Museum of the Moving Image

On Wednesday November 22nd, 2017 I was able to attend the Museum of the Moving Image with my media class. Although I have visited the museum before, this time I was able to experience one of the museum demos and got a personal tour with my classmates and was about to learn about some of the artifacts found in the museum. The demo began with the early days of the moving image before there was film or the cameras as we know it. In the beginning moving images were accomplished through illusions. One of the artifacts my class and I encountered was the zoetrope. The zoetrope consists of a cylinder that consists with cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion. The reason this worked is because the inventors of this machine, along with other artifacts, used the theory of persistence of vision. Persistence of vision works because the human eye and brain can only process 10 to 12 separate images per second, retaining an image for up to a fifteenth of a second. I found this quite interesting and learned that even now in film there are slight splits between the frames of the film which we don’t even notice. This means that the movies we watch are still an illusion only that the process of this illusion has become much more sophisticated. As time progressed technological advancements helped us achieve the motion pictures that we see on the big screen now. In the beginning films were rather short and didn’t have any color or sound. One of the most interesting cameras I encountered at the MOMI was a camera that had three different film stocks inside of it. This was the beginning of colored films and the three film stocks related to RGB, red, green, blue, and were used to capture these colors. When played together they would show color and I thought this was really cool and really innovative. The Museum of the Moving Image was very fun and a museum I will definitely go back to. It was quite informative and as someone that loves film, it was an honor and privilege to be able to go and see the history of film. It made me not only value films more but also the human mind and its capabilities of achieving whatever it sets its mind for. It’s beautiful to see how far we have come and how we figured out how to capture light and moments of time and put them on screen.