Task 1 - History of Stop Motion Animation
History of Animation
Animations are a creation of a set of images drawn, painted or made by any other artistic methods to show an illusion of motion. In the paleolithic period cavemen would draw on the walls using blood or other types of meaning and some would be in an order and attempt to create motion like a really old form of a storyboard.
Techniques:
Flip Books - Flip books are individual images on many pieces of paper and when the images are drawn, the next one is slightly different from the last and the viewer would flip the pages at a certain speed to make it look like their drawings are moving.
Rotoscoping - It is when the animator traces over the footage, frame by frame for use in animated and live-action films. Recorded live-action films were originally projected onto frosted glass panels and re-drawn by the animator. The projection equipment is called rotoscope although it was eventually replaced by computers.
Cel Animation - It is short for celluloid. It is a transparent sheet when objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation. It was used during the first half of the 20th century but because it was flammable and dimensionally unstable it was replaced by cellulose acetate. When computer assisted animation came around the use of Cel animation was abandoned in major productions.
Drawn on Film - This is when footage is produced by creating images directly onto the film stock as opposed to any form of animation where the images or objects are photographed frame by frame with an animation camera.
Flash - Flash animations are created by Adobe Flash or similar animation software and often distributed in the SWF file format. It is called Flash animation not only because of the file format but to a certain kind of movement and visual style.
After Effects - After effects are when an animation is placed on top of your film to create after effects, like if a house was on fire they would use effects to make it look like the house was actually on fire. The use for this is mainly for creating motion graphics and visual effects. They allow the user to animate, alter and composite media in 2D and 3D space with various built in tools and third party plug-ins.
Toon Boom Animation Studios - They develop animation and storyboarding software for television, film, web animation, mobile devices, games, education and training applications. It is a Canadian software company that specializes in animation production.
Stop Motion - is used in many productions the most common types of puppets are clay puppets as used in the successful Wallace and Gromit and figures made of various rubbers, cloths and plastic resins like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Stop motion can be made with any inanimate object and taking pictures of it so when you put all the pictures together it looks like they are moving.
CGI Animation - CGI animation is computer generated imagery which is fully animated like Pixar's Toy Story in 1995. CGI animation is compared to traditional animation that is drawing but GCI uses 3D modelling like a virtual version of stop motion.
Development:
Thomas Edison - He invented the Kinetoscope which was designed to watch a film through a hole at the top of the device. The device had film wrapped around on the inside of the device. The film strip was moved around inside over a light giving the image that it was moving. He worked with Eadweard Muybridge by combining his Zoopraxiscope and Thomas Edison's Phonograph and they created recorded motion.
Lumiere Brothers - They had the Cinematographe which is a motion picture film camera which is a film projector. They bought the invention off of an inventor called Leon Bouly. The item was sold because of lack of fee so Auguste and Louis Lumiere's engineers bought the licence. The brothers worked together to create motion picture that was better than Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The device was hand cranked and it projected a beam of light onto a wall then the film would turn as well creating the film image on the wall. It was played at 16 frames per second while the Kinescope was at 48 frames per second it also created more noise and used more film.
The Magic Lantern - It is a early form of the modern day projector. It had translucent oil painting, a lens and a candle or lamp. It was put in a darkened room and the image would appear projected onto an adjacent surface.
Thaumatrope - The Thaumatrope which was a toy made in 1824. It is a small disk with a different picture on either side such as a cage and a bird and it would be attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled between the fingers quickly the pictures would look like they combined into a individual image.
Zoetrope - The Zoetrope was created by William Horner it is a circular device that when spun the viewer would look through the slits in the side that would change the image in a rotational order which would look like the image is moving. For example there would be like 12 pictures of a horse that are all different images that are slightly different and when the Zoetrope is spun it would look like the horse is running.
Gertie - The first film to combine live action footage with hand drawn animation is Gertie the Dinosaur which was an early example of character development in drawn animation. Gertie was created by an American cartoonist called Winsor McCay in 1914.
Disney - Disney's first noticeable line of work was with 1928's Steamboat Willie it was the first cartoon that included a fully post-produced soundtrack, featuring voice and sound effects that was on the film itself.
Hanna Barbera - It is an American animation studio that controlled American television animation for nearly four decades in the mid/late 20th century. They have many cartoons such as Captain Caveman, Cow and Chicken, Dexter's Laboratory, The Flintstones, Johnny Bravo, Scooby Doo and many more. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera teamed up while working together at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio. Their first directed project was Puss Gets the Boot which was the beginning of Tom and Jerry.
Warner Bros - They are an American producer of films, television and music entertainment. They created Looney Tunes which was a theatrical cartoon shorts of the famous characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.
Stop Motion Animators:
Ladislas Starevich
He was a good stop motion artist who created The Beautiful Lukanida (1912), The Eyes of the Dragon (1925), The Queen of the Butterflies (1927) and many more. He was the first filmmaker to use stop motion animation and used expressive puppets to tell stories. One of his ideas was the use of motion blur in his films which he achieved. He was very successful by making 2 films per year.
