The History of Video Editing

The Beggining - Eadweard Muybridge

As with a lot of discoveries Eadweard Muybridge did not set out to come across what would be the foundation of stop motion and cinematography. Muybridge was a young English photographer who had immigrated to United States and before stumbling across motion-picture, he was known for his landscape photography. In 1872 Muybridge was hired by race horse owner and former governor of California to shoot some pictures for a photographic study. The study was a long questioned debate of whether all four feet of a horse come off the ground when trotting. After proving that all four feet of the horse did come off the ground he was then hired again in 1878 to take photo’s which would help the study of a horses gallop. Muybridge placed multiple cameras along the side of the race track which were triggered by thread and a picture would be taken as the horse passed through each piece. Using silhouettes transferred from the pictures which were placed on to a disc for a machine Muybridge himself had created called a zoopraxiscope. The zoopraxiscope was a device which projected images which were drawn as detailed silhouettes on a glass disc. Light shone through the glass disc showing the silhouettes and was then spun as the disc moved and each image was shown one after the other it gave the effect that the image was moving.

The Zoopraxiscope was considered the first movie projector. After transferring the the images of the horse on the race track and placed on the machine, they would see the horses gallop in motion from a collection of still images. You can see the numbers of each image in the bottom corner.