Frank Mottershaw

Frank Mottershaw (1850–1932) (often confused with his second son, Frank Storm Mottershaw, 1881–1931) was an early English cinema director based in Sheffield, Yorkshire. His films, A Daring Daylight Burglary and The Robbery of the Mail Coach (featuring a protagonist based on Jack Sheppard, the infamous 18th-century English highwayman), made in April and September 1903, are regarded as highly influential on the development of Edwin Porter’s paradigmatic "chase film" The Great Train Robbery of December 1903, and often claimed as the prototype of the action film. The uniqueness of Mottershaw's A Daring Daylight Burglary is seen in the way it tracks a single action through changing locations. Henry Jasper Redfern and Mottershaw made the first motion pictures filmed outdoors in Sheffield.

In 1900 Mottershaw formed the Sheffield Photo Company, which by 1905 was one of the leading film companies in the country.

Mottershaw made most of his company's films with his son Frank Storm Mottershaw (sometimes known as Frank S. Mottershaw Jr.), who shot and directed documentary film The Coronation of Peter I of Serbia and a Ride Through Serbia, Novi-Bazaar, Montenegro and Dalmatia, travelling to the Balkans in 1904 with Serbian honorary consul in Britain, Arnold Muir Wilson. His younger son, John Arthur Mothershaw (1883–1905) was actor and cameraman in some of the films.