Developing Stop Motion Animation

Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames on April 9th 1830, he lived as a bookseller before taking up his passion for photography. He was hired in 1872 by the governor of California, Leland Stanford, a racehorse owner for photographic studies. He wanted to know whether all four of the horses' feet came off the ground at the same time when it galloped. Muybridge was able to answer the question with a single photographic negative showing the trotting horse to be airborne between each bound. The negative itself has since been lost but the image survives through woodcuts made at the time.
In 1878 Muybridge had managed to photograph the horse at a trot, he also managed to photograph the horse at a gallop.
To take these photographs he placed numerous large glass plate cameras - these cameras work by using a light sensitive compound, that when exposed to light and then developed dark areas appear where the light has fallen, making a negative image, this is then turned into a positive image  by shining light through the developed plate onto paper covered in the same light sensitive compound - along the edge of the track, each shutter was triggered as the horse passed by by a thread, the path was also lined with white cotton sheets so that as much light was reflected as possible, making the image clearer. These images were then copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disk to be viewed in a machine he had invented in 1879, the zoopraxiscope, which was the first movie projector in history.