Marey / Muybridge

Two references in the field of Motion Capture are Etienne Jules Marey and Edward Muybridge, who started their research in the field of Motion Capture well before the arrival of computers. At the end of the 19th century, using the results of their work on chronophotography, these two inventors paved the way forward towards the invention of the cinema. However at that time the images were two dimensional and were therefore incomplete and inexploitable for all quantitative measurements.
From this story it is interesting to understand how these two men came to create the cameras for the cinema. The first questions arose through an artistic debate on a horse’s trot. Could we consider when a horse trots that there is a brief moment when the horse has no contact with the ground, as represented by several artists at that time? Muybridge put together a system of multiple photographs on one single photographic sheet, whose movements were close enough in time to be able to “read” the movement. Marey around the same time was using a different and more classic technique with pipes and small cushions mounted on the horse. They both came to the same conclusion at the same time and this encouraged their meeting. When Marey discovered Muybridge’s photographic system, he continued to perfect the system and finished by building the first camera that could record the movements from a film made with successive photos. The cinema was born a few years later when the Lumière brothers in Lyon were inspired by the sewing machine technology in order to build their first film projector. As good scientists, Marey and Muybridge’s main goal was to learn to understand better human or animal movement.
The above detail is to remind ourselves that firstly the starting point was an artistic debate and secondly there are two main aspects to the problem. The first aspect being the recording of the movement, as invented by Marey and Muybridge and the second being the restitution, with the help of a projector for the Lumière brothers, and with all the tools used to complete the computer images of today.