The key developments in animation from the 17th century to present include:
- The Magic Lantern in the 17th century, one of the first image projectors, which helped lay the foundations for animated films.
- Rotoscoping in the early 1900s, which involved animators tracing over live-action footage frame-by-frame, helping to more seamlessly blend animation and live action.
- Computer animation emerging from the late 20th century onward, which utilizes 3D computer graphics and software to generate animated images, allowing for more controllable and complex animations than previously possible.
2. The Magic Lantern
The Magic Lantern or
Lanterna Magica is an early
type of image projector
developed in the 17th
century.
The magic lantern has a
concave mirror in front of a
light source that gathers
light and projects it through
a slide with an image
scanned onto it. The light
rays cross an aperture
(which is an opening at the
front of the apparatus), and
hit a lens. The lens throws an
enlarged picture of the
original image from the slide
onto a screen
3. 1824 Thaumatrope
A disk or card with a
picture on each side is
attached to two pieces of
string. When the strings
are twirled quickly
between the fingers the
two pictures appear to
combine into a single
image due to persistence
of vision.
4. 1832 Phenakistoscope
The phenakistoscope used a
spinning disc attached vertically to
a handle. Arrayed around the
disc's center was a series of
drawings showing phases of the
animation, and cut through it was
a series of equally spaced radial
slits. The user would spin the disc
and look through the moviing slits
at the discs reflection in a
mirror.The scanning of the slits
across the reflected images kept
them from blurring together, so
that the user would see a rapid
succession of imagesthat appeared
to be a single moving picture.
5. 1833 (180 AD) Zoetrope
The zoetrope consists of a
cylinder with slits cut vertically
in the sides. On the inner surface
of the cylinder is a band with
images from a set of sequenced
pictures. As the cylinder spins,
the user looks through the slits at
the pictures across. The scanning
of the slits keeps the pictures
from simply blurring together,
and the user sees a rapid
succession of images, producing
the illusion of motion.
6. 1868 Flip Book
0 A flip book or flick
book is a book with a
series of pictures that
vary gradually from one
page to the next, so that
when the pages are
turned rapidly the
pictures appear to
animate by simulating
motion or some other
change.
7. 1877 Praxinoscope
The praxinoscope was an
animation device, the successor of
the zoetrope. Like the zoetrope, it
used a strip of pictures placed
around the inner surface of a
spinning cylinder. The
praxinoscope improved on the
zoetrope by replacing its narrow
viewing slits with an inner circle
of mirrors, placed so the
reflections appreared more or less
stationary as the wheel
turned.Someone looking in the
mirrors would therefore see a
rapid succession of images,
producing the illusion of motion.
8. 1888 Kinetoscope
The Kinetoscope is an early
motion picture exhibition
device. Though not a movie
projector, it was designed for
films to be viewed
individually through the
window of the cabinet
housing its components. It
creates the illusion of
movement by conveying a
strip of film bearing
sequential images over a
light source with a high
speed shitter.
9. 35 mm filmstrip of the
Edison production
Butterfly Dance (ca. 1894–
95), featuring Annabelle
Whitford Moore, in the
format that would become
standard for both still and
motion picture
photography around the
world.
11. 1908 Fantasmagorie
French animated film by Emile
Cohl.
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.
It was made up of 700
drawings, each of which was
double-exposed (animated "on
twos"), leading to a running
time of almost two minutes.
12. 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur
Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914
American animated short film
by Windsor McCay.
Although not the first animated
film, as is sometimes thought, it
was the first cartoon to feature
a character with an appealing
personality. The appearance of
a true character distinguished it
from earlier animated "trick
films”. The film was also the
first to be created using
keyframe animation.
13. 1917 El Apostol
El Apóstol (Spanish: "The
Apostle") was a 1917
Argentine animated film
utilizing cutout animation,
and the world's first
animated feature film.
14. 1925 Felix the Cat
Felix the Cat is a cartoon
character created in the silent
film era. His black body, white
eyes, and giant grin, coupled
with the surrealism of the
situations in which his cartoons
place him, combine to make
Felix one of the most
recognized cartoon characters
in film history. Felix was the
first character from animation
to attain a level of popularity
sufficient to draw movie
audiences
15. 1925 Walt Disney’s Alice
Comedies
The "Alice Comedies" are
a series of animated
cartoons created by Walt
Disney in the 1920s, in
which a live action little
girl named Alice
(originally played by
Virginia Davis) and an
animated cat named Julius
have adventures in an
animated landscape.
16. 1928 Walt Disney’s
Steamboat Willie
Steamboat Willie was produced
in black-and-white by The Walt
Disney Studio and released by
Celebrity Productions. The
cartoon is considered the debut of
Mickey Mouse, and his girlfriend
Minnie, but the characters had
both appeared several months
earlier in test screenings.
