How does motion pictures work

Since motion pictures were invented, audiences have loved how they tell stories. Movies enabled people to travel the world vicariously, and experience tragedy, love and nearly every other emotion.

Movies spread quickly, making them one of the most accessible and beloved forms of entertainment in the world.

Setting Photography in Motion Photography became a part of public life in the midth century, especially during the Civil War, when photographers documented American battlefields for the first time.

Experimenting with ways to exhibit photographs, several inventors came up with a simple toy that made it possible for a series of pictures to be viewed in rapid succession, creating the illusion of motion. It was called a zoetrope. A Wager In October 19, , Scientific American published a series of pictures depicting a horse in full gallop, along with instructions to view them through the zoetrope.

The photos were taken by an English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to settle a bet between California businessman Leland Stanford and his colleagues.

Stanford contended that at some point in a horse's stride, all four hooves were off the ground. He enlisted Muybridge to take photographs of the positions of a horse's hooves in rapid succession. Muybridge's 12 pictures showed that Stanford had won the bet. Rudimentary Projector Muybridge's findings fascinated many, and with Stanford's support he created a sequential photo projector -- the zoogyroscope -- in With this device, Muybridge projected his photos to an enthralled San Francisco audience the following year.

His studies of animals in motion drove him to experiment with photography, and he fashioned a camera that could take 12 pictures per second of a moving object. The technique, called chronophotography, along with Muybridge's work, were the founding concepts for motion picture cameras and projectors.

The pair set out to create a device that could record moving pictures. That is just what happens in a motion picture. In photography the exposure of film can be controlled by changing the amount of light entering the lens, or the amount of time the shutter remains open.

The shutter speed in a motion picture camera is controlled by the fact that 24 frames must be shot per second.

Motion picture cameras use a shutter that looks like a rotating propeller with two blades. The propeller can be made wider to decrease the percentage of time the lens is open, and thereby shorten exposures. It does this in perfect synchronization with the revolving shutter that exposes the film. Early motion picture cameras were large and heavy.

But by the mids, technology developed during World War II lead to smaller, lighter cameras that even allowed cinematographers to hold the smallest cameras.