Page 158 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex
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Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 158/206
William Friese Green: apparatus for producing and exhibiting animated or changing pictures on advertising appliances & c 1898.
If you’re interested in discovering more about Friese Green, his frenetic experimentation and serial patent applications - and his perceived character - I can recommend watching The Magic Box, John Boulting’s 1951 biopic, starring Robert Donat, though it does carry a kind of pathos for Friese Green.
In contrast, the cast-list for the real invention of the movies, that we will be featuring in the MediaPlex, goes as follows: Muybridge and Marey (motion-capture experiments); Paul Reynaud (Theatre Optique and Praxinoscope pioneer); Louis le Prince (inventor of a 16-lens motion-picture system in 1888); Friese Green (experimenter 1889), George Albert Smith (inventor of a cine-colour system called Kinemacolor, discoverer of the big close-up, and much more); Alice Guy-Blaché ( Cabbage-Patch Fairy 1896 early narrative films); Thomas Edison and William Dickson: Kinetoscope 1891-1894 and Kinetograph 35mm camera 1892); August and Louis Lumiere: Cinematograph 1895-1896); Robert W. Paul (Theatrograph Projector 1895-96), and finally Georges Melies Voyage dans la Lune 1902...
But there were three more or less coeval media developments around the fin de siecle, all to become popular entertainment media: the movies, animated cartoons, and the comics:
