Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (14th October 1801 - 15th September 1883) was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. To use this you would spin the disks and look through the slits in the reflection of a mirror. This device is called the Phenakistoscope. Here is an example of the device in motion.
Eadweard J. Muybridge (9th April 1830 - 8th May 1904) was an early pioneer in animation, known for his early film; The Horse in Motion.
Muybridge was facinated with animal movement and wanted to prove that when a horse runs all of it's hooves lift off the floor, and so he did an experiment to prove this. In order to do this he set up a series of cameras around a race track, which were triggered by the horse running past. The photos where then displayed using a zoopraxiscope which he had earlier invented himself.
The visual effect bullet time (TM Warner Bros) largely uses Muybridges technique, as well as CGI. The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999) was the first film ever to use this effect.
It is said that Muybridge "paved the way" for many other moving image pioneers including Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers.
The zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures, it is considered to be the first movie projector. The device projects images from rotating glass discs in rapid succession, giving the illusion of motion. Initially, the outlines would be painted onto the glass, but in 1892-94 a second series of discs were made, on which the outlines of the images were printed onto photographically, and then coloured by hand. This proved to be a very complex task, as some of the images featured multiple combinations of human and animal movement. The zoopraxiscope was said to be one of the inspirations for the invention of the kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system invented by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson.
