11 Seconds - Origins of Animation

11 Second Project
 
This is going to be the start of a new project. This is based on the '11 Second Club'. This is where people are given an eleven second sound clip and they are to make a short animation that is based on this clip.
There is going to be a 3D animation and a 2D animation. Both of these are going to be based on the same sound clip.

To start off this project I am going to look into the origins of animation, this is what this blog spot is going to be centred on.

Origins of Animation

Some of the first - what could be considered animation - were Zeotrope (180AD-1834), The Magic Lantern (1650), Thrumascope(1824), Phenaskistoscrope(1831), Zoopraxiscope (1879), Flip Book (1868), Praxinoscope (1877).

These were the early forms and as you can see there was quite a variety. This is probably due to the age of invention and pretty much anything was possible.

Zeotrope

The earliest to be found was the Zeotrope, this was an early invention in China, however this was then taken to England and made popular in 1834. So China was ahead in the race of technology when it comes to animation. This was found years before the English got there hands on a similar version, this is also a gap between the first animation technology in England and then the Zeotrope. This may be because it was a Chinese invention and England did not start to trade with China until about 1670, and most of this would of been expensive items - like silk, gold and porcelain.

The Zeotrope worked by the same mechanics as the Phenakistoscope. It was a round, cylindrical spinning device with a number of frames of animation, printed on a strip of paper, this is then placed around the inside of the cylinder (circumference). There are slits on around the side that go from top to bottom, which the person looking, can view the moving images on the opposite side, when the cylinder is spinning around.
As the wheel moves around, the material between the viewing slits moves in the opposite direction of the images on the other side and in doing so makes a simple shutter.
This has several advantages over the basic Phenakistoscope did not require the use of mirrors for the illusion to be visible to the observer. Also the shape of this contraption allowed for it to be viewed by more than one person - making it a social event, if that is what you wanted to be able to use it.

This is an example of a Zoetrope

This is a diagram showing how a Zoetrope would work.

 In the top image there is movement that can be seen in the space invader. This is not an actual Zoetrope, it is just mimicked, and the image that you should look at is the centre image, as you can see it has the illusion of movement.
The image underneath is a diagram of an actual Zoetrope and shows how it would be used by someone. Also what direction it would have to move. As can be seen, it is pretty simple how this would be used, and how more than one person can use it.

The Magic Lantern

 This is a modern day predecessor of the modern day projector. It used a translucent oil painting, a simple lens and a candle or oil lamp.
In a dark room, the image would be projected onto an adjacent flat surface. It was often used to project demonic, frightening images to convince people that they were witnessing the supernatural. Some slides of the lanterns contained moving parts that makes the magic of the lantern the earliest known example of projected animation.
This is before the Zeotrope invented in England.

Magic Lantern

Picture of a Magic Lantern projecting onto a wall.

 This is how a Magic Lantern looked and also how they were used. As you can see the bottom image is of the device projecting the image of a demon onto a wall, this was one of the main used of a Magic Lantern, it was used to scare people, as I mentioned ealier in the discription.

Thaumatrope

This is a toy that was used in the Victorian era. This is a small circular disk or card with two different pictures on each side that was attached to a piece of string or a pair of strings that run through the middle. When the string was twirled quickly between the finders , the two images look like they are one and have become a single image.
This demonstrates the brains ability to persistently perceive an image. This can also be called the persistence of vision - this is that there is an afterimage that is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina, and is believed to be explanation for motion perception.

Phenakistoscope

It consists of a disk with a number of images, drawn on radii evenly spaced around the centre of the disk. Slots are cut out of the disk on the same radii as the drawings, but at a different distance from the centre. This would then be put in front of a mirror and spun. As it moves a viewer would look though the slots at the refection of the art, which would only become visible when a slot passes the observers eye. This created the illusion of animation.
This is very similar to that of the Zeotrope, which was invented after this, and was basically simpler to use and also could be viewed by more than one person at a time.

Flip Book

This is just a particularly springy paged book. These pages would have a 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 is viewed springs out of view to momentarily reveal the next image just before it does the same.
This works on the same principle as the Phenakistoscope and the Zeotrope, with the rapid replacing of the images with other images. Still creating the illusion of movement, without anything serving as a flickering shutter as the slits had in the previous devices.
They accomplish this because of the simple psychological fact that the brain can focus on stationary images better than it can on moving ones.
These were more influential to early animators than the other earlier mentioned devices, which did not reach as quite a wide audience.
The limit of this devise was broken by the invention of the mutoscope, this consisted of a long circularly bound flip book in a box with a crank handle to flip through the pages.

Praxinoscope

This is the first animated projection. This was created in France. The first film was shown using this method and was notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used.
They were not photographed but were drawn directly onto the transparent strip. In the 1900 more than 500,000 people had attended these screenings.

Traditional Animation

The first film that was recorded on standard picture film and included animated sequences was the 1900 Enchanted Drawing, which was followed by the first entirely animated film, the 1906 Humorous Phrases of Funny Faces by J.Stuart Blackton, and this led him to being known was the father of American Animation. 

The first animated film created by using what came to be known as traditional animation, which is also known as hand-drawn animation, creation methods - the 1908 Fantasmagorie. This consisted of a stick figure that moved around and encountered a number of morphing objects, such as an elephant. There was also sections of live action where the animators 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 animation the blackboard look.

During the 1910's, the production of animated short films, which were refereed to as cartoons became an industry of its own and they were produced to show in theatres.

The more detailed animations that were hand drawn, requiring a team of animators, drawing each frame manually with detailed backgrounds and characters, were directed by Winsor McCay, a news paper cartoonist, and his work included Little Nemo, Gertie the Dinosaur and The sinking of the Lusitania.

