RUNNING FIGURE
Above: Six positions complete two steps.
Below: Diagram to show that, considered as outlines, the six positions resolve themselves into three silhouettes.
The speed of the ordinary camera, as we know, moves during every second but one foot of film and on which sixteen separate photographs are made. Now, in one type of camera for analysis of motion photography, eight times more film is moved with a corresponding increase in the number of separate pictures taken on it during this same time of one second. To take a specific movement of a model lasting one second: the ordinary camera catches sixteen phases of it, but the extra-rapid camera takes about one hundred and twenty-eight separate pictures of as many corresponding separate phases. In other words, the ordinary camera takes about as much as our eyes appreciate, while the fast camera records on a length of film many more attitudes during the course of the given activity than the unaided eye can ever hope to see. When this long film of the extra-rapid camera is run through the projecting machine at the normal speed it shows us on the screen, in a period of eight seconds, that which took place in reality in but one second.
PHASES OF MOVEMENT FOR A QUICK WALK.
Lower diagram shows how the several drawings, each on a separate sheet of paper, are placed in advance of each other.
WALKING MOVEMENTS, SOMEWHAT MECHANICAL.
Suitable for a droll theme.
The animated drawing artist becomes, through the training of his eye to quick observation and the studying of films of the nature immediately noted above, an expert in depicting the varied and connected attitudes of figures in action. Examples for study on account of the clear-cut definitions of the actions, are the acrobats with their tumbling and the clowns with their antics. Then in the performances of the jugglers and in the pranks of the knock-about comedians, the animator finds much to spur him on to creative imagery. The pictorial artist for graphic or easel work, in any of these cases, intending to make an illustration, is content with some representative position that he can grasp visually, or, which is more likely to be the case, the one that is easiest for him to draw. But the animator must have sharp and quickly observing eyes and be able to comprehend and remember the whole series of phases of a movement.
