One of Muybridge's early gizmos to try to make his still pictures/motion study sequences "move". I'm not sure how he did this, perhaps he painted the images on, but that would mean painting a lot of nude women onto glass plates. Then, I assume, it would spin around and you'd look at it. There is no more than a second or two of animation here, but then, the "first movie ever made" ain't exactly Gone with the Wind either:
I can't post the Director's Cut here because I can't get it to come up. So that means another post. Sigh. Some day these will end, I promise!
This animation, NOT based on a Muybridge study, was only six frames and fairly easy to make, but not so fluid as I'd like. For one thing, there was no real baseline or "ground" for the cat to run on. I had to photoshop the six images on to six squares, and it was hard to orientate the cat so that its leaps looked natural. First they were too flat, and then it began to boink up and down like a bunny in these unnatural-looking hops. Obviously, six drawings of a cheetah won't represent the incredible motion of such a cat. But at least it didn't bop all over the map in sudden wild jerks, like the Muybridge studies, in which the camera suddenly moved or the subject appeared to jostle around in the frame. After all, the Muybridge images were just that: still pictures that were meant to represent motion frozen at various stages. It was a kind of elongated stop-motion cartoon, and never meant to be strung together in the diabolical way I'm doing! Muybridge, creepy old pervert that he was, very likely got it on with those tender young maidens he photographed. He had, after all, killed a man in a jealous rage and got away with it, convincing the judge he was insane and then coolly walking away.
This has got to be the strangest erotic film I've ever seen. Mainly because the imagery in it is never quite explained. And yet, and yet. It's oddly compelling, in the way all of Muybridge's stuff is. When I did that experiment of physically cutting apart his multiple time-lapse images and giffing them so that they showed in rapid succession, I found I had made a little "movie". The disjointedness of this is both jarring and mysterious, like a peep show. We're only allowed a frame or two a second, and the rest has to be imagined. Because this brought it to mind, I was going to include the famous Monty Python sex montage with Richard Nixon, and I might yet do it IFFFF my Makeagif program decides to start working again. And oh, please, don't get me started on the demise of Gifsforum, which has not been explained anywhere on the internet: it just disappeared one day and can't be tracked down, not even a complaint on a message board or on Facebook or anywhere. The golden age of making gifs, the Age of Miracles written about in that song, has passed. No longer can I turn colour into black and white in a strange reversal of the Wizard of Oz; no longer can I make them go backwards or reverse halfway; no longer can I use multiple filters for artistic effects, three speeds, make them talk, whistle, dance. It is over. I am left only with a site that doesn't work very reliably. Gifs are considered trivial anyway, but to me they are bloody magic and I will never stop making them until my hands fall off.
Yes. This is what that Giphy system looks like. Not too impressive. but you get the idea.
(A Facebook friend clued me in on the fact that there's a Muybridge biopic out - or, at least, floating around the art-house/film festival circuit. Meaning, I'm too late to see its first and last showing at the Rio (as in "where the hell is the - ?") in Vancouver. If this goes wide it'll be a big surprise, but I'm kind of glad someone took the time to make a movie out of this subject, no matter how obscure. The BBC documentary I saw on YouTube might have its facts more straight.)
Kyle Rideout’s debut feature Eadweard, co-written with producer Josh Epstein, is a captivating look at the work of one of photography’s early pioneers, one who ultimately paved the way for the cinema. This tale of movement, obsession and murder is poetry in motion with artistry to burn.
Famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge, (Michael Eklund) tired of the static landscape scenes that made his name, is determined to record the essence of movement in a vast encyclopaedia of locomotion. Initially hailed as a revolutionary scientist, his switch to nude subjects leads to professional and personal friction. His growing mistrust of his wife Flora (Sara Canning) and her relationship with suave newspaper critic Harry Larkyns (Charlie Carrick) sets in motion a deadly series of events the could destroy Eadweard’s life and reputation.
