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A Movie From Before Movies Were Invented
Alien54 writes "Two astronomers at the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton near San Jose have discovered a set of 147 plates taken of the transit of Venus in 1882. They've assembled them into a Quicktime movie! Think about it. This is a movie from before movies were invented. As a point of comparison, Edison didn't get his films going until the 1890s. This is just around the time when Muybridge was doing his work on the motion of horses and people."
If, when they took these plates, it occurred to them that sooner or later someone would do this. There were already animation techniques involving revolving stills (the Zoetrope, for instance).
A movie IS a series of photographs... the difference is that it becomes a movie if you show them in a certain fashion.
Eadweard Muybridge had 'films' of walking nude women and trotting horses sorted in 1878 - in fact, he was the guy that helped Leland Stanford win a bet proving that a horse momentarily has all its hooves off the ground when it runs. I vaguely remember an interactive CD-ROM from the early 90's with this stuff on.
Edisons Kinetoscope was demonstrated in 1891 - a good 13 years later. That said, at the time there was a lot of parallel development going on. It's also hard to quantify what exactly cinema was defined as back then. People were coming at it from all sorts of angles - photography, illustration, zoetropes, etc etc.
Actually, for something truly amazing (but slightly offtopic), have a look at Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii's photos of Russia at the trun of the 19th century. This guy was a bit before his time. He took 3 still images of his subject using black and white film and red, green and blue filters. Then he'd project all three images onto a screen to show people... colour photographs! The site has some absolutely stunning images. Worth a look.
How is this 'prior art'? Its a series of stills which were put together into movie form only very recently. The stills themselves do not make up a film, and never were a film at the date they were taken.
Now whether there are any copyright issues may be another question...
I think the grand-parent has a valid point. You can't call a set of still images a movie just because they can be put together and made into a movie. Intention of creation plays an important role. Otherwise you could call any series of static pictures that show some change or story a movie. And such things date back much further.. from the top of my head I am thinking of the Bayeux Tapestry.. indeed any tapestries depicting stories, even prehistoric cave art; man with spear, man throws spear, dead animal.