Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
described universal gravitation. These ideas underpin all our understanding
of motion. For animators, the study of these laws will pay dividends, even
though the math may be beyond many of us (it is certainly beyond me).
The pioneers of action analysis who are perhaps of most interest to the
animator are Eadweard Muybridge and the less well-known but equally
important Étienne-Jules Marey.
One of the most famous individuals engaged in action analysis was the
English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Born in 1830 at Kingston-on-
Thames and the son of a successful businessman, Muybridge moved to San
Francisco in his early twenties. There he began to dabble in photography.
Losing interest in his own business career, he became a professional
photographer around 1865. His initial interest was in a conventional approach
to photography, which brought him a degree of success. Although his early
images of the Yukon and Yellowstone landscapes are worthy of note, it was
as a portrait photographer that he made his living. However, he eventually
became famous for his work recording the motion of animals and humans;
these studies would ensure that his name lived on as one of the founding
fathers of animation.
It is said that Muybridge's investigation into recording animals in motion
was the result of a wager between the wealthy businessman Leland Stanford
and the financier James R. Keene. They disagreed over the idea of whether
all four hooves of a running horse were actually of the ground together at
some point during the run. The validity of this story, as colorful as it is, remains
doubtful. Whatever the truth, Stanford did employ Muybridge to provide the
evidence for further research into equine dynamics. The work began in 1872,
but it wasn't until 1877 that the first of Muybridge's famous photographs was
published. Using Occident, one of Stanford's famous horses, Muybridge made
the first image that did indeed prove that a horse at gallop had all four hooves
suspended off the ground. Later, this first photograph provided reference
material for a painting by the artist John Koch, commissioned by Stanford and
now in the Stanford University Museum in California. Perhaps this is the very
first example of an artist engaged in action analysis and using photography as
a research tool.
This work marked the start of an extended study of the movement of animals
and humans that would last for the rest of Muybridge's life. His early studies
of the motion of horses were conducted at Stanford's stock farm at Palo
Alto, California. His first photographs were made in a traditional manner as
individual images, though he quickly opted for the use of multiple images
in series. He used a series of tripwires, each one triggering the shutter of a
single camera within a whole bank of cameras located in a shed that was set
on one side of the horses' trotting track. However, this process also proved to
be unsatisfactory, so Muybridge went on to create a synchronized system in
which each of the cameras was triggered by electricity.
