, to to

slow it down and to better understand it. Yeah, to either present kind of a non story based visual spectacle to just kind of show you a succession of things happening, or to study, Yeah, to study the world and get a closer look at it, maybe to see it in a kind of slow motion that you wouldn't have seen before.

So you're you're wondering if there's perhaps like an alternate reality where it, say, documentary is the primary Like when someone says, hey, do you want to come over to our house and watch a movie, you just assume documentary, and then if it's a fiction film, you're like, oh, it's not a documentary, how surprising, or things that might

be called like art films. Now, I mean, there are a million different ways you could show somebody a succession of still images simulating motion and accompanying sound, and it would not like, you know, there's an infinite variety of things you could do there that wouldn't be a story that some somewhat simulates the structure of a novel. Yeah, or or I mean there of course, there are plenty of examples of things like say, live sporting events also

presented via the medium of essentially the moving picture. Yeah, Well, maybe then this just has more to do with with our categories, like the things that we end up calling movies because as you know, as we mentioned a minute ago there there's there's an whole internet full of video content that you wouldn't call movies, but it's it's something, right, yeah. Uh. But you know this, this does get to the heart of what we're talking about here and what we've been

talking about with the evolution of photographic technology. How it how we see that the technology grow advance, then spread out and and and become you know, not merely the technology of elite individuals, but the technology of the man,

and then how that inevitably changes everything as well. Exactly. Now, one of the things that we have been talking about in our history of photography here is how the invention of photography was sort of part of a quest for ever increasing realism in imagery, right that that was something

that Louis de Guerre was concerned with. He wanted to create more and more realistic paintings, first working on his panoramas and the diorama, like taking the art of painting to two new heights of realism and simulating real scenes, and of course the next step beyond that is directly just transferring the light reflected off of things onto a

permanent record. But of course, as we were talking about, fixed images are also sort of a simulation because reality is never a fixed image, right, We we see a fixed image and it kind of implies motion, right, Yeah, there's this this wonderful blurring that kind of takes place

in our imagination. Yeah. Just I mean, just think about the ways that people had to be put in the Iron Maiden in order to have their portrait taken in the earliest Guera types, because you know, you had a exposure of several minutes and you couldn't move your face, and so how natural is that a representation of a person. Uh So the real way to get reality even more, to get even closer to the experience of just looking at the world, would be to record continuous imagery. Yeah.

This there's a particular type of video portrait. I think probably a number of people have probably seen it utilized in the film Baraca that came out many years ago. I haven't seen it, Oh you should. It's a you know, fabulous and beautiful cinematography. Um just you know, scenes of life and tradition and ritual around the world. But they're these wonderful scenes where it's just an individual staring into the camera and and you're just kind of locking eyes

with them, and it feels it feels very intimate. It's you know, it's essentially a motion portrait. That is interesting. I wonder why that didn't catch on once we had photo and video technology as the new form of portrait. You had painted portraiture, then you had photo portraiture. Why not video portraiture. So up on the wall, there's Grandpa. They're just on a continuous loop of about ten minutes of looking into the camera. Well that's what they have

in the Harry Potter world. There do not seem to really be any stationary photographs. All photographs are these motion portraits. So their ahead, Yeah, they are aheading. We don't lack. The technology is just that doesn't seem to be what people want when they're in their portraiture. Alright. So yeah, as as we've been discussing, some of the predecessors to the motion picture are are very much the photographic technologies we've discussed before. But but but some things are not

really directly related to that technology. And then we also really need to discuss some key phenomena that play into the experience of motion picture viewing. Right, These would be neurological and brain brain phenomena. Psychological phenomenon also, and one of these phenomena has historically been referred to though it's

a problematic concept. We can discuss a little bit as as persistence of vision, and other relevant phenomena that I think we'll have to mention are known as beta motion and the five phenomenon, which we will collectively call a parent movement or a parent motion. Right, So as we proceed, we'll we'll kind of like catch up on all of that. Yeah, but let's let's start with this idea of persistence of vision. Okay,

so how do we think about motion pictures? Well, when when when it's really good, we often don't think about it at all, do we? Well? Yeah, I mean that's what they say is the best director of a film is the one who creates a film where you don't notice the direction, Like you're not picking out technical elements, I mean unless you're really looking for them. But it's the person who creates the film that is pure experience, right, You just get lost in the action, the emotion, the wonder.

