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Optical toys commonly used
Between 1832 and 1850 hundreds of optical toys were manufactured that used rotating "phase drawings" of things in motion to produce a crude form of animation. -
George Horner's Zoetrope
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Still Photography Invented
Jacques-Mande Daguerre invents still photography, although it would still need another decade to be perfected. -
Muybridge's Successive Stages of Motion
Edweard Muybridge demonstrates his series photography on the "zoopraxiscope". Muybrige's photography required the used of 12-24 separate cameras. -
Chronophotographic gun invented
Etienne-Jules Marey, a specialist in animal locomotion, invents the chronophotographic gun in order to take pictures of birds in flight. This camera was portable and enabled the first series photographs of live action in a single camera. -
Dickson Invents Kinetograph
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson creates the "Kinetograph". This machine incorporated what have come to eye recognized as the two essentials of motion-picture camera and projector engineering: (1) a stop-motion device to ensure the intermittent but regular motion of the film strip through the camera and (2) a perforated celluloid film strip consisting of four sprocket holes on the bottom edge of each frame. -
Black Maria Constructed
The first motion-picture studio was constructed by Dickson for little more than $600. From 1893 to 1895, Dickson was the producer, director, and cameramen for hundreds of brief films distributed by the Edison Company to the Kinetoscope parlors. -
Cinematographe Invented
After a year of studying the workings of the Edison machine, Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented an apparatus that could serve as camera, projector, and film printer that was patented as the Cinematographe. -
First Film Showing
The Lumiere brothers rent a basement room in the Grand Cage, on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, to project a program of ten films for the first time to a paying audience. -
Star Film Company Organized
Melies organizes the Star Film Company and constructs a small production studio outside of Paris. Here Melies would produce, direct, photograph, and act in some five hundred films between 1897 and 1913. -
Melies's Camera Jams
Melies's camera jams while he is filming in the street, this gives him the idea of how to manipulate real time and real space inherent in the editing of exposed film. -
Riley-Innovative Effect
Yorkshire-based filmmaker James Bamforth (The Kiss in the Tunnel, 1899) produced films with the Riley innovative effect- the illusion of separate but simultaneous and parallel actions, which was to become a basic structural element of cinematic narrative. -
"A Trip to the Moon" Produced
By far the most successful and influential film Melies made, A Trip to the Moon achieved international circulation within months of its completion, albeit through the unethical distribution of "dupes". -
Porter Employs Time-Lapse Photography
Porter films the extraordinary "Pan-American Exposition by Night", which uses time-lapse photography to create a circular panorama of the illuminated fairgrounds, by modifying his camera to expose a single frame every ten seconds. -
Stock Footage?
Porter produces "Life of an American Fireman", interestingly combining the use of stock footage with staged scenes to create a uniquely cinematic form: a fiction constructed from recordings of real events.