Steamboat Willie was the third of
Mickey's films to be produced, but
was the first to be distributed.
The film is also notable for being
one of the first cartoons with
synchronized sound.
17. 1930 Warner Bros Looney
Tunes
Sinkin' in the Bathtub was the
very first Warner Bros. theatrical
cartoon short as well as the very
first of the Looney Tunes series.
Made in 1930, this short marked
the theatrical debut of Bosko the
"Talk-Ink Kid" whom Harman
and Ising had created to show to
Warner Brothers. Bosko became
their first star character,
surpassed only much later by
Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. Also,
this is the first publicly released
non-Disney cartoon to have a
pre-recorded soundtrack
18. 1932 Disney’s Silly
Symphonies “Flowers and
Trees”
It was the first
commercially released
film to be produced in the
full-color three-strip
Technicolor process, after
several years of two-color
Technicolor films.
19. 1937 Disney’s “Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs”
It is the first full-length cel
animated feature in motion
picture history, the first
animated feature film
produced in the United
States, the first produced in
full color, the first to be
produced by Walt Disney
Productions, and the first in
the Walt Disney Animated
Classics series.
20. 1945 Momotaro’s Divine Sea
Warriors
The first Japanese feature-
length animated film. It
was made as a
propoganda film for the
war by the Japanese Naval
Ministry.
21. TASK
Choose what you believe to be the key developments in
animation from the 17th Century to the present. (This
PowerPoint only covers until 1945 … you will have to
decide on the key moments from then until the present.
Good luck, there are many to choose from!)
For each, explain their importance in the development
of animation.
22. Rotoscoping
Rotoscoping is an
animation technique in
which animators trace
over footage, frame by
frame, for use in live-
action and animated
films.Originally, recorded
live-action film images
were projected onto a
frosted glass panel and
re-drawn by an animator.
This projection equipment
is called a rotoscope,
although this device was
eventually replaced by
computers.
Live Action/Animation
There were also many previous films
combining live action with stop motion
animation using back projection, such
as the films of Willis O'Brien and Ray
Harryhausen in the United States, and
Aleksandr Ptushko, Karel Zeman and
more recently Jan ankmajer in Eastern
Europe. The first feature film to do this
was The Lost World (1925). In the
1935 Soviet film The New Gulliver, the
only character who wasn't animated
was Gulliver himself.
23. Stop Motion
Puppet Animation
The object is moved in small
increments between
individually photographed
frames, creating the illusion of
movement when the series of
frames is played as a
continuous sequence. Dolls
with movable joints or clay
figures are often used in stop
motion for their ease of
repositioning. Stop motion
animation using plasticine is
called clay animation or "clay-
mation". Not all stop motion
requires figures or models;
many stop motion films can
involve using humans,
household appliances and
other things for comedic effect.
Stop motion using objects is
sometimes referred to as
object animation.
Clay Animation
Each object or character is
sculpted from clay or other such
similarly pliable material as
Plasticine, usually around a wire
skeleton called an armature, and
then arranged on the set, where it
is photographed once before
being slightly moved by hand to
prepare it for the next shot, and so
on until the animator has achieved
the desired amount of film. A
variation of clay animation was
developed by another Vinton
animator, Craig Bartlett, for his
series of Arnold short films (also
made in the late-1980s/early-
1990s), in which he not only used
clay painting but sometimes built
up clay images that rose off the
plane of the flat support platform
toward the camera lens to give a
more 3-D stop-motion look to his
films.
24. Silouette Animation
Silhouette animation is animation
in which the characters are only
visible as black silhouettes. This
is usually accomplished by
backlighting articulated
cardboard cut-outs, though other
methods exist. It is partially
inspired by, but for a number of
reasons technically distinct from,
shadow play.
Model Animation
Model animation is a form of stop
motion animation designed to
merge with live action footage to
create the illusion of a real-world
fantasy sequence.
25. Computer Animation
Computer animation or CGI animation is the process used for
generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more
general term computer-generated imagery encompasses both static
scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers
to moving images.Modern computer animation usually uses
3D computer graphics, although 2D computer graphics are still used
for stylistic, low bandwidth, and faster real-time renderings.
Sometimes the target of the animation is the computer itself, but
sometimes the target is another medium, such as film.Computer
animation is essentially a digital successor to the stop motion
techniques used in traditional animation with 3D models and frame-
by-frame animation of 2D illustrations. Computer generated
animations are more controllable than other more physically based
processes, such as constructing miniatures for effects shots or
hiring extras for crowd scenes, and because it allows the creation of
images that would not be feasible using any other technology. It can
also allow a single graphic artist to produce such content without the
use of actors, expensive set pieces, or props.