Video

Brief

This is a personal motion-graphics project I created using archival scans from the Library of Congress to help tell the story of Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer in the the moving arts. I’ve always been inspired by this strange loner from long ago. An immigrant from the UK, he explored both Western and Central America on photo expeditions and even murdered his wife’s secret lover. Using multiple cameras set up to take images in rapid succession Muybridge was able to capture the subtle and sometimes invisible movements that we take for granted.

Muybridge’s experiments fill up books upon books of photos, but I have always really wanted to see them move. By breaking these contact prints apart and playing them in the correct order, we can look through a tiny window and see the past. I was also enamoured by the charming artwork on the Zoopraxiscope disks, but without the original machine we can’t see them spin. By spinning the scans around in motion graphic software we can finally see them as they were meant to be experienced.