Henry Selick
He is a well known animation for the creation of the film Coraline. It was the first film to be shot fully in stereoscopic 3-D. He also directed the film The Nightmare Before Christmas which was based of Tim Burtons story Nightmare. He later created James and the Giant Peach which was also produced by Tim Burton and the film was combined with stop motion and live-animation.
Tim Burton
One of Tim Burtons first films is a short stop motion animation called Vincent. In 1993 he produced all the stop motion animation in The Nightmare Before Christmas. The film was based on a poem Tim had wrote inspires by Twas the Night Before Christmas. In 2005 Corpse Bride was released which was another stop motion film created by Tim Burton.
Nick Park
Nick Park and the Aardman Animations team produce commercials and music videos and other videos such as Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, which uses many different types of animation techniques. Pixilation was used by making Gabriel hold poses while each frame was shot and moving between exposures becoming a human puppet. Nick Park joined Aardman when they took an interest in his college project A Grad Day Out. Since then they have crated the following films such as Wrong Trousers, Creature Comforts, A Close Shave and Crackling Contraptions
History on Stop Motion Animation:
The first form of stop motion was credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for Vitagraph's The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1997) in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals come to life. In 1902 a film called Fun in a Bakery Shop used the stop trick technique which is when an object is being recorded and the camera is turned away the object is moved then the camera is turned back. Georges Melies used stop motion only once when he used moving title card letters in one off his film shorts and some of his special effects are based on stop motion. 1907 The Haunted Hotel is a film also created by J. Stuart Blackton and was a success when released. Segundo de Chomon was from Spain and released El Hotel Eletrico later in the same year as The Haunted Hotel and used similar techniques. A more complicated version of stop motion is Go Motion. It was first used on Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dragonslayer (1981) and Robocop films. Since 2005 Robot Chicken has taken over stop motion animation using custom made action figures and other toys as characters. In 1970s and 1980s industrial Light and Magic often used stop motion model animations for films such as the original star wars films, such as the chess sequence in star wars, the Tauntauns and the AT-AT walkers in the Empire Strikes Back, AT-ST walkers in the Return of the Jedi.
Variations of Stop Motion
Go Motion
Go motion is used by programming a computer to move parts of each frame of film combined with traditional hand manipulation of the model in-between frames to make a more realistic motion blurring effect.
Stereoscopic Stop Motion
Stop motion has rarely been shot in stereoscopic 3D in film history. The first 3D stop motion short was In Tune With Tomorrow in 1939 by John Norling. Stereoscopic 3D is a technique used for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image.
History of Animation
Animations are a creation of a set of images drawn, painted or made by any other artistic methods to show an illusion of motion. In the paleolithic period cavemen would draw on the walls using blood or other types of meaning and some would be in an order and attempt to create motion like a really old form of a storyboard.
Techniques:
Flip Books - Flip books are individual images on many pieces of paper and when the images are drawn, the next one is slightly different from the last and the viewer would flip the pages at a certain speed to make it look like their drawings are moving.
Rotoscoping - It is when the animator traces over the footage, frame by frame for use in animated and live-action films. Recorded live-action films were originally projected onto frosted glass panels and re-drawn by the animator. The projection equipment is called rotoscope although it was eventually replaced by computers.
Cel Animation - It is short for celluloid. It is a transparent sheet when objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation. It was used during the first half of the 20th century but because it was flammable and dimensionally unstable it was replaced by cellulose acetate. When computer assisted animation came around the use of Cel animation was abandoned in major productions.
Drawn on Film - This is when footage is produced by creating images directly onto the film stock as opposed to any form of animation where the images or objects are photographed frame by frame with an animation camera.
Flash - Flash animations are created by Adobe Flash or similar animation software and often distributed in the SWF file format. It is called Flash animation not only because of the file format but to a certain kind of movement and visual style.
After Effects - After effects are when an animation is placed on top of your film to create after effects, like if a house was on fire they would use effects to make it look like the house was actually on fire. The use for this is mainly for creating motion graphics and visual effects. They allow the user to animate, alter and composite media in 2D and 3D space with various built in tools and third party plug-ins.
Toon Boom Animation Studios - They develop animation and storyboarding software for television, film, web animation, mobile devices, games, education and training applications. It is a Canadian software company that specializes in animation production.
Stop Motion - is used in many productions the most common types of puppets are clay puppets as used in the successful Wallace and Gromit and figures made of various rubbers, cloths and plastic resins like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Stop motion can be made with any inanimate object and taking pictures of it so when you put all the pictures together it looks like they are moving.
CGI Animation - CGI animation is computer generated imagery which is fully animated like Pixar's Toy Story in 1995. CGI animation is compared to traditional animation that is drawing but GCI uses 3D modelling like a virtual version of stop motion.
Development:
Thomas Edison - He invented the Kinetoscope which was designed to watch a film through a hole at the top of the device. The device had film wrapped around on the inside of the device. The film strip was moved around inside over a light giving the image that it was moving. He worked with Eadweard Muybridge by combining his Zoopraxiscope and Thomas Edison's Phonograph and they created recorded motion.
