History of Animation

The Magic LanternThe Magic Lantern or Lanterna Magica is an early type of image projector developed in the 17th century.The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen

1824 Thaumatrope

A disk or card with a picture 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 due to persistence of vision.

1832 PhenakistoscopeThe phenakistoscope used a spinning disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed around the disc's center was a series of drawings showing phases of the animation, and cut through it was a series of equally spaced radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moviing slits at the discs reflection in a mirror.The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of imagesthat appeared to be a single moving picture.

1833 (180 AD) ZoetropeThe zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.

1868 Flip Book

0 A flip book or flick book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change.

1877 PraxinoscopeThe praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor of the zoetrope. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so the reflections appreared more or less stationary as the wheel turned.Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.

1888 Kinetoscope

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. Though not a movie projector, it was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of the cabinet housing its components. It creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high speed shitter.

35 mm filmstrip of the Edison production Butterfly Dance (ca. 1894–95), featuring Annabelle Whitford Moore, in the format that would become standard for both still and motion picture photography around the world.

1892 Cinematograph

It is a film camera, which also serves as a film projector.

1908 Fantasmagorie

French animated film by Emile Cohl.The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film which gave the picture a blackboard look.It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed (animated "on twos"), leading to a running time of almost two minutes.

1914 Gertie the Dinosaur

Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 American animated short film by Windsor McCay.Although not the first animated film, as is sometimes thought, it was the first cartoon to feature a character with an appealing personality. The appearance of a true character distinguished it from earlier animated "trick films”. The film was also the first to be created using keyframe animation.

1917 El Apostol

El Apóstol (Spanish: "The Apostle") was a 1917 Argentine animated film utilizing cutout animation, and the world's first animated feature film.

1925 Felix the Cat

Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in the silent film era. His black body, white eyes, and giant grin, coupled with the surrealism of the situations in which his cartoons place him, combine to make Felix one of the most recognized cartoon characters in film history. Felix was the first character from animation to attain a level of popularity sufficient to draw movie audiences

1925 Walt Disney’s Alice Comedies

The "Alice Comedies" are a series of animated cartoons created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a live action little girl named Alice (originally played by Virginia Davis) and an animated cat named Julius have adventures in an animated landscape.

1928 Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie

Steamboat Willie was produced in black-and-white by The Walt Disney Studio and released by Celebrity Productions. The cartoon is considered the debut of Mickey Mouse, and his girlfriend Minnie, but the characters had both appeared several months earlier in test screenings. Steamboat Willie was the third of Mickey's films to be produced, but was the first to be distributed.The film is also notable for being one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound.

1930 Warner Bros Looney Tunes

Sinkin' in the Bathtub was the very first Warner Bros. theatrical cartoon short as well as the very first of the Looney Tunes series. Made in 1930, this short marked the theatrical debut of Bosko the "Talk-Ink Kid" whom Harman and Ising had created to show to Warner Brothers. Bosko became their first star character, surpassed only much later by Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. Also, this is the first publicly released non-Disney cartoon to have a pre-recorded soundtrack

1932 Disney’s Silly Symphonies “Flowers and

Trees”It was the first commercially released film to be produced in the full-color three-strip Technicolor process, after several years of two-color Technicolor films.

1937 Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

It is the first full-length cel animated feature in motion picture history, the first animated feature film produced in the United States, the first produced in full color, the first to be produced by Walt Disney Productions, and the first in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series.

1945 Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors

The first Japanese feature-length animated film. It was made as a propoganda film for the war by the Japanese Naval Ministry.

TASK

Choose what you believe to be the key developments in animation from the 17th Century to the present. (This PowerPoint only covers until 1945 … you will have to decide on the key moments from then until the present. Good luck, there are many to choose from!)

For each, explain their importance in the development of animation.

Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films.Originally, 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 was eventually replaced by computers.

Live Action/Animation

There were also many previous films combining live action with stop motion animation using back projection, such as the films of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen in the United States, and Aleksandr Ptushko, Karel Zeman and more recently Jan ankmajer in Eastern Europe. The first feature film to do this was The Lost World (1925). In the 1935 Soviet film The New Gulliver, the only character who wasn't animated was Gulliver himself.

Stop MotionPuppet Animation

The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or "clay-mation". Not all stop motion requires figures or models; many stop motion films can involve using humans, household appliances and other things for comedic effect. Stop motion using objects is sometimes referred to as object animation.

Clay Animation

Each object or character is sculpted from clay or other such similarly pliable material as Plasticine, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature, and then arranged on the set, where it is photographed once before being slightly moved by hand to prepare it for the next shot, and so on until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film. A variation of clay animation was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig Bartlett, for his series of Arnold short films (also made in the late-1980s/early-1990s), in which he not only used clay painting but sometimes built up clay images that rose off the plane of the flat support platform toward the camera lens to give a more 3-D stop-motion look to his films.

Silouette Animation

Silhouette animation is animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes. This is usually accomplished by backlighting articulated cardboard cut-outs, though other methods exist. It is partially inspired by, but for a number of reasons technically distinct from, shadow play.

Model Animation

Model animation is a form of stop motion animation designed to merge with live action footage to create the illusion of a real-world fantasy sequence.

Computer Animation

Computer animation or CGI animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer-generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images.Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics, although 2D computer graphics are still used for stylistic, low bandwidth, and faster real-time renderings. Sometimes the target of the animation is the computer itself, but sometimes the target is another medium, such as film.Computer animation is essentially a digital successor to the stop motion techniques used in traditional animation with 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of 2D illustrations. Computer generated animations are more controllable than other more physically based processes, such as constructing miniatures for effects shots or hiring extras for crowd scenes, and because it allows the creation of images that would not be feasible using any other technology. It can also allow a single graphic artist to produce such content without the use of actors, expensive set pieces, or props.