Roundhay Garden Scene 1888 World's Oldest Surviving Film Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince

Roundhay Garden Scene was recorded on Eastman Kodak paper base photographic film using Le Prince's single-lens camera. In the 1930s, the National Science Museum (NSM) in London produced a photographic glass plate copy of 20 surviving frames from the original negative,[8] before it was lost. The copied frames were later printed on 35 mm film. Adolphe stated that the Roundhay Garden sequence was shot at 12 frames per second (fps) and a second film, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, at 20 fps; however, this is not borne out by analysis of the film, which suggests a frame rate of 7 fps for both, which was the speed of reproduction used in the 2015 documentary film about Le Prince, The First Film.

Before there were motion pictures, as we think of them, there was motion photography, first achieved when Eadweard Muybridge used multiple cameras in 1878 to make “The Horse in Motion.” The project was commissioned by Leland Stanford, who was the governor of California and later the founder of the university that bears his last name, to try to determine whether all of a horse’s hoofs were ever simultaneously off the ground. But what qualifies as the oldest film—and what we could also call the first home movie—and certainly the oldest surviving (extant) film--may well be the “Roundhay Garden Scene”, which was made in 1888 by Louis Le Prince, a French inventor. It simply shows members of his family playing in a garden and lasts for all of …two seconds. Hardly a Cecil B. De Mille extravaganza.

“Roundhay Garden Scene” was recorded in 1888, directed by French inventor Louis Le Prince and is believed to be the oldest known video footage to exist.

According to the son of the director, Adolphe Le Prince, the movie is at fourteen in October 1888 included in Oakwood Grange, the home of Joseph and Sarah Whitley, in Roundhay, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.

The film shows how Adolphe Le Prince, Sarah Whitley, Joseph Whitley and Harriet Hartley run around in the yard and laugh. Furthermore, we see that Sarah runs backwards when she turns around and that the slip of her coat of Joseph blowing up while he is on the turn.

n 1930, the National Science Museum (NSM), London, produced photographic copies of surviving parts from the 1888 filmstrip. This sequence was recorded on an 1885 Eastman Kodak paper base photographic film through Le Prince’s single-lens combi camera-projector. Le Prince’s son, Adolphe, stated that the Roundhay Garden movie was shot at 12 frames/s (and a second movie, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, at 20 frames/s), however the later digital remastered version of Roundhay Garden was produced by the National Media Museum, Bradford, which contains 52 frames, runs at 24.64 frames/s, a modern cinematographic frame rate, so it plays in only 2.11 seconds. The National Science Museum copy has 20 frames; at 12 frames/s, this produces a run time of 1.66 seconds.

This historical film is surrounded by tragedy and mystery. On 24 Oct. 1,888th, ten days after the shooting of the film, Sarah Whitley died, the mother of Le Prince who acted in the film, age 72. She was buried on October 27 at St. John’s Church in Roundhay.

Louis Le Prince has been heralded as the “Father of Cinematography” since 1930. A Frenchman who also worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, Le Prince conducted his ground-breaking work in 1888 in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.

Roundhay Garden Scene and a Leeds Bridge were recorded several years before the work of competing inventors such as Auguste and Louis Lumière and Thomas Edison.

He was never able to perform a planned public demonstration in the United States because he mysteriously vanished on 16 September 1890, on the train between Dijon and Paris. His body and luggage were never found, but, over a century later, a police archive was found to contain a photograph of a drowned man who could have been him. Not long after Le Prince’s disappearance, Thomas Edison tried to take credit for the invention. But Le Prince’s widow and son, Adolphe, were keen to advance his cause as the inventor of cinematography. In 1898 Adolphe appeared as a witness for the defence in a court case brought by Edison against the American Mutoscope Company, claiming that Edison was the first and sole inventor of cinematography (and thus entitled to royalties for the use of the process). He was not allowed to present the two cameras as evidence (and so establish Le Prince’s prior claim as an inventor) and eventually the court ruled in favour of Edison; a year later that ruling was overturned

In 1902, two years after son Adolphe Le Prince, also an actor in the film, a witness statement was made regarding the disappearance of his father, he was found shot in New York and dead.

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