But even if we're say a little bit bored or checked out during a movie, or a TV show. We may think of these things as well. We might just think of it as a massive production or a work of our We might kind of take it apart in these different directions, right, Like, I wonder how they shot this, So this is this is a pretty pretty long take. I'm bored, but I'm admiring the all the work that went into making it. But we're probably not thinking of

the film that we're viewing as visual stimuli. That exploits a loophole in the way that we process images, right, But that's exactly what it is. It's taking advantages of sort of particular facts about the way our eyes and our brains work to make us have the illusion that we're looking at continuous images when actually we're when we're looking at a succession of still images that do not

move at all. That's right. So, persistence of vision is is the retention of a visual image for a short period of time after the removal of the stimulus that produced it. The human brain can only process ten to twelve images per second, retaining an image for a for up to a fifteenth of a second. If a new image comes along within a fifteenth of the second, it

creates an illusion of continuity. Yeah. Now, in the nineteenth century, persistence of vision was originally sort of believed to occur because images lingered on the retina for a short period of time after you see them. But I think that's not exactly believed to be the true cause of the

experience of persistence of vision. Now, it is true that fast successions of still images are processed in the brain as continuous motion or you know, as as a single experience, and not as a a succession of images, but not because the retina functions like a camera taking snapshots that can be measured in frames per second, where they stack up if they come fast enough. I think the idea there was that you'd sort of blend one frame into another, uh,

that persists as new frames are sensed. But our modern understanding of vision as as perception is less like a camera taking snapshots and more kind of like an integrated sensation that involves the brain as much as the eyes. So even though the original understanding of persistence of vision might not be exactly technically correct, I think it's still useful as a metaphor for one way that the still image seems to flow smoothly from one moment to the next.

If these still images are projected fast enough, and it it's ultimately simulates continuous motion. Yeah. And so motion pictures were traditionally sixteen frames per second for silent films and then twenty four frames per second for sound films. And that seems to be kind of a low threshold of what we what is good enough for us to perceive

is continuous motion. Yeah. Anything anything less than that, and you're going to get into sort of a herky jerky stop motion kind of feel right towards then the herky jerkyman singing songs of love. Yeah. The the fire effect was originally defined in nineteen twelve by psychologist mac Max Verdheimer, and it's a He looked at it as a type of optical illusion of perceiving a series of still images when viewed in rapid session as a continuous motion. Yeah,

and this is one form of apparent movement. Unfortunately, it seems to me that these two concepts are apparently constantly confused. In writings on Photo History, I came across this because I was getting confused reading about them when preparing for the episode. Uh So. In in writings on vision Perception, and film scholarship. The definitions of beta movement in five effect seem kind of blurred together, as documented in a

two thousand paper published in the journal Vision Research. So it took me forever to figure out what was going on here, and I was glad to find out it wasn't just me. Now here's the short, simple version both of these two phenomena, the FI effect and beta movement, they enable us to see various kinds of illusory motion in successive still images, but they referred to different speeds

of projection and types of visual sensation. And to the best of my understanding, it appears to me that what's taking place in our perception of films is more related to what's known as beta movement. But either way, it's the brain's tendency to interpret certain types of changes in successive static images displayed at the right speed as smooth

continuous motion. So, for example, if you see successive still images in which three dots are changing position on a black background in between the images, if you project them fast enough, we don't see images one at a time, but we see a snake moving around. Basically, you know what happens when you make a little flipbook out of the corners of a of a document. Yeah, so, on its own, apparent movement is an extremely interesting phenomenon given

what it illustrates about the brain. It might be more mysterious and more interesting than we give it credit for, especially now that we're used to the idea of movies. But we've discussed it a bit on stuff to blew your mind before. In the context of forming a perception of the present moment in our sense of now, like apparent movement cited under the name of the fire effect can be demonstrated, for example, by rapidly flashing dots on

different parts of a screen. Uh. And if the flashes are timed and positioned correctly, we don't just perceive a dot flashing here and then a dot flashing there, but we perceive a single dot that moves between the locations of the flashes. And this is one of the many, many ways for us to realize that our vision is not a straightforward objective record of reality, but it's a world of sensation stitched together in the brain based on objective light data, but definitely not a one to one

representation of it. And just as a side note, because it's too strange and interesting not to mention. One really spooky effect here is the so called color fi effect. So what happens if you take this principle of two flashing dots perceived as a single dot in motion, and then you change the colors of the dots between flashes. If your brain perceived continuous motion when there was none, how does it handle the color change between the end

points of this path? You imagine you see the dot taking right, flashes here, then flashes there, but changes color in between. What what? What does the brain do there? Will? Studies show that people tend to perceive a change in the color of the dot about halfway along the path that it takes. So you flash a red dot, then you flash a green dot, and people see a dot zip from one place to the other and change color

