My understanding is that a lot of the slow progress from 1878 to the early 1900s was the “cinema tech stack” needing to become technically and economically viable.
To get good motion you need ~16 frames per second, which means each frame has to be exposed ~1/16 of a second, which in turn means you need stuff like sensitive film stock, lots of light, decent lenses. Then you need a camera that can move film in a way that is at a constant speed but also holds each frame perfectly still briefly, for a precise duration, and without any jitter/warping/etc. Then for economic viability you also need projection that’s bright and safe for a room, plus a practical way to duplicate film at scale.
The starting point for all of this was early photography (e.g. daguerreotypes in the 1830s–40s), which used rigid metal plates and multi-minute exposures in bright daylight.
For some forms of AI art (single images, short clips) the tech stack feels maybe mostly already there, while for others it doesn’t (how to turn short clips into a full-length movie). But maybe that’s just a lack of imagination, and we’ll look back and say something like: “they didn’t realize they needed BCI to really unlock AI art’s potential”.
I generally agree but would like to add some minor corrections: not 1⁄16 of a second but 1⁄32 because the other half of the time shutter opens or closes, although even exposures much shorter than that were already achieved in the 1870s for the scientific purposes. However, that application used hard plates and thus didn’t have to deal with the problem of film tearing in the camera.
Decent lenses and dry gelatine process were also ready by the 1880s, and the idea of making photographic film from oiled paper (Eastman used it initially, but it was very fragile) was present as well. Thus, I think, the actual barrier to inventing cinematography was producing clear transparent nitrocellulose (~1883), a technology transfer to the photographic film soon followed (~1887), then a few more years for figuring out the camera (and projector) mechanics.
My understanding is that a lot of the slow progress from 1878 to the early 1900s was the “cinema tech stack” needing to become technically and economically viable.
To get good motion you need ~16 frames per second, which means each frame has to be exposed ~1/16 of a second, which in turn means you need stuff like sensitive film stock, lots of light, decent lenses. Then you need a camera that can move film in a way that is at a constant speed but also holds each frame perfectly still briefly, for a precise duration, and without any jitter/warping/etc. Then for economic viability you also need projection that’s bright and safe for a room, plus a practical way to duplicate film at scale.
The starting point for all of this was early photography (e.g. daguerreotypes in the 1830s–40s), which used rigid metal plates and multi-minute exposures in bright daylight.
For some forms of AI art (single images, short clips) the tech stack feels maybe mostly already there, while for others it doesn’t (how to turn short clips into a full-length movie). But maybe that’s just a lack of imagination, and we’ll look back and say something like: “they didn’t realize they needed BCI to really unlock AI art’s potential”.
I generally agree but would like to add some minor corrections: not 1⁄16 of a second but 1⁄32 because the other half of the time shutter opens or closes, although even exposures much shorter than that were already achieved in the 1870s for the scientific purposes. However, that application used hard plates and thus didn’t have to deal with the problem of film tearing in the camera.
Decent lenses and dry gelatine process were also ready by the 1880s, and the idea of making photographic film from oiled paper (Eastman used it initially, but it was very fragile) was present as well. Thus, I think, the actual barrier to inventing cinematography was producing clear transparent nitrocellulose (~1883), a technology transfer to the photographic film soon followed (~1887), then a few more years for figuring out the camera (and projector) mechanics.
Also, I don’t think that safety of the projector was solved until well into the 20th c., e. g., see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazar_de_la_Charit%C3%A9#Fire_of_1897