Folder for drawings of lantern slide studies by F Percy Smith.
Folder for drawings of lantern slide studies by F Percy Smith.
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Frank Percy Smith was born in London in 1880. He was keen to exploit the educational possibilities of film and began working for Charles Urban, who had been impressed with his photograph of a bluebottle's tongue. During his time working for Urban he produced numerous scientific films, most notably The Balancing Bluebottle (also known as The Acrobatic Fly) and the Kinemacolor production The Birth of a Flower (both 1910).
During the First World War, Smith made a series of films depicting battles through animated maps and worked as a Naval photographer. When the war was over he turned to comedy with The Bedtime Stories of Archie the Ant (1925), featuring insect characters in a natural environment. However it was the series 'Secrets of Nature' he made for British Instructional Films which allowed him to go back to the educational possibilities of documentary film. Blending nature photography with painstaking laboratory work, Smith and his team produced a steady stream of titles embracing nature's minutiae, from the life cycle of a sweet pea to the 'home-wrecking' tendencies of the cuckoo. Beginning in 1922, the series continued into the 1930s and the sound era, with commentary working equally well as inter-titles.
Smith was a true pioneer, inventing original methods for time lapse and micro cinematography, involving all kinds of home-made devices, including alarms all over his home to wake him up in the middle of the night if the film in the camera needed changing. With endless patience, he could spend up to two and a half years completing a film. He also had the popular touch, with the happy knack (as he put it himself) of being able to feed his audience "the powder of instruction in the jam of entertainment".
- Measurements:
-
overall: 335 mm x 270 mm x 35 mm,
- Materials:
- paper (fibre product) and cardboard
- Object Number:
- 2026-31/1
- type:
- folder