THE HISTORY OF ANIMATION

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THE HISTORY OF ANIMATION
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What is Animation?

• a motion picture that is made from a series of
  drawings, computer graphics, or photographs of
  inanimate objects (as puppets) and that simulates
  movement by slight progressive changes in each
  frame Merriam Webster
• The act, process, or result of imparting life,
  interest, spirit, motion, or activity
• The quality or condition of being alive, active,
  spirited, or vigorous

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Early attempts at depicting motion

• Cave paintings 18,000 BC
• Greek vases 430 BC

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Chinese Indonesian Shadow Puppets

• The stage is a white cloth screen which the
  shadows of flat puppets are projected on. The
  puppets were first made of paper sculpture then
  later from animal hides. Their joints are
  connected by thread so that they can be operated
  freely. These threads are connected to the
  operators fingers. Since only the profile of the
  puppet can be seen during a performance, the
  puppets use exaggeration dramatization. The
  costumes and faces of the puppets are vivid and
  humorous. These puppets are beautiful works of
  art
• This art form entertained audiences for over
  2000 years.
• The stories tell of heroes from folklore and
  ancient history.
• Their influences can be seen even today.

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Puppets Shadows
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Early Animation Devices

• Magic Lantern 1630
• Thaumotrope 1825
• Phenakisticope 1833
• Zoetrope 1834
• Praxinoscope (1877)
• Flipbooks (1868)
• Stop motion (puppet, clay)
• Chalk animation
• Silhouette animation
• Cel animation

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Magic Lantern

• the ancestor of the modern day projector
• consisted of a translucent oil painting and a
  simple lamp
• When put together in a darkened room, the image
  would appear larger on a flat surface. Athanasius
  Kircher spoke about this originating from China
  in the 1600s.

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Magic Lantern
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Early Animation Devices

• Thousands of years later, optical toys became the
  precursors to cinematic animation. These 19th
  century devices, including the thaumatrope,
  phenakisticope and the zoetrope, demonstrate a
  key principle of why animation works
• the persistence of vision. This theory proposes
  that the brain retains an image for a fraction of
  a second after the image has passed. If the eye
  sees a series of still images in too rapid a
  succession to process, the images will appear to
  move because the eyes have been tricked into
  thinking that they have seen motion.http//www.p
  bs.org/independentlens/animateddogs/animation.html
  

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Thaumatrope

• a toy used in the Victorian era
• a disk or card with two different pictures on
  each side is attached to two pieces of string.
  When the strings are twirled quickly between the
  fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a
  single image
• The creator of this small but yet important
  invention is uncertain, but attributed to John
  Aryton Paris or Charles Babbage

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Phenakistoscope

• a cardboard disc with evenly spaced slots cut
  along the outside edge
• The face of the disc is divided into pie shaped
  sections containing a series of images
• The center of the disc is attached to a stick or
  dowel so it may spin freely
• By holding the image side up to a mirror,
  spinning the disc, and looking through the slots,
  the images create the illusion of a moving
  picture.
• invented by Joseph Plateau in Brussels in early
  1830s

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Eadweard Muybridges Phenakistoscope
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Zoetrope

• Although an unknown Chinese inventor
  discovered an early version of the Zoetrope
  in 180, the invention was credited to William
  George Horner in 1834
• The zoetrope worked on the same principles as the
  phenakistiscope, but the pictures were drawn on a
  strip which could be set around the bottom third
  of a metal drum, with the slits now cut in the
  upper section of the drum. The drum was mounted
  on a spindle so that it could be spun, and
  viewers looking through the slits would see the
  cartoon strip form a moving image. The faster the
  drum is spun, the smoother the image that is
  produced.

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Zoetrope
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Praxinoscope

• Praxinoscope comes from Greek roots meaning
  action viewer
• The Praxinoscope, invented by French scientist
  Charles-Émile Reynaud in Paris 1877, was a more
  sophisticated version of the Zoetrope. It used
  the same basic mechanism of a strip of images
  placed on the inside of a spinning cylinder, but
  instead of viewing it through slits, it was
  viewed in a series of stationary mirrors around
  the inside of the cylinder, so that the animation
  would stay in place, and also provided a clearer
  image.
• Reynaud also developed a larger version of the
  praxinoscope that could be projected onto a
  screen, called the Théâtre Optique.

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Praxinoscope and theatre optique
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Praxinoscope
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Flip book

• The first flip book was patented in 1868 by a
  John Barnes Linnet. This was another step closer
  to the development of animation. Like the
  Zoetrope, the Flip Book creates the illusion of
  motion. A set of sequential pictures seen at a
  high speed creates this effect.

