Animation is the illusion of movement, which was developed at fast speeds during the 20th century. Animations used to be viewed through spinning machines called zoetropes, which were created in 1834. These were the first time people could be sequential moving images.
Movies used to be silent, as sound had not been proposed as an idea at the time. This later became known as the Silent Period. These were films dating back to 1895 and upward, when telling a story in movies weren't really thought of. These films were also usually under a minute long.
A lot of people influenced the animation world, and created new techniques and styles through the ages. Here are the people we learned about.
The Lumiere Brothers
The Lumiere Brothers famously invented the cinematographe, which was a motion picture film camera, in 1895. This meant that people could finally capture moving images.
Georges Milies
Milies was a French illustrator and film creator. He brought in fictional characters to his movies, and used editing tricks to cut and splice his movies to give them special effects. This is essentially the first use of VFX.
J. Stuart Blackton
Blackton also did a lot of cutting and splicing in his movies, and also did a lot of stop-motion. Stop-motion is an animation style in which an environment is manipulated frame by frame, to create the illusion of an inanimate object moving. He made 30 pieces of work, and influenced a lot of other animators and movie-makers.
Edwin S. Porter
Porter got his first animation job in 1896, and later went on to make 'The Great Train Robbery' which was fifteen minutes long (long for a movie at the time).
Emile Cohl
Cohl was responsible for creating the first "Animated Cartoon". He started animating later in life at the age of fifty, and got his job by being outraged at a poster, demanding to see the producer, and getting the job of a scenarist on the spot. A scenarist is someone who plans out a movie step by step, including all scenarios. He was influenced in his work by J. Stuart Blackton.
Windsor McCay
McCay was a comic artist, poster artist and illustrator. In his animation, the foreground and the background were separately animated. This meant it was possible to have an unmoving background, with something moving projected onto it. He used this technique to create 'Gertie the Dinosaur' in 1914.
Animation developed a lot, because in 1923 sound was introduced. Movies with sound were nicknamed 'talkies' for a short amount of time. The first talkie was called 'The Jazz Singer', created in 1927. Disney also took sound into consideration, and animated a steamboat which had its own place in the soundtrack (sound effects).
Fleischer Brothers
The Fletcher Brothers created the iconic character, Betty Boop. They were successful in using singing and animating dancing. To animate the dancing, they used a rotoscope, which would take pictures of every single frame of a people. This could then be drawn over frame by frame to create an animation.
Otto Messmer
Messmer created Felix The Cat, and had an animation style in which his characters would morph and change shapes. For example, if a character was scared, the fear would make them look shaky, and their eyes large (as if their eyeballs are about to pop out).
Lotte Reiniger
Reiniger did a lot of cut out animations about fables and fairytales. Cut out animation is a type of animation in which paper is cut into shapes and moved around, creating moving silhouettes.
Oskar Fischinger
Fischinger made abstract musical animation. He was doing this well before computer animation and music videos existed. He worked mainly in the 30s to 50s.
Len Lye
Lye made post office adverts in the 30s and called them GPOs. He was experimental in his techniques. He's also the person responsible for the adverts and trailers before movies at the cinema.
Propaganda films came into play around the late 30s and early 40s. These were made in all countries to make their rival countries/enemies look foolish or weak. It was an effort to make people want to fight for their countries. In a way, propaganda films were extensions of the truth.
Warner Brothers
The Warner Brothers started around this time as well. They are well known for their politically aware films with surreal humour. One of their most famous products is Tom and Jerry.
Norman McLaren and Grieson
These two worked for the National film Board of Canada, and made fun movies with a lot of political awareness. This was because they made war propaganda.
Halas and Bachelor
These two created a lot of british propaganda, and later on created an animated feature of George Orwell's animal farm.
Then came the 50s, 60s and 70s. This was when the budgets for animations became smaller, and animations started being on TV. Bob Godfrey created the first animation on British TV, which was called Rhubarb and Custard.
Ray Harryhausen
Known as the 'father of modern visual effects', Harryhausen did stop-motion animation. He used screen projected background plates in his animations.
In the 80s, CGI came into play. This meant that films could have more special effects that would take less time to create. A lot of famous companies popped up around this time, like Disney, and Pixar.
Out of all of these animators, the one that is most intriguing to me is Ray Harryhausen, who embraced animation, and brought it into real life. In his film 'Jason and The Argonauts', there is a lot of special effects and impressive illusions to make the audience think the skeletons and other things are real.
I admire an animation/animator that breaks boundaries, so Harryhausen is by far the most interesting to me. He made it so the animation world could move into a new age of movies and animations because of his methods of animation.
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