Still Running
2009
Eadweard Muybridge famously used a row of still cameras to capture a horse’s gallop. Using trip-wires triggered by the horse’s hooves the resultant images broke motion down into a series of stills that dissected the moving image into a number of constituent parts, thereby revealing detail, which the eye could previously not see. In this case that indeed all four horses hooves did leave the ground. Having broken motion down into stills it was then a simple process to reverse the process and animate the stills using Zoopraxiscope to re-create motion.
Still Running uses a process called Chronocutting to invert Muybridge’s process to show both motion and stasis. The source material for Still Running is a short section of footage taken from a 1970s AA advert. The original shot shows children running on a patch of grass alongside a car. The camera pans to keep the car in centre frame.
A small slice from the middle of the frame was taken and then copied 12 times from left to tight to create a new composite picture. Each time the section was copied it was placed a fraction of a second behind the previous part. The result is that the slice on the far right of the picture is more than a second behind that on the left. Depending on how fast the camera was panning and the children were running some elements from the scene remain constant whilst other move from slice to slice. So here the girl and car are repeated 12 times, effectively running on the spot whilst the boy passes from slice to slice, from left to right, as if winning the race. A Grand National soundtrack from the period compliments the motion.
Screened at: Memorial Art Gallery, Hastings (2009).