Unit 33-LO1

The developement of Animation and the People

A history of pioneers that experimented with different takes on movement of images/photography and drawings had developed different types of animations that have now been developed immensely with digitalizing animation via computers etc. Some of these famous pioneering animators are of how animation has come about.

In 1831 there was a Belgian scientist named Dr. Joseph Antoine Plateau and along side with his was Dr. Simon Rittrer. They both constructed a machine called a phenakitscope. A phenakitscope was a deception that the rotating disk containing small windows, and another disk behind it that has images on it formed an animation effect, as it moved to the correct speed that it should be spun. 

Another pioneer is Emile Cohl, who first developed a method of the Fantasmagoric, containing 700 drawings on paper and then shot each frame onto a negative film to produce a film. It is considered to be the first animated cartoon in 1908. Photographed images that have been turned into an animation was also started up by Eadweard Muybridge, the man who was asked by the former governor of California, to investigate if a trotting horse’s feet had all lifted off the ground at once. Similar to how we use stop motion today, Muybridge took a series of 25 frames per second as well to create an animation to prove that it is true. Lastly, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis the creators of cinematography that was first aired publicly in December 28, 1895 in France.

Some of the developers of animation were Willis O’Brien who was a motion picture special effects and stop-motion animator. He was well known for his work on the visual effects on movies such as ‘The Lost World’, ‘King Kong’ and ‘Mighty Joe Young’. Willis O’Brien’s work was influenced by Thomas A. Edison who is an inventor of phonography, the motion picture camera etc. As O’Brien’s film ‘The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy’ was noticed by Edison, O’Brien was hired by the Edison company to animate a series of short films also keeping to the prehistoric theme. Working closely with Willis O’Brien was Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion model animator. Harryhausen along with Pete Peterson worked closely with O’Brien making the film ‘Mighty Joe Young’ with the stop-motion animation. Ray Harryhausen developed his own brand of stop-motion animation, which was known as “Dynamation”. These pioneering developers work closely together in order to create one visual aspect of animation. Using different styles of animation to combine their methods of creating animation into one production of animation to make success.

Unit 33-LO1

Genres of animations and forms and the usage in today’s society

Having noticed already that there are many types of animations, there are also different genres and forms of animations too. These are TV animation, Channel idents, cinema, and advertising in animation as well. In the 21^st century, animation is being used by nearly everything that you come across, whether it’s on television, in the cinemas, used for channel idents, for advertising, music videos, computers, mobile phones or websites. You can use animation almost anywhere and that is why it is important to understand the background of how animations work and the different types of animation. Because animation is being used in almost every company, it is vital for you to know and understand how to convey a message through animation. Whether it is to attract audiences of a particular age, you will have to know the choices of your design, color and layout that will cater to your specified audience.

Brainstorming

Moodboard (Process)

The process of my production made in to a moodboard 

Unit 33-LO1

History of animation and different techniques 

here are many techniques of animation and these are: drawn animation, cutout animation, model animation/stop motion animation, computer animation/ computer generated imagery (CGI), rotoscope, flipbook, clay or plastecine (Claymation), puppet animation etc. I am going to expand on some understanding of these techniques.

Firstly, I am going to explain what a drawn animation is. Drawn animation is a drawing of a character. For each frame the drawer draws the character slightly different and changes the posture of the body to show the movement of the character. This is very time consuming because you have to draw each frame, as like any other animation technique, it starts out as a storyboard with a rough sketch of the characters (hand-drawn). This helps the drawer to develop the little details a long the way to portray the characters personalities in every drawing of the animation. One example of a famous hand-drawn animation from the 1930’s is ‘Felix the cat’. It was created in the silent era of the 1960’s. This animation shows the simplicity of hand-drawn animations before compared to today’s hand-drawn animation, which is cleaner and not pixilated. One good example of a production that will be brought back is 'The Snow Queen' from 2002. It is scheduled for November 27^th 2013 will be released as a 3D production.

Another animation technique is cut out animation, which is a technique that uses materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs to create characters, props and backgrounds. One example of a cutout animation is South Park. South Park had first used actual paper cutouts in their first ever episode, but now that technology has been more advanced over the years it is done digitally with computers. What the computer does is scan the images or vector graphics instead of cutting out physically.

The flipbook and stop motion animation techniques are very interesting and take a matter of days/months to complete the desired look and motion. This is simply because in a stop motion scenario, you will have to take pictures for every movement, and for every movement it is required that you have 24 frames per second.

That is where persistence of vision from the human eye comes in. The human eye retains an image for a fraction of a second, meaning that everything we see is a subtle blend of what is happening now and what happened a fraction of a second ago. The stop motion animation technique very much is suitable for human eyes as we see a sequence of frames its as if it is a continuous moving picture. 

Flipbook:

Stop motion: