Jean-Pierre Beauviala solved the technical problem of synchronizing image and sound in simple filming situations when, as a young electronics researcher, he planned to film daily life simultaneously in various craftspeople’s workshops in Grenoble’s historic city centre. He wanted to portray his acoustic and visual perceptions of the individual worlds of craftspeople at work, walking down the street from one workshop to another, and from one shop window to another. This suggested the possibility of a sort of filmed ethnography of the passer-by, of the flaneur. To do this, he invented a control circuit in the mid-1960s that let him synchronise a camera and a tape recorder, and which was portable enough that he could film as he walked. The film was never completed, but the different spaces he intended to film in the old neighbourhoods of Grenoble did eventually become connected to one another in 1971 with the establishment of Aaton, a camera manufacturing company whose models contributed to the evolution of cinematographic forms and techniques.