Research: Collection Room

Collection Room

 The Collection Room:

As I mentioned in my proposal, my entire project is primarily inspired by my Granddad due to his interest, and consequently encouragement of mine, in pre-cinema animation devices. Because of this he had a room in which he kept all objects pertaining to this area, known as the 'collection room' to my family. It is rather unorganised and has been relatively untouched for the past few years, but I decided to look through it to help broaden my knowledge of and understanding of optical toys. This entailed a trip to Leeds to visit my Grandmother and sort through everything there. I spent a day going through it all, getting rather covered in dust and picking out object of interest. The collection included several inventions such as magic lantern projectors, different kinds of stereoscopes etc:

Stereoscope

A magic lantern projector

A box of magic lantern slides

Also in the room were a vast amount of magic lantern slides, stereocards, some thaumatropes and flip books (and these are just in the boxes I had time to look through). Having already got a large number of my own stereocards in gifts and previous visits I concentrated on sorting through the magic lantern slides.

 Several I picked out and felt are particularly interesting are these showing the 'Marvels of the Heavens'. It has occurred to me that they function to educate viewers as well as entertaining them my showing them things that would not otherwise have access too. Stereocards depicting cities of the world and famous landmarks were extremely popular in the 19th century, probably for the same reason. Therefore, these devices were so popular as they broadened peoples outlooks and experiences in a time were people were far more limited then they are today. Another thing I found when sorting through the collections was a larger number of slides depicting popular stories, such as Aesop's Fables and Alice and Wonderland etc. These made me think about how in a pre-cinema era, slide projectors like this were a huge source of entertainment. Therefore, collections of slides like these might be used in sequence as a means of telling stories visually, on a fundamental level in the same way we was movies in the modern world.

I also found several flip books and thaumatropes that I added to my own collection and will help me in my future research and understanding of optical toys:

As well as all these fascinating objects, my Grandad also had a large collection of book concerning pre-cinema animation devices. I picked out several of these to help me in my research, such as 'The History of Movie Photography' by Brian Coe and 'Dates and Sources' By Franz Paul Liesegang. These, along with my grandfather's own book 'The Wonders of the Stereoscope' by John Jones' have so far proved very interesting and useful. As I continue to research and develop my project, I will definitely use these books and everything else I have found to look into the devices in detail. This way I can pick out themes and ideas that can lend themselves to experimental work and an interesting final outcome.