Eadweard Muybridge
When I started my attempts at being an animator, one of the most cherished books I owned was a book about Eadweard Muybridge book which has series after series of photographs on how people walked ran jumped twirled and danced. It was awesome. Of course these days, you don’t have to actually buy a book to see this wealth of knowledge. Just point your browser to this website and learn away!
It’s interesting to note that all these photographs came about because of a bet…
Read on…
via Wikipedia:
In 1872, soon-to-be Governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether during a horse’s trot, all four hooves were ever off the ground at the same time. Stanford sided with this assertion, called “unsupported transit”, and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. (Though legend also includes a wager of up to $25,000, there is no evidence of this.) Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.[1] Muybridge’s relationship with Stanford was long and torrid, and it would ultimately prove to be his entrance and exit from the history books.
To prove Stanford’s claim, Muybridge developed a scheme for instantaneous motion picture capture. Muybridge’s technology involved chemical formulas for photographic processing and an electrical trigger created by Stanford’s electrical engineer, John D. Issacs.
In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford’s question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford’s racehorse Occident airborne during trot. This negative has not survived, although woodcuts made of it did.
By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiment, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of twenty-four cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse’s, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire which was triggered by the horse’s hooves.
This series of photos, taken at what is now Stanford University, is called The Horse in Motion, and shows that the hooves all leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse, as it switches from “pulling” from the front legs to “pushing” from the back legs.
-Mike Milo
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On June 28th, 2007 at 12:00 am
This is a great resource. There used to be another site like this with Muybridge’s photos as animated gifs, but I don’t think it exists anymore.
On June 29th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Muybridge’s real name was Edward Muggeridge.
He was famously acquitted for a murder that he almost certainly committed.
On July 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 am
One of the most amazing film experiments i’ve ever seen is the piece john dowdell did for the eastman house in rochester, ny. he took most of muybridge’s photos and exposed them in loop sequences and synched them up with phillip glass music. first of all, you’re seeing moving images BEFORE motion pictures existed - that would be awesome by itself. the glass music made it magic !