Early Pioneer: Charles- Emile Reynaud

Who is Charles- Emile Reynaud?

Charles- Emile Reynaud was a French science teacher and projected the first animated cartoon films. Reynaud died in a hospice on the banks of the Seine where he had been cared for since 29 March 1917.

What is Charles- Emile Reynaud Famous for?

Reynaud is mostly known for creating a device called the Praxinoscope in 1877 and also created the Theatre Optique in December 1888, he presented this first animated film in public at the Musee Grevin in Paris.  In his later years, his inventions were slowly going to an end as the cinematograph camera was being brought in by The Lumiere Brothers. 

What is the Praxinoscope?

The Praxinoscope is very similar to the zoetrope (created by William Horner), it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The Praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its very narrow very slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in the positioned as the wheel was turned.  A viewer would look in the mirrors and then therefore sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope.

Factors that affected the Praxinoscope

The factors that affected the Praxinoscope is that if it was spun to fast it would look very blurry and you wouldn’t be able to see the moving image, also if you spun it backwards the sequence wouldn’t make sense.  

There weren’t just bad things about the Praxinoscope because it was the successor of the zoetrope. A zoetrope could only view the moving image to one person at a time, but now the Praxinoscope can be viewed multiple times by different viewers because it has mirrors all around it and you could see it at every angle.

How the information has helped me

I feel that I have learn't a lot from this research that I have found. I now understand how the praxinoscope works and what it consists off. The factors that effected the praxinoscope was very similar to the zoetrope and I feel that I now fully understand the key terms of this.