Eklund’s Muybridge is an odd fish, gangly, loping and unorthodox in look and movement, and a taciturn eater of lemons. He is polite, even courtly with subjects, but capable of great cruelty, which is demonstrated by the animal vivisection and the abuse of “deformed” patients in the name of scientific endeavour. Eklund often resembles a snowy haired Daniel Plainview, hinting at the monomaniacal pursuit of Eadweard’s goals and darkness within. His voice resonates with the deep honeyed burr Daniel Day Lewis brought to the villainous oilman, which was in turn inspired by iconic director John Huston, the movie mastermind behind The Maltese Falcon, The Misfitsand The Treasure of the Sierra Madre amongst many more.
Invoking Huston is no coincidence. Muybridge here becomes the prototypical film director, constantly in fear of losing the light, yelling action to motivate his subjects, throwing tantrums when his instructions are ignored. He is even forced to pitch for funding and convince nervy backers to trust in his vision. His obsession and frustration in working in stills but desperate to capture movement is well realised. He strives for immortality through his images, equating them to fathering a child. The filmmakers seem to have found a kindred spirit. For all the sensational drama in Muybridge’s life, the focus on his work and skill is what shines through.
Appropriately for a film about “the godfather of cinema” Eadweard is technically assured, with stunningly beautiful compositions from cinematographer Tony Mirza. Elisabeth Olga Tremblay’s clever use of jarring edits creates, like Muybridge’s photographs, the impression of movement within a still frame, while visual effects superbly imitate the Great Man’s motion studies to illuminate how he saw the world. The production design by Rideout is handsome but unfussy, never falling into the fusty museum trap of many a period piece.
The film is not without its faults, however. Anna Atkinson & Andrew Penner’s all pervasively grating score overplays its idiosyncratic hand, sounding more suitable for a Wes Anderson directed hoedown than an arts biopic. Sara Canning is poorly served by weak characterisation, with Flora’s initial manic-pixie-photo-groupie and subsequent nagging wife personae afforded little of the nuance granted to Muybridge. Elsewhere the wobbly accents of minor players betray its Canadian production, while off screen dialogue suggests budgetary compromise. But as a vital glimpse of a significant figure in cinema’s prehistory these are small caveats to make.
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.
This was an experiment in Muybridge animation, which is certainly not a new idea. Most of the Muybridge photos display all the frames consecutively, which is (I think) the way most people would view them. Putting them together into a sort of primitive motion picture came much later.
Well, this is my attempt, and a pretty good one I think, at taking one of these sheets of tiny photos - this one, to be specific:
. . . cropping the little square photos into - little square photos, and putting it all together with Makeagif, which will take any sequence of photos (who knows how many) and make a teeny-tiny slide show out of it.
The motion here is actually not too bad. The square photos made the cropping less tedious than you'd think (considering I had to do it 12 times).
But there are some strange things about this little photographic cartoon from the 1880s. The fact that the rider appears to be nude isn't so unusual, nor is the fact that he's not using a saddle. Muybridge liked his models (male or female) to show lots of skin, not for prurient reasons but to display natural skeletal and muscular movement without impediment.
No, it's that jump. The horse seems to jump over it before it appears. Something strange going on here. People often accused Muybridge of "fiddling", tweaking his images somehow to impress the public, and he really wasn't a scientist or an inventor - not at the start, anyway. But then, neither was Edison.
Maybe it's just the way I'm seeing it. Maybe it's the way I cropped the photos (but since they were all perfectly square, that part of it was relatively easy).
Anyway, I was all set to go watch TV or go on Facebook or do some other moronic thing, when I looked at the Muybridge images again and noticed how many exotic animals he had forced to walk through all those elaborate tripwires. Including. . . one of my favorite animals of all time, the capybara!
Yes, the Muybridge capybara. This is what I found:
This is what the photos looked like, copied and cropped apart 4" x 3":
. . . and here is the finished gif, spliced together by my magic Makeagif program:
He's a little drunken, a little wobbly, but then he's about 130 years old, and photographed with the most primitive equipment imagineable. And it's really not bad, for only nine frames a second.