from red to green about halfway there. But the really interesting question is how can you have seen the dot change color halfway there if it wasn't actually traveling and you didn't know what color the second dot would be until you saw it. Oh wow, Yeah, that that's that really forces you to rethink how we're perceiving now, how we're perceiving time exactly. It's so strange because it's like, for a split second your brain was able to predict to the future, but of course we know that's not

what happened. In fact, what this seems to indicate instead is that not only is our vision a stitch together impression in our minds that's not a one for one representation of reality, our perception of time from moment to moment is a stitch together simulation as well, such that, like our very perception can essentially be post addicted. What you think you see in one split second can be

changed by what you see a split second later. It's not until after you see the green dot that your brain forms your perception of the dot you saw halfway along its imaginary journey. So this means you're not just seeing with your eyes, you're seeing with your memory and with other cognitive functions of your brain. So it's it's

vision is not reality. Of course, it's an illusion mostly informed by reality, but it's sort of formed in a in a in an anti chamber of consciousness that's not quite there in your sensation, where things are quickly edited together for you to perceive. And of course all this is crucial in the way that movies work. Movies are not merely audio visual objects. They require quirks of the human brain to make sense and to feel like representations

of reality. Alright, we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to continue to discuss how of the motion picture works in our brain and then also some of the earlier models of this technology.

All right, so I've got a kind of weird proposition about film technology, and it is that film technology we should think of the earliest versions of it that originally evolved as a specifically human biotechnology, sort of like a medicine made specifically for the human body, rather than as a pure physical technology, because it has to do specifically with the human brain and the human eye. That's right.

This is something that I think is really mind blowing to to think about, because given the numbers we mentioned previously, you know, the human brain can only process ten to twelve images per second um and and you know, and then the way that the image will persist for the fifte the second. You might be thinking, well, what about animals? What about the various pets it we sometimes have hanging out in our living rooms while the TV is on.

You might wonder, well, can some animals not see television or films, or at least not see it the same way we do? Right? And then how do they see it? What would that be like just uh, to have different eyes, different visual processing. I was wondering about this and I found an excellent little article in Science Nordic and UH. In this particular article do dogs see what's happening on TV?

They talked to Auto rope Stad, an associate or at least then associate professor at the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science and UH. He pointed out that he would this would probably be like a strobe like torture show for for any for for various animals to try and watch or be forced to watch television um or a movie at least on an older television set. So they're they're

they're being visited by the herkee jerkyman basically. So. The article points out that while humans requires in this articles at sixty twenty images a second to perceive the illusion of films, dogs require seventy images per second. So it's really only been in the past decade or so that TV has become watchable to the canine audience. So at least for the you know, the vast majority of canines

out there. Yeah, my dog has never shown any interest in TV at all, even you know, our our more recent TV and I but I think that may just be because he's a snob. Because I was looking this up and uh, there is research indicating that dogs can recognize images, such as the images of other dogs and humans on modern digital TV screens. It just seems like some dogs don't really care. I also wonder about just like the senses and that are important to have given

an organism, because obviously dog can't smell. Yeah, that the dog sense of smell is is phenomenal, Like it they live in a different sensory realm Uh that it's really difficult for us to try to even imagine where it's. It's really like like odor first, and if you remove odor from the equation, they're just not going to be taken in by the illusion. But we're we we put all of our emphasis on visuals and then you know,

an audio second. Uh, we don't for the most part, we don't really care what the films would smell like outside of you know, a few smell a vision gimmicks here and there. For the most part, we're we're fine not smelling the film. Are we going to do an episode on smell a vision one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. I think it would be cool to do an episode where we talk about all the sort of failed inventions and innovations of of of

the movie theater industry. Uh, you know, getting into The Tingler and whatnot. The Tingler, Yes, fun film, The Tinkler. Um. But okay, so the dogs seventy images per second. The article points out that birds need a hundred frames per second to see. And while the article didn't mention cats, I have read elsewhere that they need a hundred frames

per second as well. Um and uh, and I have noticed that that our cat, she will all lot of times just not look at the television, but occasionally we'll put on these these HD bird watching videos on YouTube and she definitely perks up and gets into those. Now, part of that is listening. Of course, dads have have you know, amazing hearing, so they are you know, they're she's definitely listening to all these birds sounds. But then

she's also tracking the movements as well. Um. But you know, conceivably though this would not have been the case if you were playing bird videos in prior decades. Well, I think one thing we should keep in mind is that our while we can be fooled in this illusion of successive still images being interpreted as motion in our vision, um that all our sense are different. Senses are not all synchronized in how they perceive things. Uh, And they don't. They don't get fooled in exactly the same way as.

