Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images to create an
illusion of
movement. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion
picture or video program, although there are other methods. This type
of presentation is usually accomplished with a cameraand a projector or
a computer viewing screen which can rapidly cycle through images in a
sequence. Animation can be made with either hand rendered art, computer
generated imagery, or three-dimensional objects, e.g. puppets or clay
figures, or a combination of techniques. The position of each object in
any particular image relates to the position of that object in the
previous and following images so that the objects each appear to fluidly
move independently of one another. The viewing device displays these
images in rapid succession, usually 24, 25 or 30 frames per second.
[edit]History
Five images sequence from a vase found in
Iran
An
Egyptian burial chamber mural, approximately 4000 years old, showing
wrestlers in
action. Even though this may appear similar to a series of animation
drawings, there was no way of viewing the images in motion. It does,
however, indicate the artist's intention of depicting motion.
Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion drawing
can be found in paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted
with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to
convey the perception of motion.
A 5,000 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta has five
images of a goat painted along the sides. This has been claimed to be an
example of early animation. However, since no equipment existed to show
the images in motion, such a series of images cannot be called
animation in a true sense of the word.
A Chinese zoetrope-type device had been invented in
180 AD.The phenakistoscope, praxinoscope, and the common flip bookwere
early popular animation devices invented during the 19th century.
These devices produced the appearance of movement from sequential
drawings using technological means, but animation did not really develop
much further until the advent of cinematography.
There is no single person who can be considered the "creator" of film
animation, as there were several people working on projects which could
be considered animation at about the same time.
Georges Méliès was a creator of special-effect films; he was generally
one of the first people to use animation with his technique. He
discovered a technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling
to change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film.
This idea was later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès discovered
this technique accidentally when his camera broke down while shooting a
bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be
passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was
that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse. This was
just one of the great contributors to animation in the early years.
The earliest surviving stop-motion advertising film was an English short by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper called Matches: An Appeal(1899).
Developed for the Bryant and May Matchsticks company, it involved
stop-motion animation of wired-together matches writing a patriotic call
to action on a blackboard.
J. Stuart Blackton was possibly the first American film-maker to use the
techniques of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. Introduced to
film-making by Edison, he pioneered these concepts at the turn of the
20th century, with his first copyrighted work dated 1900. Several of his
films, among them The Enchanted Drawing (1900) and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)
were film versions of Blackton's "lightning artist" routine, and
utilized modified versions of Méliès' early stop-motion techniques to
make a series of blackboard drawings appear to move and reshape
themselves. 'Humorous Phases of Funny Faces' is regularly cited as the
first true animated film, and Blackton is considered the first
true animator.
Another French artist, Émile Cohl, began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in 1908 called Fantasmagorie.
The film largely consisted of a stick figure moving about and
encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that
transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where
the animator’s hands would enter the scene. 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. This makesFantasmagorie the first animated film created using what came to be known as traditional (hand-drawn) animation.
The author of the first puppet-animated film (i.e. The Beautiful
Lukanida (1912)) was the Russian-born (ethnically Polish) director
Wladyslaw Starewicz, known as Ladislas Starevich.
Following the successes of Blackton and Cohl, many other artists began
experimenting with animation. One such artist was Winsor McCay, a
successful newspaper cartoonist, who created detailed animations that
required a team of artists and painstaking attention for detail. Each
frame was drawn on paper; which invariably required backgrounds and
characters to be redrawn and animated. Among McCay's most noted films
are Little Nemo (1911), Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).
The production of animated short films, typically referred to as
"cartoons", became an industry of its own during the 1910s, and cartoon
shorts were produced to be shown in movie theaters. The most successful
early animation producer was John Randolph Bray, who, along
with animator Earl Hurd, patented the cel animation process which
dominated the animation industry for the rest of the decade.
El Apóstol (Spanish: "The Apostle") was a 1917 Argentine animated
film utilizing cutout animation, and the world's first animated feature
film.
Computer animation has become popular since Toy Story (1995), the first animated film completely made using this technique.
In 2008, the animation market was worth US$68.4 billion.
