When Jordan Peele opened his 2022 Wild West Lovecraftian horror \u201cNope\u201d with Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s pioneering horse footage from nearly a century and a half earlier, he reminded us that filmmaking has always been about capturing the impossible. We live in an incredible age where anyone with a smartphone has a miniature filmmaking studio in their pocket; the ability to create, edit, and distribute video has never been more readily available. And yet, if we want to gain a better appreciation of the tools at our disposal, and why they work, it\u2019s wise to look back at some of the first movies ever made (or at least the earliest films still available to us).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a bit of debate around this subject. Humans have simulated motion for centuries through optical illusions like the phenakistoscope, invented in the early 1830s, which created the appearance of figures walking, running, or dancing by cycling through sequential images. However, if we\u2019re talking about images captured on film and run through a projector of some kind for an audience\u2014the foundation of cinema as we know it today\u2014then we have a couple of contenders. These films aren\u2019t just milestones, but also blueprints for how filmmakers first solved problems of motions, framing, and visual storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first is photographer Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s \u201cThe Horse in Motion,\u201d from 1878. Using an early version of a projector called a zoopraxiscope, the images appeared to move and proved that all four of a horse\u2019s hooves are off the ground when it gallops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n