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Wobbly: the Muybridge weenie study

Part of the charm, or frustration, or Muybridge-ness of these stop-motion thingies is how wobbly it all is. Because these were NOT taken with a movie camera, because movie cameras did not even exist back then, perspective would change with each photograph, the grid would move jerkily, framing would tilt around crazily, and it all seemed to take place with an earthquake in the background.

I pasted this guy up merely to show that Muybridge was interested in the male organ. Or in the man with no clothes on, at least. There were not nearly as many weenie sketches, of course, as nubile young women with their breasts bouncing up and down. "That's it! Skip-a-rope, ladies, skip-a-rope!" I can't see him cheering on the weenie guy in quite the same way. 

One interesting thing Muybridge did, and I'm not going to make an animation of it even though I love Victorian gowns with corsets, is compare locomotion in fully-dressed women with that of nude women. The corset does not just "make the waist smaller", as people think. It makes the spine ramrod-straight, pushes back the shoulders, forces the breasts upwards and the hips down, while ruthlessly squeezing the middle, reducing it by several (or many) inches. It's impossible to slouch in a corset - in fact, it can't be done - and almost as impossible to bend down to pick something up. That was why they had to have servants back then.

Muybridge animation: more late-night madness

Worked on these, and worked on them, oh boy. To give you an idea of what I started with, here are the original images:

These had to be individually cropped apart, made exactly the same size, worked on to enhance to definition, then put through my gif program in correct order. Did it take a long time? Was it fiddly and difficult? What's good about all this is how completely absorbing it is. Donald Trump and climate change and jihad don't scare me any more than a package of Hostess Twinkies.

Is that good? I'm still trying to figure that out.

ONE more Muybridge gif. . .

 

Maybe not quite as exciting as I thought when I saw the original images:

For one thing, I had to leave off the last two images because they overlapped and created a jerkiness that destroyed the continuity. The aim is to make a continuous little cartoon loop or movie of the horse cantering. I came close, though it's not as smooth as I had hoped. The speed was a problem: I tried nearly everything before settling on this, a little faster than the fastest speed on my gif program. Really, it's OK if you don't mind a little bit of jerkiness.

I guess.

But this is the LAST ONE. All that copying and cropping is making me weary. Muybridge, not having heard of gifs, never had this problem.

Actually, though. . .

I changed my mind. This is great. Compared to the other Muybridge gifs I see on Google, it's at least as good, if not better. There's a little bump or jerk in the middle of the action that may or may not be due to different frame sizes or framing problems, but that's not something I'm willing to solve on a Sunday morning.

Oops, changed my mind.

This is another version I made, having sized all the frames to exactly 500 x 500. See much difference? I don't either. The "jounce" in the middle isn't quite as noticeable here. But those smudgy little blocks of square film aren't framed very well either, and don't lend themselves to clean editing.

But now that I look at them both. . .

No, there IS a difference, in that the jarring bump is more of a jounce. It's as if there's a missing frame that should have captured that motion in the middle, so it looks like the rider's neck elongates. How to capture a horse and rider in ten frames a second?

Challenge: Muybridge bird!

So here is the challenge. I've been experimenting with making little animations, flip-books or whatever you want to call it, on my gif program. Easy enough to do, but the only photos in sequence I can find are Muybridge animal/human studies. 

So what you do is start with this, a whole lot of small black-and-white photos on a gridwork background.

Then you start copying them. You'll need, for this one, only twelve copies. Then you crop out each individual photo from the sheet, and number it. 

Okay.

(some time later)

What you have is. . . 

And what you finally have is:

Not the smoothest animation, but flight is harder to capture somehow. A running animal seems to give the eye a sense of continuity, so that we fill in the missing frames. This one, well. . . It doesn't have the continuous motion of a horse running along a track, that sense of endlessness, since flight is so erratic and moves upward. But all things considered, it was a pretty boring and nearly pointless exercise in Muybridge animation.

Should I try a little naked running man, next?