Lumiere Brothers - They had the Cinematographe which is a motion picture film camera which is a film projector. They bought the invention off of an inventor called Leon Bouly. The item was sold because of lack of fee so Auguste and Louis Lumiere's engineers bought the licence. The brothers worked together to create motion picture that was better than Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The device was hand cranked and it projected a beam of light onto a wall then the film would turn as well creating the film image on the wall. It was played at 16 frames per second while the Kinescope was at 48 frames per second it also created more noise and used more film.
The Magic Lantern - It is a early form of the modern day projector. It had translucent oil painting, a lens and a candle or lamp. It was put in a darkened room and the image would appear projected onto an adjacent surface.
Thaumatrope - The Thaumatrope which was a toy made in 1824. It is a small disk with a different picture on either side such as a cage and a bird and it would be attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled between the fingers quickly the pictures would look like they combined into a individual image.
Zoetrope - The Zoetrope was created by William Horner it is a circular device that when spun the viewer would look through the slits in the side that would change the image in a rotational order which would look like the image is moving. For example there would be like 12 pictures of a horse that are all different images that are slightly different and when the Zoetrope is spun it would look like the horse is running.
Gertie - The first film to combine live action footage with hand drawn animation is Gertie the Dinosaur which was an early example of character development in drawn animation. Gertie was created by an American cartoonist called Winsor McCay in 1914.
Disney - Disney's first noticeable line of work was with 1928's Steamboat Willie it was the first cartoon that included a fully post-produced soundtrack, featuring voice and sound effects that was on the film itself.
Hanna Barbera - It is an American animation studio that controlled American television animation for nearly four decades in the mid/late 20th century. They have many cartoons such as Captain Caveman, Cow and Chicken, Dexter's Laboratory, The Flintstones, Johnny Bravo, Scooby Doo and many more. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera teamed up while working together at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio. Their first directed project was Puss Gets the Boot which was the beginning of Tom and Jerry.
Warner Bros - They are an American producer of films, television and music entertainment. They created Looney Tunes which was a theatrical cartoon shorts of the famous characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.
Stop Motion Animators:
Ladislas Starevich
He was a good stop motion artist who created The Beautiful Lukanida (1912), The Eyes of the Dragon (1925), The Queen of the Butterflies (1927) and many more. He was the first filmmaker to use stop motion animation and used expressive puppets to tell stories. One of his ideas was the use of motion blur in his films which he achieved. He was very successful by making 2 films per year.
Henry Selick
He is a well known animation for the creation of the film Coraline. It was the first film to be shot fully in stereoscopic 3-D. He also directed the film The Nightmare Before Christmas which was based of Tim Burtons story Nightmare. He later created James and the Giant Peach which was also produced by Tim Burton and the film was combined with stop motion and live-animation.
Tim Burton
One of Tim Burtons first films is a short stop motion animation called Vincent. In 1993 he produced all the stop motion animation in The Nightmare Before Christmas. The film was based on a poem Tim had wrote inspires by Twas the Night Before Christmas. In 2005 Corpse Bride was released which was another stop motion film created by Tim Burton.
Nick Park
Nick Park and the Aardman Animations team produce commercials and music videos and other videos such as Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, which uses many different types of animation techniques. Pixilation was used by making Gabriel hold poses while each frame was shot and moving between exposures becoming a human puppet. Nick Park joined Aardman when they took an interest in his college project A Grad Day Out. Since then they have crated the following films such as Wrong Trousers, Creature Comforts, A Close Shave and Crackling Contraptions
History on Stop Motion Animation:
The first form of stop motion was credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for Vitagraph's The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1997) in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals come to life. In 1902 a film called Fun in a Bakery Shop used the stop trick technique which is when an object is being recorded and the camera is turned away the object is moved then the camera is turned back. Georges Melies used stop motion only once when he used moving title card letters in one off his film shorts and some of his special effects are based on stop motion. 1907 The Haunted Hotel is a film also created by J. Stuart Blackton and was a success when released. Segundo de Chomon was from Spain and released El Hotel Eletrico later in the same year as The Haunted Hotel and used similar techniques. A more complicated version of stop motion is Go Motion. It was first used on Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dragonslayer (1981) and Robocop films. Since 2005 Robot Chicken has taken over stop motion animation using custom made action figures and other toys as characters. In 1970s and 1980s industrial Light and Magic often used stop motion model animations for films such as the original star wars films, such as the chess sequence in star wars, the Tauntauns and the AT-AT walkers in the Empire Strikes Back, AT-ST walkers in the Return of the Jedi.
Variations of Stop Motion
Go Motion
Go motion is used by programming a computer to move parts of each frame of film combined with traditional hand manipulation of the model in-between frames to make a more realistic motion blurring effect.
Stereoscopic Stop Motion
Stop motion has rarely been shot in stereoscopic 3D in film history. The first 3D stop motion short was In Tune With Tomorrow in 1939 by John Norling. Stereoscopic 3D is a technique used for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image.