For example, I was reading somewhere that in the early days of film technology, when you would have like a hand crank film playback, people could deal with slight variations and speed at which the visual frames were coming, but they could not deal with variations in which the accompanying sound was coming. Yeah, I think back on on the like the the the varying levels of of video quality I've been willing to deal with, such as watching like half scrambled episodes of Tales from the crypt you know,

in in my my childhood. But but when it comes to audio, if there is audio present, like you needed to have a certain degree of fidelity. Now, all of this we we've discussed, then you can probably guess there are ways to get to these effects, to to exploit these phenomena and the human visual processing system without using

motion picture technology. Right, pote photographic motion picture technology, because I guess you could have different definitions of what motion pictures are, but like you could, there were things that were sort of like a movie before there was ever a photography based movie. Right. So the first thing we want to talk about here is just sequential images and sequential art, and we could easily do an entire episode on sequential art. I I, for instance, I highly recommend

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. If you're at all interested in comics and you haven't picked this up, uh, you definitely should. It's an insightful, uh comics based breakdown of all of this. So it it itself is in comic book form, and it discusses like how comics work, how they're composed, and its origins and sequential art. Can I admit a weird personal thing about my experience with comics,

And I don't know why I do this. Often when I read a graphic novel or read a comic book, I find that I have to go back several pages and look at the pictures because I get into a rhythm of just reading the text in each frame and only barely noticing what the image rey is. And I find I have missed important plot elements because they were subtle visual things in the images, and I it's like I don't pay enough attention to that, and if I don't make myself, I don't do it. Now, that's interesting.

I I've never experienced quite the same thing, but I do find myself, especially if I'm reading a book that's particularly gorgeous, I have to remind myself to go back and look at the images, just to to take them

in fully, because I'm I'm just kind of speeding. I'm speeding through them, and I'm not really focusing on all the work that went into each frame, which if you're dealing with, you know, with with some of the again, the more gorgeous graphic novels out there, I feel like I'm doing a disservice to the book and and and also I'm not getting my money's worth out of it, right, Yeah, I know I feel that sometimes too, And I don't

know why I have that tendency. I Mean, it would seem almost obvious and automatic that you should pay attention to the images, but sometimes the brain just doesn't work that way. Maybe maybe this book you mentioned would help. Yeah, I, like I said, I think it's a wonderful breakdown of comics and it's uh, it makes you appreciate them all the more. But it does get in a little bit

into the history of sequential images sequential art. Uh. We should probably just summarize a bit and point out that the modern comic book, like what you're probably thinking of a comic book, and our idea of comics itself, largely this came out of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So some of the earlier forms actually pre date the motion picture,

such as the French comics of the eighteen thirties. Um. Now, when you're going further back than that, when you're when you're asking yourself, well, what are the oldest examples of sequential art, I think about the fart scrolls, the fart scrolls. Oh, yes,

the Japanese farts and evil Japanese fart scrolls. I guess they're not necessarily always sequential, but but no, um, that is one of the one of the areas you can end up going is not not so much the fart scrolls themselves, but but the use of scrolls in Eastern traditions, illustrated scrolls, yeah, scroll paintings in India, scroll paintings in

in East Asia, and Chinese traditions. There are there are also some traditions in which the scroll is presented umm, almost like uh, you know, a scrolling picture where it is it's there's there's a performance art to it as well. It's not just hey, look at these scrolls. It's like, gather around, we will present to you the scroll, um, and you know in the and so these are you know, epic paintings where you you just you know, scan your

eyes across you you take it all in. So this doesn't in any kind of optical illusions since simulate motion, but it does allow you to cognitively put the motion together in your head. Right, Yeah, there's But then again that does get kind of difficult to write because we are creatures of the motion picture era making sense of sequential art and potential examples of sequential art from the past. So there are a lot of these examples where it

depends on who's who's arguing which side. For instance, looking at some of the uh, you know, the the the ancient cave illustrations, some make the argument that, well, we're looking at some form of sequential art. Others say absolutely not. The bio tapestry is another example where some make the argument it, yeah, what you're looking at here is sequential art, grizzly medieval sequential art. But again, in all of this,

there is no actual illusion of movement. You know. I was just thinking that, on one hand, it makes sense too to just naturally sort something like an illustrated scroll or a comic book into a different category than than like a modern motion picture with a high frame rate, because one, at least, it seems to me, we just automatically perceive as continuous motion through this optical illusion, like

the beta movement type things. Uh, and and that's just automatic and immediate, and whereas this other type of thing like a scroll or a comic book with successive images requires cognitive effort in the imagination to piece together into a visual narrative that seems continuous. I do assume that

