Eadweard Muybridge *** Sallie Gardner at a Gallop

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Sallie Gardner at a Gallop was an early production experiment on June 19, 1878 that led to the development of motion pictures. The motion picture consists of 24 photographs in a fast-motion series that were shown on a zoopraxiscope. The photographs were taken by Eadweard Muybridge, who was commissioned to produce them by Leland Stanford. The concept of the shoot was to show that horses who are galloping lift all four hooves completely off the ground.

During July 1877, Muybridge tried to settle Stanford's question with a series of progressively clearer, single photographic negatives showing Stanford's trotter, Occident, airborne in the midst of a racing-speed gait at the Union Park Racetrack in Sacramento, California. One of the prints was sent to the local California press, but because the film negative was retouched, the press dismissed it. Negative retouching was very common at the time, however, and the photograph won Muybridge an award at the Twelfth San Francisco Industrial exhibition.
The following year, Stanford financed his next project, although it was rumored that the two had a $25,000 wager on a bet. The motion picture was taken at Palo Alto on June 19, 1878 in the presence of the press. Muybridge photographed a Kentucky-bred mare named Sallie Gardner that Stanford owned. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's path. Muybridge used 24 cameras which were 27 inches apart and about one twenty-fifth of a second in time. The shutters were controlled by trip wires, which were triggered by the horse's hooves. The photographs were taken in succession at one thousandth of a second. Domm, the jockey who was riding Sallie, set a speed of 1:40 gait, which meant that the horse was going at a mile per 1 minute and 40 seconds, equivalent to 36 miles per hour (58 km/h). The result was a motion picture of the horse lifting all four hooves off the ground at the same time when galloping. The prints were produced onsite and when the press also saw the broken straps on Sallie's saddle, they became convinced of the authenticity of the photographs.

The relationship between the Muybridge and Stanford became turbulent in 1882 when Stanford produced the book The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography, which was published by Osgood and Company. The book did not include the photographs taken by Muybridge, although it claimed to feature instantaneous photography, but instead, showed 100 illustrations based on the photographs taken of Sallie. Muybridge was not credited anywhere in the book except in a technical appendix based on an account Stanford had written. This was not taken well by Muybridge, as this incident caused the Britain's Royal Society of Arts to summon him to explain why he was not credited for the work. The society then offered to finance further photographic investigations of animal movement.
In 1880, Muybridge projected moving images on a screen when he gave a presentation at the California School of Fine Arts, making this exhibit the earliest known motion picture exhibition. He later met with Thomas Edison who had recently invented the phonograph. Edison went on to invent the precursor of the movie camera, the Kinetoscope.
Muybridge's studies and work were published in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania after nine years of successive experimentation with photography and motion. The publication consisted of 781 collotype plates and was named Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872--1885. The collotype plates measured 19 by 24 inches, each were contained in 36 by 36 frames which totals approximately 20,000 images. The published plates contained 514 men and women in motion, 27 plates depicted abnormal male and female movement, 16 subjects were about children, 5 plates was about adult male hand movement and 219 subjects were about animals.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Gardner_at_a_Gallop

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Eadweard Muybridge
• Animal locomotion
• June 19
• 1978
• Sallie Gardner at a Gallop
• Kinetoscope
• zoopraxiscope
• Cinematograph