OUGD401- Animation (chronologies)

Animation

Animation is derived from the latin word animare meaning "to give life to".

Animation requires an individual to artificially create a series of images that give the illusion that movement has been given to an object or form. 

This series of images when played back fast enough fools the brain into thinking that movement is taking place, which is called "persistence of vision". 

The documentation of movement had started in 1650 with the invention of "The Magic Lantern" by Christian Huygens which worked as a form of projector. In 1824 The Thaumatrope was created as a popular toy which could flip two images together (opposite) to create the illusion of movement. The Phenakistoscope was a wheel of images which created the illusion on movement when spun in front of a mirror, it was invented by Plateau and Von Stampfer (of Belgium and Austria respectively) independently of each other in 1831. The Zoetrope (1834) was also a repeated use of imagery but this was put into a form of circular drum which contained slits within the sides for several viewers. 

Although Pierre-Hubert Desvignes is usually credited with inventing the flip book/the Kineograph (1868), John Barnes Linnett of London was the first to patent a design. These flipbooks with designs of a dancing skeleton and a windmill are made to Linnett’s patent.

George Méliès: A Trip To The Moon 1902

Influenced the music video for rock band Queen: song "Heaven for Everyone" features clips from the original 1902 short film and is known to be inspirational to a wide variety of other popular culture. 

Windsor McCay: Gertie the Dinosaur (1908)- known for being one of the first animations to use key framing (the starting and ending points of any smooth transition) and registration marks. 

 Sinking of the Lusitania (1918)- a documentation of news which took 7 days to make its way around the world which was certainly incredibly astounding for its time. 

 1928 - Animation became commercially important but still not regarded as high art. Cartoons became mainstream but were now commercially viable p and profitable. 

'Steamboat Willie' was the first animation by Walt Disney and was the first animation that was synced with music correctly: 

1.7 million spent on Snow White and 1,000 worked on the animation:

Disney was also used within world war 2 including "education for death: the raising of a nazi" and "victory through air power" these were both used to convey a message and create a response. The first to created a hatred of hitler and the second to force the government to give more money to buy aircraft. 

Within this animation Chuck Jones cleverly creates a character and personality and shows this across the whole animation. He also breaks the fourth wall by directly talking to the animator. 

The Golden Age of Animation came to a close in the late 50’s early 60’s when the practice of having Block booking animated shorts with a feature film came to an end. Cinema houses wanted to show double bills and matinees to compete with TV.

This rise in popularity of television meant that broadcasters demanded large quantities of programming on low budgets, something than was difficult to achieve through animation without making some big changes to production methods.

Simplifying backgrounds, reusing animation walk cycles and talking mouths (lip-syncing), ultimately lead to the slow decline of ‘quality’ feature animations that were replaced by much cheaper mass produced shorts by companies such as Hanna-Babera.

Used computer generated backgrounds along with traditional hand rendered animation of the characters. 

Toy story was one the first fully computer animated films and was/ is still a great success. 

These are from the "digital" age which are completely created on the computer. Avatar was made on an incredibly high budget with a large amount of marketing.