ANIMATED PHOTOGRAPHY.

Northland Age, Volume 3, Issue 21, 2 January 1907, Page 5

ANIMATED PHOTOGRAPHY.

There is some dispute, says the "London Magazine," as to whom belongs the honour of inventing the animated picture machine, but there seems a general inclination to regard Edison as the man who constructed the first practical apparatus. Certainly he was the first to use cellu-

loid films in long strips for cinematograph purposes. To make animated photography practical, two machines are essential the camera to take the photographs and the bioscope to show the pictures in full movement on the serene, The bioscope camera is small and light, and can be easily carried on a bicycle. Internally it is composed of two dark boxes, and mechanism to keep tight the film as it is wound off a spool in one box past the lens, on to the spool in the other box.

The film is made of celluloid, one and three-eights of . ail inch in width, with small holes punched in each side, by means of which it travels evenly over sprocket wheels both in passing,.through the camera and the -bioscope. The film is moved from spool to spool by handle, which the operator turns, and by an arrangement of the mechanism the film is wound through at a speed of one foot per second ; and during that period it stops 16 times for a 40th of a second on each occasion. In this way the pictures are secured, and each separated from the other. From the negative'so obtained any number of films ready for the bioscope can be printed just in the same manner as an ordinary photograph is obtained. In throwing the pictures on the screen a very powerful light of from 2,000 to 3,000 candle power is used, and the picture is sometimes enlarged 300,000 or 400,000 diameters.

Great enterprise and ingenuity are exercised in obtaining fresh subjects for exhibition purposes. The wellknown series of pictures, "Whirling the Worlds," for example, took ten months to construct and photograph at a cost of £1,300. All the properties were specially built for it, occupying eight men for five and a half months. Eighty actors and actresses were engaged to enact the different characters. The length of the film is just a quarter of a mile, made up of some 20,000 photographs and occupies over 20 minutes in showing. To obtain pictures of actual life, operators travel in all parts of the world, and get in all kinds of curious positions. Pictures of scenery are obtained from the back or front of a railway train in motion.