True motion pictures, rather than eye-fooling ‘animations’, could only occur after the development of film (flexible and transparent celluloid) that could record split-second pictures. French innovator and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey in 1880’s conducted some of the earliest experiments in this regard.
Marey, often claimed to be the ‘Inventor of Cinema,’ in 1882 constructed a camera or a “photographic gun” that could take multiple (12) photographs per second of moving animals or humans – called chronophotography or serial photography, similar to Muybridge’s work on taking multiple exposed images of running horses.
The term ‘shooting a film’ was possibly derived from Marey’s invention. Marey was able to record multiple images of a object in motion on a single camera plate in contrast to Muybridge who produced images on individual plates.
Marey’s chronophotographs (multiple exposures on single glass plates and on strips of sensitized paper – celluloid film – that passed automatically through a camera of his own design) were revolutionary.
Marey was able to achieve a frame rate of 30 images. Further experimentation was conducted by French-born Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince in 1888. Le Prince used long rolls of paper covered with photographic emulsion for a camera that he devised and patented. Two short fragments survive of his early motion picture film (one of which was titled Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge and the Roundhay Garden Scene)
The work of Muybridge, Marey and Le Prince laid the groundwork for the development of motion picture cameras, projectors and transparent celluloid film – hence the development of cinema. American inventor George Eastman, who had first manufactured photographic dry plates in 1878, provided a more stable type of celluloid film with his concurrent developments in 1888 of sensitized paper roll photographic film (instead of glass plates) and a convenient “Kodak” small box camera (a still camera) that used the roll film. He improved upon the paper roll film with another invention in 1889 – perforated celluloid.
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