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.