The Silent Era

Charles-Emile Reynaud's Theatre Optique is the earliest known project of projected animation. This predates photographic video devices such as Thomas Edison's 1893 invention, the Kinetoscope and the Lumiere Brothers' 1894 invention of the Cinematograph. 

Cinematograph make motion pictures popular, the endless possibilities of animation began to be explored in much greater depth.
In 1908, Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton,  produced a short stop-motion animation called The Humpty Dumpty Circus.
Stop-motion is a video technique in which real objects are moved around in the time between their images being recorded so that when the pictures are viewed as a video, they appear to be moving by some invisible force. This directly descends from various Trick Film techniques which used video to realistically display the impossible.
The first film to have a wide scale appreciation (in stop-motion animation) was Blackton's Haunted Mansion.
 American cartoonist Winsor McCay created the animation Gertie the Dinosaur in this animation, as it played Winsor would speak to Gerti who would respond with a series of gestures. The way that speech was conveyed in these films was though text. The screen would momentarily change and text would appear with sentences that were directed at Gertie, so that the audience would know what it was that the character in the film (in this case Gertie) was being told, saying or what they were going to do next.
Gertie the Dinosaur was the first film that combined live action footage with hand drawn animation. Winsor hand-drew almost every one of the 10,000 drawings he used for the film.
The area in which the live footage was used within the film was when Winsor walked behind the projection screen and a video of him appears on the screen showing him, getting on Gerties back and riding our of frame. 

The Golden Age of Animation

In 1923 a studio called Laugh-O-Grams went out of business and its owner Walt Disney opened a new studio in Los Angeles.
Disney's first project was the Alice Comedies which involved a live action girl interacting with a number of cartoon characters.
His first film, that is often considered to be his first animated feature film is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 1937. However this was the first to become successful and well-known within the English-speaking world and the first to use Technicolour cel animation.
After Snow White, Disney began to focus much of its productive force on feature length films. Though Disney did continue to make shorts though out the Century, Warner Brothers continued to focus on shorts.

3D animation3D animation within the last couple of years has come into its own. There have been a number of 3D animated films that are rather integral. The first feature length computer animated film was Toy Story by Pixar. This was the film that made a gate way to other computer animated films being made.
Most computer animations are now used in games, creating characters and environments. This is more labour intensive than when creating a film.

Most 3D animated projects in the TV/film industry were shorts for a time. This was because they didn't have the money it would of taken to create a hour/2 hours length film.
Computer animation created blockbuster films such as Toy Story 3, Avatar, Shrek, Cars 2 and Life of Pi.

Types of animation

Stop Motion (Stop Frame)

Stop frame animation technique to make physically manipulated objects appear to be moving on there own. The object is moved in small measurements between individually photographed frames. This will create the illusion of movement when the pictures are all put together in order and played in a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or Clay figures are often used within Stop Motion for their ease of repositioning.
Not all stop motion animation requires figures or models; many of them can involve using humans, household appliances and other things, this is usually to create a comedic effect. Stop Motion using objects is sometimes referred to as Object animation.
Stop motion as a long history when it comes to films. It was often used to show objects moving by magic.
The first use of this was in Albert E. Smith's and J. Stuart Blackton's: The Humpty Dumpty Circus.
In which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life.
One of the most widely released stop motion featured film was The Nightmare before Christmas by Henry Seilck and Tim Burton.

Man in a chair

Horse in motion

As you can see these are two different examples. The top one is using objects to create the animation. The second is using hand drawn tattoos to make the animation.
The first animations is not as smooth with the images. This is because the frames are longer and there aren't as many. If they wanted there animation to look smoother, they would have to take more images inbetween the images that they already have.

Key Frame


This is a drawing that defines the starting and ending points of any smooth transition. The drawings are called 'frames' because there position in time is measured in frames in the strip of film. A sequence of keyframes defines which movement the viewer will see, where as the position of the keyframes on the film. video or animation defines the timing of the movement. This is because only two or three keyframes over the span of a second do not create the illusion of movement, the remaining frames are filled with inbetweens.

The animator creates the important frames of a sequence and then the software fills in the gap. The animator can correct the frames at any point, shifting keyframes back and fourth to improve the timing and dynamics of the movement, or they can change the inbetween into another keyframe, so that they can further refine the movement.

Square

Arrow

This is the animation that is created by these two shapes.

As you can see from these images above, keyframes are fairly simple in creation. This will get more difficult if the animation is more visually intencive than just a few simple shapes. However, this would cut down on the number of frames that you would have to create, because the software would do that for you by making the inbetweens.

CGI - Computer animation

This is making computer generated images by using computer graphics. The more general term for this would be computer generated imagery, this includes both static scenes and dynamic images. while computer animation on refers to moving images.
Computer animation is basically the digital successor of the stop motion techniques used in traditional animation with 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of 2D drawings. 3D generated animations are more controllable than other more physical based processes such as Clay Animation. This is because miniatures for effects shots or hiring extras for crowd scenes, because it is allows the creation of images that would not be feasible using any other technology.
It also allows for a single graphic artist to produce such content with out the use of actor, expensive set pieces or props.
To create the illusion of movement an image is displayed and of the monitor and then it is repeatedly replaces by new images that are similar to it but advanced slightly in time (usually of 24 - 30 fps). This is identical to that of motion pictures.
For this animation all the frames must be rendered after modelling is complete.

This is the transition into how they predict as to how a 3D figure will move.

Japanese girl with fan.

This is an example of 3D animation. As seen above the animators of this girl would have to pin point how it is that the animation itself will move before they then make the character. This is because to make it more believable, it has to have more human functions.
This animation is a bit jumpy, this could be helped my making more frames that fit in between the already existing frames. This, if done correctly, will make the movements smoother.
The first image shows where joints and pivots on a person are. This is to make sure that the animator knows what can and cannot be moved.