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Animation in the Movies

• Animation has been around since the beginning of
  cinema in the late 1800s
• At that time, the French filmmaker Georges Méliès
  demonstrated stop-motion or stop-action
  animation, whereby the camera was stopped and an
  objectremoved or added to a shot before filming
  was resumed

Le voyage dans la lune, Georges Mélies, 1902
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Animation in the Movies

• In 1907, J. Stuart Blackton made the first
  animated cartoon, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces
  using the stop-motion technique filming a
  blackboard of drawings

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Animation in the Movies

• A year later, French newspaper cartoonist Emile
  Cohl created a series of cartoon films.
• The first American artist to draw for film was
  also a well-known newspaper cartoonist named
  Winsor McCay, who created Gertie the Dinosaur in
  1914with 10,000 drawings, (backgrounds
  included)

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Animation in the Movies

• The most famous cartoon personality before Walt
  Disney's Mickey Mouse, however, was Felix the
  Cat, created by Australian cartoonist Pat
  Sullivan and animated by Otto Mesmer.

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Silhouette Animation

• developed by Lotte Reiniger in Germany during
  the 1920s
• It uses jointed, flat-figure marionettes whose
  poses are minutely readjusted for each
  photographic frame

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Rotoscope

• Frustrated by the limitations of cel animation,
  Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, which
  projected live action footage onto the animator's
  drawing board. By tracing the shape, the animator
  could create a smooth, realistic action that
  predated Walt Disney's work by 15 years.
  Fleischer also developed the personalities of
  such famous characters such as Betty Boop,
  Popeye, and Superman.

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Rotoscope
Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which
animators trace over live-action film movement,
frame by frame, for use in animated films.
Originally, pre-recorded live-action film
images were projected onto a frosted glass panel
and re-drawn by an animator. This projection
equipment is called a rotoscope, although this
device has been replaced by computers in recent
years.
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The Fleischers

• The first cartoons created by the Fleischers
  using the Rotoscope were the Koko the Clown
  series, and then went on to utilize it in Betty
  Boop and Popeye. Though they used rotoscoping to
  create the main characters, they continued to
  rely on traditional rubber hose style animation
  in their cartoons.

The Fleischers pioneered other traditional
animation priniciples in their studio which
changed the face of modern animation, right up to
today. Most animators at the time would use the
technique of Straight Ahead Action. Animators
would simply start drawing their sequences at the
beginning and straight ahead to the end.
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Pose to Pose - Keyframes

• The Fleischers used another technique called
  Pose to Pose animation, in which the animators
  would produce main extreme poses, or keyframes,
  then fill in the in-betweens.
• The difference was that the Fleischers would have
  assistants draw the in-betweens while the lead
  animators moved on to create more keyframes.
  Though at the time this eventually led to labor
  problems and striking workers at Fleischer
  Studios, the practice is still used today by
  traditional cel animation companies, and has been
  translated into the automatic tweening
  processes found in computer based animation
  tools.

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Cel Animation

• One of the milestones of efficient animation
  production was the patenting of a cel (or
  cellulose acetate) animation production process
  by Earl Hurd in 1914.
• Because cels were clear, different drawings of
  moving parts could be laid over a single static
  image, reducing the number of times an image had
  to be redrawn

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The Advent of Disney

• With the arrival of sound in 1920, Walt Disney
  quickly rose to preeminence through his
  imaginative use of sound and color, his lively
  characters and clever gags. Mickey Mouse achieved
  fame in Steamboat Willie (1928), Disney's first
  sound film. Short films or "shorts" starring
  Mickey gradually incorporated a number of other
  popular characters and ran for several years.
• Mickey Mouse - his evolution.

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Snow White

• In 1937, Disney made his first full-length color
  cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His
  studio continued to make full-length animated
  films, and developed more advanced techniques
  combining animation with live action.
• His style of cel animation, known as full
  animation because it has constant movement and a
  high ration of drawings per second of film, has
  most strongly influenced animation worldwide.

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Cels
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3 D Animation

• Computer-generated imagery (CGI) is the
  application of the field of computer graphics, or
  more specifically, 3D graphics.
• In 1995, the first fully computer-generated
  feature film, Toy Story, was a resounding
  commercial success, this inspired many more fully
  computer-generated movies that exist today.
• Other films using CGI include Star Wars, Jurassic
  Park, Terminator, etc.