Precursors of film
[1] For instance: the flip book, zoetrope and phenakistiscope are very tactile devices that allow study and play by manipulating the motion by hand, while the projected image in cinema is intangible.
Early motion picture shows were often screened in existing theatre venues and accompanied by live narration, music, and sound effects, thus combining the new medium with theatrical traditions.
Many early films by Edison's company, Max Skladanowsky and other pioneers, consisted of popular vaudeville acts performed in front of a camera instead of an audience.
A few years after the introduction of cinema, movies started to deviate more and more from live performances when filmmakers became creative with the unique possibilities that the medium provided: editing, close-ups, camera movements and special effects.
[6] Some ancient sightings of gods and spirits, especially in temple worship, are thought to possibly have been conjured up by means of camera obscura or proto magic lantern projections.
In a more elaborate daytime use of the camera obscura Della Porta proposed to project hunting scenes, banquets, battles, plays, or anything desired on white sheets.
Trees, forests, rivers, mountains "that are really so, or made by Art, of Wood, or some other matter" could be arranged on a plain in the sunshine on the other side of the camera obscura wall.
[13][14][15] Although there seem to be few records of the camera obscura being used for such elaborate spectacles, the scarier kind of "magic" was probably more or less commonplace by the start of the seventeenth century, mainly with actors portraying the devil, demons, witches or ghosts.
This was a primitive projection system with a focusing lens and text or pictures painted on a concave mirror reflecting sunlight, mostly intended for long distance communication.
Moving images were possibly projected with the magic lantern since its invention; Christiaan Huygens' 1659 sketches for slides show a skeleton taking his skull off his neck and placing it back.
These usually involved parts (for instance limbs) painted on one or more extra pieces of glass moved by hand or small mechanisms across a stationary slide which showed the rest of the picture.
[22] Magic lantern slides with jointed figures set in motion by levers, thin rods, or cams and worm wheels were also produced commercially and patented in 1891.
It was quite common that a showman would provide dramatic narration, while occasionally pulling a string or operate another type of simple mechanism to change backgrounds, move figures around, or introduce new elements.
The stroboscopic disc was followed by other animation toys, such as the zoetrope (1866), the flip book (1868) and the praxinoscope (1877), before its basic principle became the foundation for the apparent motion in film technology.
A later limelight variation was demonstrated to the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1853, with plans to construct a similar apparatus with 100 lenses for 100 images to create a circa 30-second "moving tableau".
[32][33] Thomas Ross developed a small transparent phénakisticope system, called Wheel of life, which fitted inside a standard magic lantern slide.
Eventually the idea reached instrumentmaker Jules Duboscq, who since 1850 very successfully marketed a stereoscope with lenses in collaboration with David Brewster (he also sold Wheatstone's version with mirrors, became the French publisher for Plateau's Fantascope and offered a projector on wheels for phantasmagoria, among many other optical instruments).
In 1851, Antoine Claudet wrote to French magazine La Lumière in response to a patent given to the Mayer brothers for their "multiplicateur", which photographed multiple (identical) images onto a single plate (a technique that created the carte de visite format that was very popular in the 1860s).
He then introduced two methods to animate stereoscopic pairs of images, one was basically a stereo viewer using two stroboscopic discs and the other was more or less similar to the later zoetrope (but in a vertical position with horizontal slits).
The first was an anaglyph method with red and green glasses, the second used the stroboscopic principle to alternately present each picture to the corresponding eye in quick succession.
35,317 for the kinematoscope, a device that exhibited "stereoscopic pictures as to make them represent objects in motion" on glass plates, linked together in a chain, and mounted in a box.
The demonstrated picture sequence was photographed with wooden models, with a bit of white wool round a bendable wire representing smoke coming from a cottage chimney, a paper flag and mill fans of wood.
Apparently without knowledge of previous developments in the field, Herschel believed the "phenakistoscope" (sic) could very well be adapted into a viewer for stereoscopic motion photography pairs.
[58] On 2 May 1861, while working near Paris, Henri Désiré du Mont filed French patent 49,520 for "a photographic device for reproduction of the successive phases of movement".
An article in Scientific American concluded "It is already possible, by ingenious optical contrivances, to throw stereoscopic photographs of people on screens in full view of an audience.
Donisthorpe announced in the 24 January 1878 edition of Nature that he would advance that conception: "By combining the phonograph with the kinesigraph I will undertake not only to produce a talking picture of Mr. Gladstone which, with motionless lips and unchanged expression shall positively recite his latest anti-Turkish speech in his own voice and tone.
[60] Jules Janssen developed a large photographic revolver to document the stages of the transit of Venus in 1874, regarded as an important method to determine the Astronomical Unit (the distance between Earth and the Sun).
A press demonstration on June 15, 1878 at Stanford's stock farm in Palo Alto, California convinced everyone attending (especially when an accident caused by a broken strap was documented in the negatives).
Inspired by Janssen's photographic revolver, Étienne-Jules Marey developed a chronophotographic gun in 1882, which was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, recording the different phases of movements onto a single plate.
Many people working in the field followed the international developments closely through information in periodicals, patent filings, personal contact with colleagues and/or by getting their hands on new equipment.
