Development of early film

The first development of image and animation was the cave paintings produced over 50,000 years ago, these show animals being hunted and they show movement by faintly painting extra legs, this gave the effect of movement.

This picture shows an early cave painting of a boar, it shows lots of legs each one more faded then the next to show movement.

The magic lantern was invented in 1650; it consisted of a oil painting, a simple lens and a candle or oil lamp. In a darkened room, the image would appear projected onto a flat surface. It was often used to project frightening images in order to convince people that they were witnessing the supernatural. Some slides for the lanterns contained moving parts which makes the magic lantern the earliest known example of projected animation.

Thaumatrope was a simple toy used in the Victorian times (1824). A thaumatrope is a small circular disk or card with two different pictures on each side that was attached to a piece of string or a pair of strings running through the centre. When the string is twirled quickly between the fingers, the two pictures appear to combine into a single image.

Phenakistoscope (1831), it consists of a disk with a series of images, drawn on radii evenly spaced around the centre of the disk. Slots are cut out of the disk on the same radii as the drawings, but at a different distance from the centre. The device would be placed in front of a mirror and spun. As the phenakistoscope is spun, a viewer would look through the slots at the reflection of the drawings which would only become visible when a slot passes by the viewer's eye. This created the illusion of animation. This was similar to the zoetrope but instead of holding to the mirror you just spin it on the floor.

Edward Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. When he first went to America, he suffered an injury which causes brain damage and he was sent back to England to recover. Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs. Was commissioned by the United States Army to photograph the Modoc War in 1873. In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover. He travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875.

Georges Milies was a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. He accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick in 1896, and was one of the first filmmakers to use multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour in his work.

Jan Švankmajer

Born 4^th September 1934, is a Czech filmmaker and artist. He is a self-labelled surrealist known for his surreal animations. He was born in Prague; An early influence on his later artistic development was a puppet theatre he was given for Christmas as a child. He studied at the College of Applied Arts in Prague and later in the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He contributed to Emil Radok's film Doktor Faust in 1958 and then began working for Prague's Semafor Theatre where he founded the Theatre of Masks. He then moved on to the Laterna Magika multimedia theatre, where he renewed his association with Radok. This theatrical experience is reflected in Švankmajer's first film The Last Trick, which was released in 1964.