00:00I'm Laurel Avery, and I've just published a book called Light and Shadow, which is about Augustin Le Prince, who
00:08many people know as Louis Le Prince, who actually created the first motion picture camera in 1888 in a garden
00:15in Leeds.
00:17And in that same time period, he filmed traffic crossing Leeds Bridge, which is where we are right now.
00:25They have put up a wonderful commemorative plaque about Le Prince on the bridge, but there's not a lot that's
00:31known about him in the world, and even in Leeds, a lot of people don't know the story of Le
00:37Prince.
00:38I saw a Reddit post nine years ago that listed the oldest film on the IMDb, which was the Rante
00:46garden scene that lasts all of two seconds.
00:49And I was mostly fascinated because I'm a dress historian, and when I saw the clothes moving, it was just
00:58incredible to see actual clothing at the time in motion.
01:02And then when I learned that Le Prince vanished off a train just before he was about to present his
01:09invention in New York, I had to know more.
01:12I fell down a research rabbit hole and came to Leeds and went to France and went to America, and
01:18the book has come from that.
01:21His whole life is really interesting, the disappearance aside.
01:24He was involved in the siege of Paris, where he was trapped in Paris for months and almost starved to
01:31death.
01:31He was arrested as a spy and would have been hanged had he not been rescued at the last minute.
01:38At the time, there was a lot of competition for the patents for the first film.
01:45People in America, such as Thomas Edison, in France, the Lumiere brothers were working on making a film camera, and
01:54they were all later than Le Prince by two to five years.
01:58Had he survived, he would be known as the father of cinema, and for those of us who know his
02:05story, he is absolutely the father of cinema, and the film that we can see proves it.
02:12For people to get to the essence of the story of Le Prince, they need a real story around it.
02:18And I thought a fictional retelling of his story might be the way in for people to learn about Le
02:27Prince.
02:27My book is 85 to 90 percent completely true, and the other amount is what I've made up, what I
02:35filled in in the bits that we don't know.
02:39We don't know what happened to him or why he vanished, but that allows for an author to play with
02:45it a little bit.
02:46And so I was able to put in some, I hope, intriguing possibilities of what could have happened to him,
02:56but it's sort of left up to the reader at the end what actually happened.
