Monday, December 7, 2015

Blog Post #4: Museum of Moving Image


One of the demos I experienced with my group at the Museum of Moving Image was the Gif maker.  A few of the students stood in front of a camera and made several different movements while pictures were taken.  Then the pictures were put together to make a gif.  It was interesting to see how taking still images and putting them together can make a moving image.  Leading up to the Gif maker we saw some of the old technology used to make moving images.  There were models of some of the earliest cameras ever made.  They were extremely bulky and heavy and some said they looked like trains.  We also saw a zoetrope.  A zoetrope is an animation device that simulates motion by showing several pictures or drawings at different stages of motion.  Then when you spin the zoetrope it looks like a moving image.  The particular zoetrope we saw showed us an image of someone running.  It was interesting to see the old technology compared to today’s technology.  With past technology the experience of watching a moving image could easily be ruined.  When using the zoetrope, if you looked through the opening at the top, the illusion of motion was broken.  You could see the images were actually just photographs.  Today it would be much harder to ruin the illusion of motion with video.