Page 157 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 157/206
(contd) “The surviving sequences show several frames that overlap slightly at the edges. The chemicals in the original negatives would have melded together where they overlapped, making them difficult for Le Prince to put onto separate glass plates for projection.
Additionally, black borders all around the images and white frame numbers at the edges of the strips suggest that what survives today are inverted copies of the exposed paper negatives in their entirety – borders, annotations and all – rather than individual glass plates that could have been used in a projector.” (https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/man-movie-camera)
I’ll let Le Prince represent the many experimenters entranced by the idea of motion pictures - yet ultimately unsuccessful - and let him stand alongside the Englishman William Freise-Green, another intrepid experimentalist and inventor:
William Friese Green: Moving magic-lantern pictures 1889.
Friese Green claimed and patented much more than he actually achieved in his motion picture experiments. He was building his business as a studio-photographer in the West Country (based in Bath) in the 1880s and met John Rudge, who was developing a magic-lantern that could project 5 frames/second by means of sliding glass slides. Friese Green developed this idea, using much more practical celluloid slides. His various drawings and patent files at this time include the top-hat- inspired lantern projector above (an early ‘wearable!’!, and some of his colour film experiments (borrowing heavily from the work of George Albert Smith (Kinemacolor, 1906). The BFI summarise his contributions to film: “Having been damned for claiming to invent what he did not invent, recent commentators have sought to view in a more sympathetic light someone who was undoubtedly one of the very first to work on the concept of moving images. As a dreamer more than as an inventor, he has his place as a founding father of British film.” (BFIScreenonline). From the delightful wearable projector (above) it seems that Friese Green was more like a new-media conceptual artist than a Victorian inventor, but for sheer ingenuity he must join the list of those interesting cine-experimenters of the fin de siecle.”
From the delightful wearable projector (above and the ‘advertising hat’ next page) it seems that Friese Green was more like a new-media conceptual artist than a Victorian inventor, but for sheer ingenuity he must join the list of those fascinating cine-experimenters of the fin de siecle.