that's probably a difference that's hardwired into the brain. But I wonder, I mean, I wonder what sort of role conditioning and and sort of a culture of imagination in place there that if you don't have things like movies, if something like a comic book or a scroll with successive images could, through a sort of culture of imagination practice, feel more like a movie does to us, with like this kind of automatic conjuring of continuous visual sensation. Does

that make any sense? Yeah? Again, this is one of those areas where you can you can really work kind of think yourself into a into a circle when you start trying trying to decipher how you are actually absorbing any particular form of media. You know, because you're getting into the you know, you're reading an action scene in a book and you're picturing it in your head um, and then you're then you're watching an action scene. You're

reading an action scene on a comic book page. There's something similar going on, but with more visual data to inform what's happening in your mind. I read a book a couple of years ago called What We See When You Read? And I think the author's name was Peter MENDELSSOHND or something like that. But I thought it was a really interesting book. Basically it was just a sort of artistically put together extension of this question of what do you actually picture in your head as you read

a piece of fiction. How does the imagination work? Um, Because we have this idea that like, Okay, when I read a book, I see the character, but it keeps asking all these probing questions about what exactly is it that you think you see? How do you see it? And it really makes you start to question the the experience of your own imagination. It's almost like the imagination can start to feel like a second order illusion within your mind. Yeah, and and I feel like I had

my own experience. It's it's changed a lot over time. Like when I first started reading like full blown novels as a kid, I went to great lengths to sort of cast it in my head and decide I did like what actors were playing what characters, and then I would like focus on a consistent casting throughout my reading of the book. But for the most part, I got

away from that as I got older. Now I'll only rarely do that, or or if there's some sort of film adaptation of a book or something, perhaps that'll kind of infect my my thinking along it. Um. I also remember there was a time when if I watched anything animated and then went and read a book, I would end up seeing an animated and and it would always kind of discourage me from reading. I'm like, I'm gonna I'll read this tomorrow when the cartoons are out of

my head. But I don't really experience that anymore. I wonder if does does the animation or the live action take precedence when you've seen both, Like, do you so you've seen live action and animation of the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, just one have precedence in

your mind? It's It's weird because this is a great example, because there was a time, like the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, I went to great pains to not think about the animation right, and then in rereading The Hobbit to my son Um, I kind of forced myself to and I think by just distance, by having not seen them in a while, I was able to avoid like summoning just the images from the Peter Jackson films and hopefully kind of have something in between,

something that we just kind of emerged more from from my mind as opposed from these visual adaptations. I guess there's some elements that are easier to dash than others, because I feel like I could read Lord of the Rings without picturing most of the stuff from movies, except like Christopher Lee would be stuck there. Yeah, I couldn't. I couldn't have any sorrow moan but him. Here's another example. Um the Name of the rose By and Berto Eccho. The first time I read it, uh, like uh in

high school. I think I was a big fan of the film adaptation, which I had seen previously. So of course I pictured brother William as being Sean Connery. But that's not really how he's described in the book. He's they say he's extremely tall and thin with red hair. I believe. Yeah. So when I reread it, uh, And

this was several years ago. But during that I actually had to I went to great pains to focus myself and not picture Sean Connery, but instead to picture something more along the lines of, say Jeremy Bratt or maybe Jeremy Irons. You know, someone who has actually played Sherlock Holmes, or has you know, something more in line with with the like the field of a Home's character. Okay, I feel like we've gotten really far field. I think it's my fault. We should get back to simulations of the

h of movement. Simulations creating this illusion of continuous motion uh, I guess after just mere sequential art, when they're started to be devices that could rapidly show us images, that would that would more automatically simulate motion. And one of the crazy things about these, uh, these these these technologies we're gonna discuss here is that they all emerge from the same time period. They're all products of the photographic era and and and products of the the birth of

the motion picture. Well, yeah, I mean this is a time when people were thinking about the science of imagery and vision, not just in the invention of the photograph. And I remember it was in the eighteen thirties that Louis de Gerret and Henry Fox Talbot were inventing their their photography methods, like the Digera type and the what would eventually become Talbot's Cala type method. It was in

eighteen thirty nine that they both announced them. So in eighteen thirty two, that is when we see a little invention that was known as the finn akistoscope. Yeah, and so you you may have seen one of these in a museum or perhaps you own one yourself as a

toy or a collectible. But it's a spinning cardboard disc attached vertically to a handle and in position radially around the center of the disk center, you have a subsequence of images that, when rotated and viewed through slits on an opposing disc, this creates the illusion of movement, like a very simple animation. Generally it's something like an individual jumping rope or an animal running, that sort of thing,

a person walking. Another example of this, pretty much the same device is the zoo trope from four, a cylindrical variation of the previous invention with viewing slits on the side, so it looks like a drum, and you rotate it and you stare through, and again you watch a very simple animation unfold. And these two you'll find them in a lot of like hands on science museums, you know,

around the world. Yeah, and to be clear again, in the zoo trope, it's still images, but because you view them spinning rapidly, and because you view them in these slices through the slits, it simulates the continuous motion, but it doesn't perfectly simulate it. It's a little bit jerky. And one thing that's cool about that is that it creates a kind of creepy effect. I was going to mention that there are several scenes with a zootrope in the horror movie The Conjuring Too, where the one of

