Techniques and Development of stop-motion animation.
Animation has been around for a long time and started with the very basic stop motion animation. Stop motion animation was the first type of animation where a lot of different pictures of objects or people would be played one after another to create an illusion of the framed pictures moving together and making a film. The framed pictures are played at the rate of 24 frames per second and the lowest can be played at 12.5 seconds per frame. The human eye sees the images in a fluid motion.
Zoetrope (180 AD: 1834)
In 180AD Ting Huan from china invented a spinning wheel that was hung above a lamp and called it Chao hua chich kuan. In the wheel would be a painted images on the panels and when spun at the correct speed would show a an animation. The modern Zoetrope was invented in 1833 by a British mathematician William George Horner and called it the daedalum. The daedaum failed to become popular until the 1860's. The American developer William F. Lincoln named his toy the Zoetrope meaning the wheel of life.
A Zoetrope works by looking through the slits with one eye closed and spinning it at steady speed which creates the illusion of each picture moving together.
Flip book (1868)
The
first flip book was patented in 1868 by John Barnes Linnett. A flip
book is just a book with springy pages that have an animated series of
images printed near the unbound edge. A viewer bends the pages back and
then rapidly releases them one at a time so that each image viewed
springs out of view to reveal the next image just before it does the
same.
Stop
motion animation has a history in film, it was used to show objects
moving. the first stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E.
Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897). The Humpty Dumpty Circus is a toy circus of acrobats where the animals come to life.
In 1902 the film
Fun in a Bakery Shop directed by Edwin S Porter used the trick
technique in the 'lightning sculpting" sequence. The set is in a bakery
and a man in a bakers hat and costume enters and begins kneading dough
at the rat covering it completely and he then goes over to the dough and
begins to pummel it with his hands. His back is to the camera which
doent give the viewer the chance to see what hes manipulating the dough
but he then steps away and there is now a sculpted mask. He sculpts
another mask and two other men also dressed as bakers come in to see
what hes doing.
The
trip to the moon ( Le Voyage dans la lune) in 1902 Georges
Melies used true stop motion motion to produce moving title-card
letters for one of his short films below but never took advantage of the
process for any other films. The film was written and directed by
Georges assisted by his brother. The film runs 14minutes if projected at
16 frames per second which was the standard frame rate at the time the
film was produced. It was extremely popular at the time o its release
and is the best known of the hundreds of fantasy films made by Melies. A
trip to the moon is the first known science fiction film and uses
animation and special effects.
Humorous
Phases of Funny Faces is a silent cartoon directed by James Stuart
Blackton released in 1906. The short film is generally regarded by film
historians as the first animated film.
The
cartoon uses stop motion as well as stick puppetry to produce a series
of effects and it features a cartoonist drawing faces of people on a
chalkboard and the people move from one pose to another. It features
movement as where a dog jumps through a hoop, a scene which actually
uses cutout animation made to look like chalk outlines.
Willis
O'brien was an Irish American motion picture special effects and
stop-animation pioneer who was responsible for some of the best -known
images in cinema history and is best remembered for his work on The Lost
World (1925) King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949)
The
film tells of a gigantic island dwelling ape creature called Kong who
dies in an attempt to possess a beautiful young woman. Kong is
distinguished for its stop-motion animation. The film has been released
to video, DVD and Blu-ray disc and has been computer colorized . In 1991
the film was deemed "culturally historically and significant by the
library of congress and selected for preservation in the National Film
Registry. It has been remade two times once in 1976 and again in 2005
Closed
Mondays is an eight minuet animated film using animated,
three-dimensional clay figures created by Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner
in 1974 it was produced by Lighthouse Productions released by pyramid
Films in the USA and won the academy award for the best animated short
film.
The
film open with the words "Closed Mondays" written in white and against a
black background filling the screen. Using a pull back shot the camera
then shows the viewer that the words are part of the sign.
Techniques and Development of stop-motion animation.
Stop
motion animation has a history in film, it was used to show objects
moving. the first stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E.
Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897). The Humpty Dumpty Circus is a toy circus of acrobats where the animals come to life.
In 1902 the film Fun in a Bakery Shop directed by Edwin S Porter used the trick technique in the 'lightning sculpting" sequence.
The trip to the moon ( Le Voyage dans la lune) in 1902 Georges
Melies used true stop motion motion to produce moving title-card
letters for one of his short films below but never took advantage of the
process for any other films. The film was written and directed by Georges assisted by his brother.
Humorous
Phases of Funny Faces is a silent cartoon directed by James Stuart
Blackton released in 1906. The short film is generally regarded by film
historians as the first animated film.
Willis
O'brien was an Irish American motion picture special effects and
stop-animation pioneer who was responsible for some of the best -known
images in cinema history and is best remembered for his work on The Lost
World (1925) King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949)
