If you enjoy movies, you’ve undoubtedly asked, “What was the first film ever made?” This is a fantastic question, but it’s also one that’s a little difficult to answer. Various people began experimenting with images in the late 1880s, mixing them together to create the appearance of a motion picture. However, due to the technology and difficulties in capturing that type of video, motion images are uncommon. It’s hard to imagine there was a period when producing a video was simple, inexpensive, and easy. With contemporary smartphone technology, we can generate a high-quality movie virtually instantaneously.
For many years, the most interesting motion films of the past were your parents’ and grandparents’ stories, and subsequently, crackling sounds scraped off a big vinyl record and projected to your ears from a wooden box. That’s some very rudimentary stuff. But because of the work of one man, Eadweard Muybridge, everything changed. His experiments and attempts altered society’s possibilities and opened the way for what we now consider the mainstays of modern life: conveniently available and consumable visual information, which was often supported by affluent patrons.
Even so, here are a couple of the very first movies:
The Horse In Motion (1878)
Multiple cameras were used to create this revolutionary motion photography, which was then assembled into a single motion film. It’s something you could accomplish right now with a few cameras configured to go off at a specific time. The film was developed to scientifically resolve a hotly disputed subject at the time: Are all four hooves of a galloping horse ever off the ground at the same time? The video confirmed that they were, and motion photography was developed as a result.
Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)
Roundhay Garden Scene is the world’s oldest surviving motion-picture film with true sequential action. It’s a short film directed by Louis Le Prince, a French inventor. It’s technically a movie, even though it’s just 2.11 seconds long. It is the oldest surviving film, according to the Guinness Book of Records.
The arrival of a Train (1895)
The arrival of a train driven by a steam engine at a train station in the French seaside town of La Ciotat is seen in this 50-second silent video. It’s a single, unfiltered image of ordinary life, and the film is made up of a single continuous real-time shot. There’s also an urban tale that when the picture was initially screened, the crowd was so terrified by the appearance of a life-sized train barreling at them that they shouted and rushed to the rear of the theatre.
