What Was the First Movie Ever Made?
If you’re a movie fan, you’ve probably wondered, What’s the first movie ever made? This is a
great question, and a somewhat complicated one.
In the late 1880’s various people began experimenting with photo, blending them together to
give the illusion of a motion picture. But the technology and difficulty to capture that sort of
video made motion pictures rare.
Even so, here are a couple of the very first movies:
1. The Horse In Motion (1878)
This groundbreaking motion photography was accomplished using multiple cameras and
assembling the individual pictures into a a single motion picture. it’s something that you could do
today, using a few cameras that are set to go off at an exact moment. The movie was made to
scientifically answer a popularly debated question during this era: Are all four of a horse’s
hooves ever off the ground at the same time while the horse is galloping? The video proved that
they indeed were and, more importantly, motion photography was born.
2. Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)
The world’s earliest surviving motion-picture film, showing actual consecutive action is called
Roundhay Garden Scene. It’s a short film directed by French inventor Louis Le Prince. While it’s
just 2.11 seconds long, it is technically a movie. According to the Guinness Book of Records, it
is the oldest surviving film in existence.
3. Arrival of a Train (1895)
This 50-second silent film shows the entry of a train pulled by a steam locomotive into a train
station of the French coastal town of La Ciotat. It’s a single, unedited view illustrating an aspect
of everyday life, and the film consists of one continuous real-time shot. There’s also a an urban
legend associated with this movie that says when the film was first shown, the audience was so
scared by the image of a life-sized train barreling toward them that people screamed and ran to
the back of the room.
