American mutoscope biography company houston texas

The Biograph Company , also known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company , was a motion picture company founded in and active until It was the first company in the United States devoted entirely to film production and exhibition, and for two decades was one of the most prolific, releasing over short films and 12 feature films. The company was home to pioneering director D.

The company was started by William Kennedy Dickson , an inventor at Thomas Edison 's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. In the summer of the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison's Vitascope projector. The company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, including the British Mutoscope Co.

In it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company , and in to simply the Biograph Company. The camera used friction feed instead of Edison's sprocket feed to guide the film to the aperture. The camera itself punched a sprocket hole on each side of the frame as the film was exposed at 30 frames per second.

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Biograph films before , were mostly "actualities," documentary film footage of actual persons, places and events, each film usually less than two minutes long, such as the one of the Empire State Express , which premiered on October 12, , in New York City. Spurred on by competition from Edison and British and European producers, Biograph production from onward was increasingly dominated by narratives.

As the stories became more complex the films became longer, with multiple scenes to tell the story, although an individual scene was still usually presented in one shot without editing. Biograph's production of actualities ended by in favor of the narrative film. The company's first studio was located on the roof of Broadway at 13th St. The set-up was similar to Thomas Edison 's " Black Maria " in West Orange, New Jersey , with the studio itself being mounted on circular tracks to be able to get the best possible sunlight as of the foundations of this machinery were still extant.

The company moved in to a converted brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street near Union Square , a building that was razed in the s. Biograph moved again in , as it entered feature-film production, to a new state-of-the-art studio on th Street in the Bronx.