The Science of Film
Capturing images on film has enabled us to see what our eyes alone cannot. And by speeding up and slowing down those images we have been able to explore the secrets of the world around us. Early photographic pioneers like Eadweard Muybridge, first revealed the hidden secrets of human and animal movement. By connecting twelve cameras together in a line, Muybridge photographed a trotting horse. He showed that at certain points during its gallop, all four of its legs left the ground – this had never before been understood, let alone seen. Muybridge changed forever the way we saw ourselves and the world around us. It wasn’t long before still images were joined together to make movies. These sequences are amongst the first movies ever made. And in a few short years we went from these to these – watching events in ways previously unimaginable. Film normally moves through a camera at twenty four frames per second. If we film at very high speeds such as five hundred frames per second, and play the action back at normal speed, the effect is to slow the event down and record it in minute detail. The result is slow motion footage. Just as useful at revealing the hidden secrets of our world is speeding events up, this process is called time lapse photography. Fruit normally takes around two weeks to rot. But by taking one shot of the fruit every four seconds, for two weeks and then running the film at normal speed we can see this process taking place in thirty seconds. A more recent technique that allows us new insight is time slice photography, time slice freezes a single moment in time and lets us view it in three dimensions. It is achieved by arranging a hundred and twenty lenses in a semi circle – feeding a strip of film behind the lenses and opening them all simultaneously. When you watche the images back you get a frozen slice of time. So what does the history of moving images tell us about the future? By the year 1000 we could only reproduce our world through painting, drawing or sculpture. By the year 2000 we could beam live images from anywhere, including other planets. Digital mediums allowed us to manipulate and transform reality. By the year 3000 we might be able to see objects millions of times smaller than the atom and microscopic nano-cameras inserted into our bodies could even record our dreams.