The Birth of a Flower

Charles Urban was a film producer and distributor who, like George Albert Smith, tried to produce a commercially successful motion picture film process -- more difficult than still color photography, simply because it required more time for each frame's exposure. He found a fine partner for this early experiment in Percy Smith, who was working on time lapse photography -- take exposures at a rate of a frame a minute and then exhibit at a more normal sixteen frames a second, and a still life becomes a moving subject.

As a result, this short subject of several flowers bursting from their buds, while it may not be very interesting to the modern viewer, is important in a couple of technical ways. Anyone interesting in the history and evolution of motion pictures should be fascinated.

An early - possibly first? - example of time lapse cinematography from British naturalist F. Percy Smith. We've all seen the same kind of thing countless times since, but it really must have blown minds back in 1910, and there's an undeniable beauty in the smooth unfolding of the various flowers captured by Smith's patient camera. Sadly, only a fragment of the 6-minute film appears to have survived.