Patrick Wilson. Well, he's in all the Conjurings, I think at least the first two. The second one is the one where he sings an Elvis song for some somebody thought that was a good idea, but uh, there's a sea where Patrick Wilson stares into one of these zootropes. He's looking through the slit says the thing is spinning, and he watches this strange man in a bowler hat and an umbrella walking around until suddenly, like there's a jump scare. A boogeyman with bad teeth does a jump

scare on Patrick Wilson. But it's actually a very effective sort of set piece object for a horror film because there is a way in which it's obvious and not quite Their simulation of smooth motion is unsettling. I can't think if I've seen it used in another horror movie. Maybe it has been, but certainly other films have used the idea, if not of a zootrope, at least of a flickering presence or gait like I think of the

ghost in The Ring. Basically, I think any presence that is almost but not quite smooth and continuous the way modern films are tends to be perceived, at least these days, is creepy or horrifying. And this could have to do with a version of the Uncanny Valley effect, which we've discussed on a couple of episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind. But I it's clear that a lot of people perceive that type of motion or presence in a

flickering way as creepy today. Well, I know with Samara in The Ring, I remember correctly they filmed the actor walking backwards and then reversed the footage, so she's walking towards the camera, but the motion, like we can tell there's something weird about the motion, the way that her limbs are moving. Yeah, but there is also like a like a like a flicker, like there's a glitch in a VHS tape or something. Uh, And so that that's a weird. So there's the weird gate and there's the

flickering like you would see in the zootrope. I don't know if it would have been perceived as creepy in the same way back when these things were popular children's toys.

Maybe maybe not, I don't know. Now another case, and this is a a really fun case to consider, is the flipbooka um, and uh, you know it's easy, especially with hindsight, to assume that the flipbook was surely invented, you know, well before uh these pretty previous advancements, But there's no evidence that it was really I mean, I made them when I was a kid. You have to imagine that

people came up with this idea hundreds of years ago. Yeah, I mean you can you I would guess like, all right, well you need you need paper, so you need the printed word and then you just need somebody board enough to start drawing like a just a cartoon horse in the corner, and then flip through them to create the illusion of movement. Uh, you know, the kind of thing that we all did as children, uh, in various notebooks

and what have you. But yeah, when when you start looking at the history, it looks like, again, this is one of those things that, yes, it clearly could have been invented at any point, uh, in as long as that we had paper and uh, you know, and it was readily available. You know, we had some sort of flippable book at your disposal. But it seems like eighteen sixty eight is about as far back as we can

go the flip book. That is when uh, British printer John Barnes Lena patented a flip book and uh, and that's the oldest known documentation of the flipbook. And I think a few things are illuminated here. Again, as we've discussed in uh in previous episode, the dangers of hindsight in considering the history of inventions, also just the true impact of motion picture technology and the way it's changed

the way we think about images. And then of course the fact that for most of of of of history, paper wasn't something so readily wasted or even uh and even bound flippable books. I imagine we're too revered for, you know, for someone to make a bunch of scribbles in the corners, though I'm kind of surprised a monk never made one in the Middle Ages, like doing an illuminated manuscript, Well, it's entirely possible that it that it did and it didn't survive, Like that's possible, there's just

no evidence. Um. I think there have been some cases for certain sequential art in illuminated manuscripts, but not not a flipbook, nothing that creates the actual illusion of movement. That's really interesting. Yeah, hindsight bias exactly. All Right, I think we need to take another break, but then we will be back to discuss a little more about the technology that directly preceded the motion picture. Alright, we're back.

