Edison Factory

 

220px-Thomas_Edison2.jpg

Thomas Edison (1847-1931) was the Steve Jobs of his day. He had a factory built to create moving pictures.

180px-Dickson_greeting_cropped

William K.L. Dickson (1860-1935) was the brains. He was born in France but raised in Scotland. His family moved to the US in 1879 and not long after he was working for Edison. At Edison’s factory in 1891, he created an early motion picture camera called the Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope made it possible for one person to look into the camera and see moving images. Dickson called them peepshows (Bioshock Infinite uses them and you can look into them). He, also, made the Mutoscope, which was a better version of the Kinestoscope. He did leave Edison’s employment and founded his own company, where he made softcore peepshows.

Kinetoscope

Kinetoscope

 

 
Mutoscope

Some of Dickson's work:


Monkeyshines (1980)



Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894)

 


Blacksmith Scene (1893)

 


The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894)



William Heise (1847-1910) (on the left) helped Dickson a lot of times and was his cinematographer on a number of occasions. He was also a cameraman and producer. He did direct some of his own films, of which, The Kiss (1896), is the most famous. The Kiss was even seen as obscene when it first came out.


And a movie they made together that used hand-tinting, which is when you add color to each frame by hand:


Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895)



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eadweard Muybridge

Image
This part will be solely on Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). He was English but spent part of his life in the USA. He had jobs as a bookseller in NY and San Francisco. While visiting Texas in 1960, he was involved in a stagecoach accident that gave him head injuries. As a result of that accident, he returned to England. He started to get into photography at this time. He returned to America in 1967 to photograph the western part. The photographs made him a celebrity throughout America. The then governor of California made him a bet to see if a horse's hooves go completely off the ground when they gallop. He then went to work making trip-wires that the horse would set off and make a series of cameras go off as a result. And here is the famous result: As you can see, a horse's hooves do go completely off the ground. This started his love affair with seeing humans and animals in motion. He soon created the Zoopraxiscope, which had glass disks that you could paint ...
Read more

Cinema of Siam/Thailand (1895-1990)

Image
"The Land of Smiles" The royal family took a notice of film when the Lumi è re Brothers were going around the world showing their work. Early movies in this country were various informational documentaries. The first true movie with a narrative came out in 1923 called, Miss Suwanna of Siam . This movie has sadly been lost and only some stills remain.   Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) was an important movie. “Chang” is Thai for “elephant” and the national animal of the country. Before they made King Kong , the American filmmakers, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, came to direct this movie that has a man battling animals. Most things wouldn't fly today since real animals are killed on camera and animals are put in danger. Elephants have a stampede through a house, even. It went on to be one of the most popular movies of the late 1920s and was one of the few Hollywood movies to be shot on location at that time. After the success of Chang , the c...
Read more

Étienne-Jules Marey, George Eastman, Louis Le Prince, and William Friese-Greene

Image
  Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) was a French doctor, scientist, and is considered one of the pioneers in the develop of photography. In 1882, he invented a gun that could take pictures 12 frames a second. He loved to take pictures of animals. Without him, we wouldn’t know that cats land on their feet. George Eastman (1854-1932) was an American who founded the Kodak Company. In 1888, he produced images on photographic paper, which he called "roll film". This pretty much started the film industry (even though it technically started in 1895) since everyone started to use Kodak film.   Louis Le Prince (1841-1890(?)). Yet another Frenchman. In 1888, he used Kodak film to shoot what many consider to be the first movie ever made, Roundhay Garden Scene, on a single lens camera. He also made another, Leeds Bridge . He’s called “The Father of Cinematography”. He disappeared in 1890 and no one knows what happened to him. Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)   Traffic Cro...
Read more