Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Module #4

Reading Assignment: Chapters 9 & 10

The Industrial Revolution and the Arts & Crafts Movement


During this week's assignment I became really fascinated by Eadweard Muybridge's sequence photography. I remember flipping through the book for the first assignment and putting a post-it note on that page because I liked it so much. The different variations in the photos reminded me of one of my favorite books as a child, a flip book. I absolutely loved these books! I would always try to get my hands on one and play with it for hours. I loved the ones that had two sequences so that you just had to flip the book the other way to play the second set of images. I don't know what it was about those sequences but they made me so curious. Obviously they worked seamlessly but I could never really wrap my head around them. I would sit there for hours studying each page and each image and find the slight differences only to be dumbstruck every time I flipped through them. I must have thought there was a special secret to it or it was magical in some way but it got me every time. I knew that together they made this cool animated video in my hands but seeing them separately as solo images on printed paper made it seem impossible. 

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and his famous horse in motion photographs

Flip books were originally introduced as folioscopes (flip book in french) by the Frenchman Pierre-Hubert Desvignes in the 1860s (Fouché). Flip books gave the illusion of movement in sequence without the use of a machine. Desvignes is credited as the inventor of the flip book but John Barned Linnett was the first to patent the idea of a flip book. Linnett, English lithograph printer, patented the flip book under the name "The Kineograph" in March 1868 (Fouché). Flip books started becoming very popular at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th century. In 1894, Herman Casler invented the Mutoscope, a machine that aligned images in sequence to create a moving picture. A mutoscope was essentially a flip book in a machine. Mutoscopes were considered the first machine that applied the simple principle of persistency of vision studied by Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey (Fouché). Mutoscopes became very popular in the U.S. for their success at "Penny Arcades" (Fouché). People would insert coins into the machine and turn the handle to watch the different sequences play out in animated form. Thus began the animation and birth of cinema.

An advertisement for the Mutoscope

The first GIF, graphics interchange format, was created by Compuserve in 1987 (Alfonso III). This new image format was able to use color and replaced the run-length encoding format (RLE) which only ran black and white photos. What made the GIF so special was it's compressed format that allowed faster transfer times across slow modem connections. The original version, 87a, was created by Steve Wilhite. The following year a new version was released that allowed people to create compressed animations using timed delays (Alfonso III). Wilhite credits the success of GIFs to Netscape. 

"What has made GIF hang around is the animation loop that Netscape added. If Netscape had not added GIF in their browse, GIF would have died in 1998," -Wilhite (Alfonso III).

Some of the first GIFs I remember are the rotating Earth one, the American flag in the wind and the dancing baby. Remember that baby in a diaper that rotates in a full circle like it's doing a Native American chant? Yes, that one. Seems a little creepy now but at the moment I enjoyed it. These early GIFs were always on loops and didn't have the best quality. They were usually on white backgrounds and were very basic. Now the modern versions are usually loops of videos from movies or TV like cats getting scared into boxes or creative ones like time lapses of children growing up. The New Yorker recently used a GIF as their cover for the first time last month. GIFs are so accessible now that you can download apps that will make them for you.

Early GIF of a rotating Earth

Muybridge GIF

Overall, I think Muybridge's idea was amazing! That crazy bet for $25,000 really paved the way for sequence photography and GIFs. I love how you can trace GIFs back to something like sequence photos from Muybridge. The direct connection might now be there but the horse in motion photos did lead to other ideas that eventually led to animations like GIFs that run on loops and look like virtual flip books to me. Now I'm looking at GIFs on a daily basis! It's also funny to think that as a child the internet was soooooo slow. I hated dial-up internet and connecting to the internet took forever! It's also crazy to think that internet is just as old as I am. I grew up in an internet world and yet 20 years later it has rapidly changed and there are generations being born into this normalcy of smartphones and being forever connected. I also finally learned how to pronounce GIF! While doing my research I learned that the developers used the Jif peanut butter slogan as a parody for GIF. So next time you think of how to pronounce it just think of peanut butter and you'll be correct. Also found a cool article that turned Muybridge's photos in GIFs. Click here if you'd like to check out the Buzzfeed article.


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