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Let's take a look at the history and techniques of traditional animation.
Animation is a form of motion picture that's made by hand,
and that's different from a live action motion picture that involves a camera
that's shooting a real scene.
Animation is made by hand,
live action is in a way a documentation of an event in the real world.
It may surprise you to hear that the first animation was created
over two thousand years ago.
The earliest known description of animation
was a rotating lamp from China in the first century.
The inventor, Ding Huan,
created a lamp with fans inside
so that a rising column of air caused the cylinder to rotate.
On the cylinder were translucent panels painted with images.
As the cylinder turned, the images changed, creating the illusion of motion.
This is essentially the same principle as the zoetrope.
Motion pictures and animation work on the principle of the phi phenomenon.
And that is, when you show a bunch of still images in quick succession
the brain interprets that as a single moving image.
This principle became the basis for many parlor devices
and theatrical entertainments in the nineteenth century,
such as the zoetrope and other similar devices.
Animation has its artistic roots in visual art and theater.
On the visual arts side, of course drawing is the basis of all animation.
If you're like me,
the first animation you ever made was a flip book
in the margins of your textbook at school.
The flip book was officially patented in England in the mid-nineteenth century.
The theatrical side of animation is one that may not be as obvious.
Character animation in particular relies upon acting. In fact there's an old cliche
that says animators are just actors who don't want to get up in front of people.
Here's an example of a theatrical presentation of animation in the late nineteenth century.
Charles-Émile Reynaud was a real rock star of animation.
He improved on the zoetrope by adding mirrors, and he called this the praxinoscope.
Then he developed a method whereby the animated images could be projected on a screen
and he called that the Optical Theater.
Here we see him at work.
He's spinning these discs around, and each one of those discs is controlling
a different character's movements.
Today we would call that technique "animated sprites." We see that in game design.
Reynaud employed stock characters and stories from the Commedia dell'Arte,
because that's what the nineteenth- century audience was familiar with.
on the left we have Columbine, the love interest.
In the center is the hero of the story,
Pierrot, a clown,
also known as Pagliacci.
And on the right you'll see Harlequin, another clown,
who always ends up getting the girl because you can see he's a much snappier dresser.
Reynaud's usage of the characters and situations from the Commedia dell'Arte
are a good example of how new media usually adopt the conventions
of older media, at least to start with.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, several cartoonists
around the world became the first animators.
Émile Cohl was a French caricaturist who created one of the first animated films,
and this was called "Phantasmagoria" in 1908 and it was really just a stick figure animation.
Another important animator of that time was Quirino Cristiani, who was an Argentine animator,
but sadly all of his work has been lost.
The name Winsor McCay is most closely associated with early animation.
McCay was an American cartoonist
and he had a popular strip called "Little Nemo in Slumberland."
And in 1911 he brought "Little Nemo" to life.
And a lot of people consider this to be the first animated short film,
but as we've seen, there were others before this.
In the 1920's, the art of animation really blossomed
and we saw the first big studios opening up, such as Disney,
Warner Brothers, and Fleischer Studios.
Here's a still from the famous "Steamboat Willie"
by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks.
It was very popular at the time, and it was also one of the first animated
short films to use sync-sound.
As cartoons were developing in the commercial film industry,
at the same time, animation was being used by more avant-garde artists.
One of the greatest examples of early animated film is
"The Adventures of Prince Achmed"
by Lotte Reininger.
This is a feature-length film created in 1926
using only cut-out silhouettes.
This is now the earliest surviving animated feature film.
It's available on DVD, so that's required viewing for all students of animation.
Other artists tried their hand at animation, such as the Cubist
Fernand Léger
from his famous short film, "Ballet Mécanique" of 1924.
In continental Europe in the 1920's, we saw the development of
an abstract form of animation sometimes known as visual music.
An early example of visual music or abstract animation is
"Symphonie Diagonale" by Viking Eggeling.
Eggeling was a Swedish artist associated with the Dada movement.
These abstract films were also known as absolute animation and they were
the forerunners of what we call motion graphics today.
Oskar Fischinger was a German artist who created
some of the most striking samples of visual music or absolute animation.
this is a still from "Allegretto,"
which was completed in 1943, but he took a very long time to complete it.
A three minute animation synchronized precisely to music
using only abstract forms.
Fischinger is now sort of regarded as the grandfather of the art of motion graphics.
During the Great Depression,
commercial animation really took off, and this is now known as the Golden Age of animation.
The art form an animation really reached its peak in 1937 with
"Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
Now let's look at some of the various methods whereby animation is created.
The most basic technique is called the pencil test.
You simply draw lots of images and shoot them one frame at a time.
Here's an example from "Little Nemo."
And there's a mechanism here to register all the drawings so that they're all lined up.
Today, of course, we would use an animation pegboard to do that.
2D stop-motion is similar to a pencil test, except
you don't have lots of drawings, you just have a single surface that you keep
erasing and drawing over with each frame.
And this is an early example of 2D stop-motion animation from 1906.
A more controlled, repeatable form of stop-motion uses articulated cut-outs,
And "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" is of course a prime example of that.
Reininger's method was to create silhouettes
by cutting out these opaque shapes and lighting them from below.
Other artists have created cut-out animations that were fully rendered.
