Animation history

Animation

A simulation of movement and actions created by displaying a series of pictures, or frames. Animation on computers are one of the most important ingredients of multimedia. There are many software applications that enable you to create animations that you can display on a computer monitor. Video takes continuous motion and breaks it up into discrete frames, animation starts with independent pictures and puts them together to form the illusion of continuous motion.

Claymation

Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit

This type of animation i find particularly interesting havening complete control over your characters and scenery leaves little room for error but with this technique it can be very time consuming and laborious overall i would like to do a short piece with Claymation but nothing feature length.







Claymation is the term for clay animation, a form of stop animation using clay. Its creator, Will Vinton, owner of an animation studio, worked with clay artists to create clay animation, a term they made. Claymation involves using objects, characters and maybe scenery sculpted from clay or other moldable material, and then taking a series of still pictures that are replayed in rapid succession to create the illusion of movement.

Computer-generated

Dreamworks Shrek

This is the kind of animation i find very interesting a lot of hard work and preparation goes into any kind of animation but this one i personally find most rewarding crisp images and cutting edge technology allows for a believable feature length animation with totally fiction characters and creatures i find watching these kinds of films very visually interesting and entertaining.

Computer-generated animation is a subset of both computer graphics and animation technologies. It is the creation of moving images (animation) using computer technology. Computer animation is broken down into two categories. Computer-generated animation where the animation is designed solely on the computer system using animation and 3D graphics software, and computer-assisted animation where traditional animations are computerised The dominant technique in animation today. Results can be spectacular, especially with the development of 3D. 

Hand-drawn
Walt Disney's Pinocchio 

Hand-Drawn animation is what most people refer to as cartoons, this kind of animation would be what most people grew up with especially those of the Disney generation this is a very skillful way of animating taking time to draw each frame with 30 frames a second you can only imagine the work that goes into this personally i have high respect for these type of animators.

Using up to 30 frames per second are required. The oldest form of movie animation in which every frame is drawn by hand. Hand drawn animation, is seen as the dominant form of animation over nearly the entire history of the art. It's only recently that it has been replaced largely by 3D CGI films.

Animatronics

Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park

 Jurassic Park was my favourite child-hood film for a reason it looked real! this is a very interesting way of animating I don’t know if in my eyes i would call it animation, its robots in a film, is it animation? Even so it i a brilliant technique a is very effective all in all id like to do something like this but I’m not to sure how complicated it will be, defiantly something to try.

A animatronic device is a mechanised puppet. It may be preprogrammed or remotely



 controlled. The device may only perform a limited range of movements or it may be incredibly versatile. usually used in real settings alongside flesh-and-blood actors.

Rotoscoping

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

 Rotoscoping is again interesting and clever to bring a animation into a real situation can be a lot easier that to sketch the whole scene frame by frame but instead getting the film and tracing over it is time saving and gives a totally different effect i like it but i prefer the traditional animation of sketching the whole scene but in saying that i would like to try this considering the many effects that you can gain.

A technique in which animators trace over a film, frame by frame, creating a metamorphosis world between reality and imagination to get drawn characters in a real environment.

History of Animation

Pioneers of animation include Winsor McCay from the United States, Emile Cohl and Georges Melies from France. Some say McCay's "Sinking of the Lusitania" from 1918 was the first animated feature film. Early animations started appearing before 1910, consisted of simple drawings photographed one at a time.  It was extremely labours as there were literally hundreds of drawings per minute of film. The development of celluloid around 1913 quickly made animation easier to manage. Instead of numerous drawings, the animator now could make a complex background and/or foreground and merge moving characters in between several other pieces of cells, which is transparent except for where drawings are painted on it.  This made it unnecessary to repeatedly draw the background as it remained still and only the characters moved.  It also created an illusion of depth, especially if foreground elements were placed in the frames. Walt Disney took animation to a new level.  He was the first animator to add sound to his movie cartoons with the premiere of "Steamboat Willie" in 1928.  In 1937, he produced the first full length animated film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". With the introduction of computers, animation took on a whole new meaning.  Many feature films of today had animation incorporated into them for special effects.  A film like "Star Wars" by George Lucas would rely heavily on computer animation for many of its special effects.  "Toy Story", produced by Walt Disney Productions and Pixar Animation Studios, became the first full length feature film animated entirely on computers when it was released in 1995. With the advent of personal computers, it has now become possible for the average person to create animations.