F. Percy Smith

A distinguished pioneer of scientific filmmaking, Percy Smith was born in London in 1880. Working as a clerk at the Board of Education, Percy began to photograph the natural world around him, nursing a lifelong fascination with all manner of plant and animal life.  His close-up photograph of a bluebottle's tongue caught the attention of film entrepreneur Charles Urban, who quickly began to exhibit Percy's work in London theatres. After the considerable success of sequences such as The Balancing Bluebottle, where he recorded flies juggling, Percy finally joined Urban as a full-time filmmaker in 1910.  Before the outbreak of the First World War, Percy completed over fifty nature films for the Urban Sciences series including, in 1910, the famous piece, 

The Birth of a Flower. An early example of stop-motion photography, the film was hugely popular. Meticulously researching his subjects, Percy devised ingenious ways to film slow-growing plant life - modifying his equipment with gramophone needles, candle wicks and other assorted objects, allowing him to continue filming plant movement even as he slept.  In 1911 his study,