Horsin' Around
Published:
Tended to:
Tags:
muybridge •horse-in-motion •experments •craft •symbols •film-history •design •stanford •bay-area
~ ~ ~
Obsession takes hold
In the summer of 2024, while my co-founder Luke McGartland and I were attending the dy/dx program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I found myself circling back to a long-standing fascination with Eadweard Muybridge — a man often credited as the ”father of motion pictures.” In the 1870s, Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, was Muybridge’s chief patron, and the first motion studies of the horse named Occident were captured on Stanford’s race track.
Even though we had no academic justification for being there, I reached out to Stanford Special Collections, and to my surprise, my co-founder Luke and I were invited to explore the archives on a sweltering July afternoon. Stepping into the cool, dim archives room and handling these priceless proto-cinema artifacts was an unforgettable experience.
Something about that moment lodged itself deep in my mind. Since then, I’ve found myself remixing Muybridge’s Horse in Motion into different aspects of my life, with friends and family now sending me instances of the symbol spotted in the wild :’) This note is an evolving record of my experiments around this symbol.
Horse in Motion Sprite Animation Component
At the beginning of 2025, we refreshed the www.sequence.film landing page, gearing up for a wider launch. A playful “see you in the timeline” SVG had been sitting in the footer for a while, but i wanted to breath some life into it. Something with motion, something interactive, a bit nostalgic, and in sync with our brand’s retro-computing aesthetic touches.
I started by creating a small simple grid template in Figma, tracing dots over the original Occident plates to generate a sort of silhouette mark that reminded me of dithered or dot-matrix graphics. Exporting the frames as SVGs, I needed a way to display them in rapid succession. Jamming with Vercel’s v0 on my intentions for this, I was able to have it adopt Framer Motion and compose a customizable animation displaying the SVGs in rapid succession.
Try out the v0 version of the component yourself here: horse-in-motion-animated-sprite.vercel.app
We then integrated the component into the Sequence website, giving our footer just a little bit more juice.
Want to tinker with the code? Grab it here: horse-in-motion-animated-sprite
But for the more IRL > URL hands-on crafters among us…
Embroidered “Lean Forward” Patch
A few months ago, my friend Therese created a custom ink stamp featuring the horse in motion with the phrase “lean forward” — a shared mantra we were both trying to adopt at the time. It became one of my most cherished gifts, something I quickly found myself wanting to carry with me in a more permanent form.
I decided to turn it into an embroidered patch (after all, it was about time I used those embroidery supplies I bought at some point in the tick of the pandemic). My first attempt, winging it with a fully combined 6-strand embroidery floss and no knowledge of stitches, ended in disaster — mangling one of my precious original patches in the process.
After watching some instructional videos from the good ol’ college of YouTube (Ellia Fabila and Shmoxd both had some excellent pieces to learn from), I picked up the proper floss separation and stitching techniques. I spent an entire Super Bowl afternoon perfecting the patch, sewing it onto my favorite jacket just in time for the Berlin Film Festival-where, to my delight, it sparked a few conversations with the cinema-savvy crowd.
I’m really happy to be able to memorialize this symbol in a way that allows me to easily wear it on my chest, and I had a BLAST learning how to do embroidery. I’m already trying to plan out what other hand-made patches I want to work on the next time I’m looking to avoid a major sporting event.
But for now, back into the digital realm.
Bullet Time, 1870s edition
(work in progress))
Fck it, let’s get a tattoo
(work in progress)
Send me your horse in motion sightings!!!
If you come across any cool references to the Horse in Motion or Muybridge’s studies, send them over my way! Would love to add them to my growing collection :) drop them in the are.na channel or email me@parker.mov.
Resources & Further Reading
~ ~ ~