So when you think about a motion picture camera, in order to do what it does, it has to take a lot of photos in very quick succession that can be played back in very quick succession, right, in order to get the level of frame rate that actually looks like motion to our eyes. So how how do we get there? Like? What was there between the Daguero type or the Cala type, you know, these single exposure camera

shots and the actual movie camera. Yeah. I can't help but use the metaphor of of guns and weapons of war when thinking about them, because certainly a Daguerreo type would be kind of like an old timey canon, right, Who's a pain to load it, to aim it, to fire it, and then you'd have to go through the whole rigamarole of loading it again. Uh So you know you're you're dealing with with lengthy exposure times and some of the earliest cameras. Right. But but but as the

but from a motion picture camera. To function as a motion picture camera, you essentially have to have a machine gun. It's just just taking picture after picture after picture after picture. And so one thing that immediately occurs to me is that you've got to somehow deal with the change in the media on which it's recorded. Because the earliest photos were taken on on media that had to be sort of specially prepared and loaded up one at a time. How how how could you load a camera for rapid

exposures of many images? Yeah, and when we're talking rapid exposure, we're talking expacture exposure times of a fraction of a second, a long way from those hour long exposures that we were talking about and in previous episodes for photography, by eighteen seventy the exposure time was down to one second and ultimately one one thousands of a thousandth of a second, which is fast enough for for motion pictures of course, But how do you get all the like you obviously

you're not gonna be using like metal plates for that, right, Yeah, Well, so here's the here's the thing. One of the earlier approaches to this problem simply involved using multiple cameras. You know, think again about the cannon where you can't possibly create a single old timing cannon that's gonna fire uh six cannon balls in the space of a few seconds. It's impossible.

Get your six cannons. You get six cannons, you line them up, you have them, you know, you know, in the ship, right, and then you just fire them all off in succession. That's exactly the approach that was taken early on by photographers such as Edward my Bridge. Oh yeah, famous for the his running a Horse images from seven He used a battery of twelve cameras to pull this off.

And I guess we'll explain more about that in a minute. Yes, Now, before we came in here, Robert, you were you were telling me some strange details about the life of Edward my Bridge that I have never heard before. Yeah, I was. I was reading a little bit about him in the History of Photography by Beaumont new Hall and and um, my Bridge is a fascinating character. Um do you know

why he spells his name the way he does? Yes, so he wanted he wanted his name to sound more archaic because he was born Edward James, Uh Muggeridge and Uh. He wanted a fancier show name essentially, so it's Edward in his name is spelled like ed weird, yes, and then uh, and then my bridge is spelled m U y b r I d g E. So earlier in his life he was he was born eighteen thirty. He would die in nineteen o four, but earlier in his

life he was a bookseller. But then he sustained severe cranial injuries in a runaway stagecoach crash in eighteen sixty, which it was like a brutal accident, actually killed one of the passengers and injured just about everybody else too. But anyway, you know, severe cranial injuries required a good year of treatment uh, and he was forever changed by it. Possibly there's possibly the reason for some of his emotional and erratic behavior later in life. But during his recovery

he took up photography. Now and then this in photography is where he would he would really make his name. But as a there was just a note about a murder trial that took place in the history of photography, so I had to look into it a little bit more and the and this is the story. Basically, in eighteen seventy two he married Flora shall Cross Stone, but then he caught wind of a former lover that lived in the area and Major Harry Larkins, and he got it in his head that that that Larkins was the

father of Stone's son, Floredo. So my Bridge went to Larkins house, confronted him at the front door, and shot him dead on his doorstep. Yeah, uh he or he shot him and then he died later that day. At anyway, fatally shot him on on his doorstep. And so my Bridge was accused of the murder, and the defense ended up leaning on his previous brain injury, saying, look, you know he was in this horrible accident and it it

changed the way his his brain works. And and they brought in an expert testimony, They brought in people to speak to say, yeah, he was a totally different person before this took place. And they were going for, you know, an insanity plea, which I've read that that my Bridge apparently undercut this himself when when he was questioned. But at any rate, the judge ended up throwing out the insanity pla and then acquitted my Bridge on the grounds

of justifiable homicide. That was a different time. Yeah, it was, yeah, because clearly there was no questioning based on what I was reading that he killed this guy, he murdered this guy on on his doorstep. But but yeah, he was he was acquitted. Uh, and it was considered justifiable homicide. UM. It was an important case apparently because it serves as like an historic forensic neurology case and neurology forensic neurology neurology defense. Uh. It would also, by the way, go

on to become an opera. Philip Glass would compose an opera based on these events titled The Photographer. But It's just a yeah, really tragic episode. Uh. Flora petition for divorce, had to do it twice and was finally granted it. She died in eighteen seventy five, and then my Bridge had the son placed in an orphanage and Florida ended up working his entire life as a ranch hand and a gardener, and he himself died into in a pedestrian traffic accident. But but my Bridge had established himself by

this point as a as a photographic pioneer. Former Governor of California, Leland Stanford had commissioned him to photograph his racehorses. Work that was interrupted by the trial, but the resulting images were widely published for their detailed depictions of horse locomotion. And this was the idea of using multiple cameras set up in succession to to capture images very rapidly back

to back. Yeah, run the horse pass this battery of cameras, fire the cameras off, and then we can look and see are the horses legs actually all coming off the ground as it runs across the field. Apparently this is a controversy in the eighteen seventies, like people are are actually highly concerned to know whether the horses ever completely

airborne or always has at least one hoof on the ground, right. Yeah, And so these images were since it were a sensation, they were widely published for their detailed depiction of horse locomotion. And uh And in eighteen eighty my Bridge invented what he called a zoo gyroscope or a zoo practice scope to project his pictures on the screen. So you know, in all of this from capturing locomotion to projecting images.

