Father of Animation

June 21st, 2008 by admin

No one really knows who is the father of animation. Some say its Georges Méliès who experimented a lot to add special effects to his films and he accidentally discovered the stop-motion animation technique where he would stop the camera and ask the actors to freeze and then replace some actors or make some of them ‘vanish’ and then continue filming again. Some say its J. Stuart Blackton who made the first animation clip in 1900 called The Enchanted Drawing; later in 1906 he made another animated film called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. by J. Stuart Blackton

Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay

As far as the theatrical release is concerned I guess it was Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay in 1914, where McCay used this 2D dinosaur in the backdrop and the dino seemed to listen to him as he performed in sync with it on the stage. McCay would throw an apple at it and the dino would catch and eat it much to the excitement of the audience; well actually McCay used to hide the apple in his palm and the pre-animated dinosaur Gertie caught the animated copy of it. It was all a matter of sync and timing. Gertie is said to be the first animated character with a personality of its own. This seemed to excite the audiences and thus others tried to copy his technique of moving images and came up with their own animated films. And gradually various forms of animation came into existence; I shall write about them in subsequent articles. Adios…

Animation Explained Further

June 21st, 2008 by admin

The concept of Persistence of Vision was taken to a new level when people decided to experiment more and more with it; thus many instruments were developed on similar lines for eg. the Phenakistoscope, the Zoetrope, the Praxinoscope; and then came in the Flipbooks which I’m pretty sure most of you must have seen.

Flipbook

The idea of flipping images was tried with increasing the number of images per second, imposed on the retina. Thus developed the concept of frames per second. It was seen that when images were projected at a lower frames per second, the motion appeared jerky and at higher fps the motion got blurred, so after much experimentation it was found that a rate of 24fps (frames per second) was comfortable for viewing. The still camera was already existing then and this development led to the invention of the motion camera, well thats a totally different domain altogether.

Ok… so where was I, yes Frames per second; films are projected at 24 Fps in the theaters, where as the PAL system of broadcasting uses 25 Fps for the television medium and in some countries the NTSC system is used which broadcasts at approx 30 Fps. Cool, so thats it for all the factual and technical aspects of what animation is and how it began.

What is Animation? – Part I

June 21st, 2008 by admin

Hi I’m Zeee and we would not go into the details of me; cuz we are here to talk animation (as the blog name suggests). Hmmm… So.. after watching all the Tom n Jerry episodes, the Shrek sequels, the Dragonball Z series etc. etc. I’m sure most of you are aware of what animation is or at least what all that you see can be termed as animation;but not all of us know about it. So this specific article goes out to those who are unaware of what animation is and also to those who are completely aware of it but they simply love animation so much that they would sit down to read anything and everything about it inspite of knowing all of it.

Well, it all began in around 130 A.D. when a Greek astronomer Ptolemy discovered this principle called Persistence of Vision. It states that the retina in the eye retains the image in the form of light entering the aperture of the eye for one-tenth of a second; and if consecutive images are projected on the retina within one-tenth of a second then this causes the images to superimpose, thus giving us a sense of motion of the object in the image.

Okay I’ll simplify this, do you remember playing with this toy in your childhood, the bird drawn on one side and cage drawn on the other and when you twirl the string faster you see the bird in the cage. Walk down memory lane and see if u can picture it in your hand; well what you played with is called a thaumatrope and that was your first interaction with animation.