A Zoopraxiscope? What?

In class this week we finished up our discussion about music and it was great! We went through the types of music, specifically including vocal. We were going through the different types of vocal music and listening to some examples \and the song Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring came on and immediately I recognized it as a song that my choir sang this last year, except that we sang in the German, not English. It is a great song; long but wonderful. Next we moved on to cinema and while we were going through the terminology and history of cinema we talked about a Zoopraxiscope, and to myself I was like, "What the heck is a Zoopraxiscope?". So, I did some more research on it and this is what I found:

A Zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures. Created by photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879 and may be considered the first movie projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892-94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand. Some of the animated images are very complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement.(Wikipedia)

Then we moved on to discuss cinema some more. It was interesting to see what the cinematographer does to make us feel a certain way when we view a movie. I had never realized that the high and low-angle shots were what made you feel sorry for the person on the bottom, because they are made to look so small. I loved learning all this about film and then being able to watch movies, and clips from movies, and be able to pick out the characteristics we talked about in class. Now it all makes sense!