He was highly influential. Like he he influenced a number of individuals who would go on to continue to to tinker with and uh and innovate uh motion picture technology. I'd heard about his his accomplishments in photography before, I had never heard about like the murder or any of this. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's a brutal and sad story because it's it's one of those where you're you're dealing again with with a brain injury as well, so it's not just

a situation. And I mean, we've talked a bit about this and stuff to blow your mind when you really start breaking down like neurological realities. A lot of our judgments about people's behavior are not so cut and dry, but this one I feel feels especially problematic. Um first of all because of the brain injuries is sustained, and then secondly because it's just like he clearly murdered somebody in cold blood and um and was acquitted. So it's uh, yeah,

I'd say it's a tragic, tragic episode. But like I said, he influenced a number of individuals, including in the eighteen seventies French physiologists Etna Jules Mara, who lived eighteen thirty through nineteen o four. Yes, the same the same years that that my Bridge lived, and they both died in May of nineteen o four, one week apart. So it's just pure dumb luck. It is one of those things that suggesting my Bridge did it. No, but it's one

of those things. When I was putting together my notes, I was like, oh, did I just write down the wrong dates for this individual's life because they're exactly the dates of the previous individual. No, they just happened to have been born and to have died in the exact same years. But anyway, Um Murray he invented what he would call the chrono photographic gun to capture the movements

of birds in flight. So he set out He's one of these individuals who, like he was really going after the science first, Like he was, he really wanted to to break down how a bird is flying, to capture the visual details that are that are happening too fast for the human eye to observe, and so he was developing the photographic technology to make it happen. Inspired by my bridges work with horses, and this is a wonderful contraption to look up, because it really did look like

a gun. Uh. It imprinted twelve photos a second on a rotating glass plate. Uh. And it had it had like a butt, you know, the shoulder, It had a trigger like it was it was it was built on the like the stock of a rifle. So there are these wonderful old illustrations of a of a gentleman, presumably Murray himself, you know, going down on one knee and holding up the uh, this fabulous photographic gun and aiming

it at birds in flight. And and with this device again, he's doing what my bridge did, but he's doing it with a single instrument, yes, with one camera. So this is a step closer actually to the idea of a movie camera. Right. Again, only twelve images here, So all he could do, and all he was setting out to do, of course, was to capture the movements of a bird. And uh and the and the the images that this uh,

this camera gun produced are are pretty impressive. Like they are taking locomotion that is happening at a scale that the human eye can't really perceive, in the human mind can't fully process, and it's breaking it down so that we can analyze it and this, uh, this continue to inspire that both of these cases continue to inspire other individuals to do the same thing with human locomotion, with

the locomotion of various animals. Uh, and you know, really taking on the scientific task of using this new technology to better understand what is transpiring in reality. Well, as we were talking about at the very beginning, it makes me imagine an alternate history in which movies come about, but they're only considered like a tool of documenting reality in order to study it, and they never get repurposed

into like any form of storytelling. Yeah, or you could imagine an alternate world where where it's prohibited, where where cinematic technology, photographic technology is only for uh, for science and truth, never for for for narrative, never for transformers. Alright, well, we're gonna go ahead and cut this episode off here, but we will be back to finish with a part two on motion picture technology. That's right, we'll get into

a great Edison rivalry that doesn't even involve Nikola Tesla. Yeah, but but yeah, Edison will definitely play a role, as will Kodak as as we set up in previous episodes, and and we'll discuss more about just the impact of like how how motion pictures were initially perceived and how people reacted to this in this new medium, and then again how it's just changed the way we understand reality in the passing of time and our our own sense

of self in the meantime. If you want to check out more episodes of Invention, head on over to in Invention show dot com. That's where we'll find all the episodes. If you want to discuss episodes of Invention, a really cool place to do it is to head on over to the old Facebook and look for the Facebook group um the Stuff to Blow Your Mind discussion module. That's where folks talk about episodes of Stuff to Bow Your Mind, which Joe and I also host, but also episodes of

Invention are discussed there as well. Big thanks to Scott Benjamin for research assistance with this episode, and to our excellent audio producer, Tor Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback about this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of

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