In other words, you can take a drawing
or an engraving or some other image,
cut it out,
connect it together with pins to articulate it,
light it from above
and get the illusion of a moving drawing or a moving painting.
And many artists have employed this, including Lawrence Jordan and Harry Smith.
For commercial production, the most common form of animation is called cel animation.
Cell is short for celluloid,
and celluloid is a transparent sheet
that can be painted upon.
Usually, characters are painted on the celluloid, and backgrounds
are on some opaque medium, like paper.
This is an illustration of an animation stand patented by Walt Disney.
In this illustration, we see transparent cels on a pegboard,
and those are overlaid on top of a piece of opaque artwork.
The camera shoots down onto both of those elements.
The background art can be shifted from side to side, and perhaps up and down,
to give a greater range of camera movement.
The next level up from that is a multiplane camera,
where you can get the illusion of 3D
by having many many layers of animation artwork.
The multiplane camera was in fact originally developed by Lotte Reininger
for "The Adventures of Prince Achmed,"
but it was patented by Walt Disney in 1936.
To streamline the process of animation,
Max Fleischer invented a technique called rotoscoping, that's simply just tracing over
live action film that was shot with a real camera.
Here's an illustration of Max Fleischer's patent application for
a rotoscope projector.
What you see here is a projector that's shining into a sheet of frosted glass.
And then celluliod is placed over the top of that, so the artist can trace
the image that was shot with a live action camera.
And this is a method whereby you can achieve greater realism,
especially for human figures.
It was used most famously for "Gulliver's Travels,"
and also the Disney studio used it exactly once
for the figure of Snow White herself.
A more advanced method for combining live action and animation is called the
aerial image camera, and basically it works
with a synchronized projector and camera.
As each frame of the pre-shot film is projected onto the animation stand,
another camera can re-photograph that image.
So you can not only rotoscope, but you can also combine live action
with hand-drawn animation.
Of all the forms of traditional animation,
perhaps the most time-consuming and certainly the most realistic
is 3D stop-motion.
And in 3D stop-motion,
you've got physical objects, usually models,
that you pose and animate on each frame.
An early form of 3D stop-motion is replacement animation.
The idea is that you will have multiple versions of an object, like a character's head.
And on each frame of the film you'll simply replace that head to get a different expression.
this method was pioneered by George Pal
in his series of cartoons called "Puppetoons."
Pal, of course
became a feature film director
and his film "The War of the Worlds" is also a landmark event in visual effects.
Replacement animation is still in use today.
These are just a few of the heads of Jack Skellington
from "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
Nowadays, replacement animation is actually
enjoying a bit of a resurgence, because we now have 3D printing technologies,
where we could for example create all Jack Skellington's heads inside the computer
and then print them out
to physical objects, instead of carving each one by hand.
Replacement animation has limitations for articulated characters.
The limbs of the character and things like fingers and so on are not easily
animated with replacement animation.
For that you want a posable character, something that has an armature.
And this method of character modeling with posable armatures
was pioneered by an artist named Willis O'Brien.
O'Brien famously created a film called The Lost World that demonstrated this technique,
and it was brought to full maturity for "King Kong" of 1943,
in which multiple animated stop-motion characters were brought to life.
And this really opened the doors to a lot of visual effects
because now we could basically create any creature that we wanted to
on the screen, using stop-motion.
One of O'Brien's proteges is named Ray Harryhausen,
and Harryhausen is perhaps the most famous name in stop motion today,
because for decades he created special effects for films such as
"Jason and the Argonauts."
This is a complex scene in which
he had to animate each one of these little skeletons by hand,
and he was only able to complete maybe a second of animation per day.
One limitation of traditional stop-motion is its lack of motion blur.
Traditional stop-motion animation exhibits a weird strobing effect
in which no matter how fast an object appears to be moving, it doesn't blur.
It's always in perfect focus.
For a real object, either shot with a real camera or seen directly with the eye,
a fast-moving object is going to be a little bit blurry.
To achieve that in stop-motion
requires a more advanced technology, and that's known as go-motion.
Go-motion was developed at Lucasfilm for "The Empire Strikes Back."
And the idea is that
instead of shooting a static model one frame at a time,
when you shoot one frame, the model is actually in motion during that one frame.
And this is achieved through
an animatronic rig.
And you'll see here Phil Tippett, the famous stop-motion animator
working on this tauntaun rig.
And the tauntaun moves according to a system of wires
and rods that are driving its movement,
so that under computer control
the model can actually be in motion while the camera shutter is open.
Go-motion is an advanced technology
that is employed simply to give that much more realism
to an animated character.
Without go-motion, there's a very clear difference between
live action footage
and an animated stop-motion figure.
And if they're combined in the same shot, the stop-motion looks fake.
So go-motion is a way of achieving greater realism.
And go-motion probably achieved its peak
with the movie "Dragonslayer."
and you see the crew here posing with the dragon rig.
In the animation industry, a lot of the techniques we've seen here have been
replaced by computer animation,
because it's just simply faster, cheaper and easier to produce.
However, some artists are still working in traditional techniques.
Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie" came out in 2012.
I'll conclude this discussion of traditional animation with a recommendation.
This is "Blood Tea and Red String" by Christiane Cegavske,
a short feature film made all by one person.
And if you're a fan of surrealist animation in the vein of
Jan Švankmajer or the Brothers Quay, then this is highly recommended.