Frank Percy Smith (12 January 1880–24 March 1945) was a British naturalist and early nature documentary pioneer, who explored time-lapse photography, microphotography, microcinematography, underwater cinematography and animation.

To supplement his income, Smith sold slides and gave natural history talks, accompanied by magic lantern displays of his own painted graphics.

The couple converted the conservatory of their house at 2 Kings Villas, Chase Road, Southgate, then in Middlesex, into a studio optimised for stop motion for time-lapse, which he called 'speed magnification'.

A contemporary reviewer wrote: The achievement of the Kineto War Maps is to place before one in concentrated form the true significance of various intricate and extensive operations.

In a few minutes, they make absolutely clear and comprehensible important facts which the average reader finds it difficult to grasp fully from the muddle of official communiques and unofficial comments.

Better than any verbal explanations these animated diagrams assist one to gauge the exact value and meaning of involved military evolutions which are often so perplexing to the lay mind when dealt with in the ordinary manner.

He began a series of animated films for children under the title Bedtime Stories of Archie the Ant, of which three episodes (Bertie's Cave, The Pit and the Plum, and The Tale of a Tendril) were abandoned in an unfinished state in 1925.

In 1922 producer Harry Bruce Woolfe recruited Smith for his British Instructional Films series Secrets of Nature.

In 2016 Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith[15] was released by the BFI in a combination DVD and Blu-ray set.

Also on the disk are eight Smith originals: The Birth of a Flower (1910), The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911), The Wonders of Harmonic Designing (1913), Plants of the Underworld (1930), Nature's Double Lifers - Ferns and Fronds (1932), He Would A-Wooing Go (1936), Lupins (1936), and The Life Cycle of the Newt (1942).