Animators timelime of films and techniques.

1902 - fun in a bakery shop (Thomas Edison) 

1902 - A trip to the moon (george melie) 

1906 - humerous phases of funny faces (Stuart blackton) chalk on board

1910 - the beautiful leukida 

1910 - paper cut out (Emile Cohl)

1911 - little nemo (winsor McCabe)

1914 - use of backgrounds (J.R bray) 

1917 - The krazy Kat (Silk hat harry) 

1917 - cut out - quirino christiani (El apostle) 

1923 - Alice in wonderland (Walt Disney)

1925 - the lost world (harry o Hoyt) 

1926 - the pen wiper (Joseph sunn) claymation 

1930 - the eating bird (Harold L miller)

1933 - king Kong (cooper\ shoeshack) - Willis O'Brien

Task 3.

Tim Walter Burton, born in 1958, is a film director and producer. His short film "Stalk Of The Celery Monster" was the holy grail that made his road to fame and the film gained attention from Walt Disney's Animation Productions. Walt Disney offered him an apprenticeship for three years. While he was working for Walt Disney he worked on films like Tron and also The Fox and the Hound. After a while he grew tired of working with Walt Disney and began to work on solo projects due to his style clashing with their style of animation. One of early his films was a six minute stop motion animation called 'Vincent'. Walt Disney were extremely fond of this short clip, they gave him funding to remake this little film. He then had enough money to have his favourite voice actor feature 'Vincent Price' this is why he had named the animation Vincent. 

One of his most recent animations was inspired by Vincent and is a remake of Frankenweenie (2012). The original version of Frankenweenie in 1984 was said to be "to quirky and scary for a mainstream appeal", due to this reason, the original wasn't a successful film. 28 years later the same film is being re-made and re-released; the second time around the film was very successful and became one of the "best kids films of the twenty first century". This film really shows the expanding process of animation, that in this context, Walt Disney didn't allow scary or quirky because people didn't know about horror or jump scares at the time. His second major film was The Nightmare Before Christmas which Tim Burton write and produced the film. It was said that this film helped generate a new interest in stop motion animation. 

The film was in production for three years because each character had over 7,000 clay animated faces created for the movie. In my opinion.  it was a move well thought out that the film was in production for so long because it was such a nice piece of work and I think it set the bar high for everyone involved in stop motion animation. Using clay is a very slow process because when clay is used, it melts under certain temperatures, so this made it hard for Tim because he would have to remodel it if a problem occurred during it, this was very time consuming for him. 

By using clay, you could show a lot of facial expressions because you can handle it to hold its shape, the negative side to this is that for every slight movement of the face or the body you would have to create a new model for the expression. So you can end up with a lot of clay heads. Tim Burton created all of the figures himself and it took over 8 months just to make three main characters. Its a lot easier to create a new head instead of moving the expression on the existing clay model and also there's a possibility  you may have to re-film that expression again and it's merely impossible to get the same expression twice.

Burton also used puppets in Mars Attacks, he used puppets to make the film look real while using real life actors. He created the puppets from a mixture of plastic, wood and whatever he had at his disposal. So it was a lot like The Nightmare Before Christmas, as he had a series of alien heads in his workshop with different expressions. George Pal had also used this technique in his 1940's cartoon Puppetoons. This inspired Tim Burton in the making of Mars Attacks because George Pal was also very fond in dinosaurs, monsters, and aliens, as shown in his films The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. 

Tim Burton wasn't only inspired by George Pal, but he was also Influenced by Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen mainly used a lot of dark subjects in his films, they were always monsters and dinosaurs and if you look at Tim Burtons work today there are a lot similarities in there because Burton also uses dark storylines and characters; Corpse Bride is an example of this. The setting and the mood of the film is quite dark but Burton did it in such a masterful way that we become to like the characters he invented.

Sources:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000318/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Burton

http://www.biography.com/people/tim-burton-9542431

http://www.timburtoncollective.com/bio.html

Task 1

William Hornor:

 Created the Zoetrope. This device made the illusion of motion from a fast sequence of static pictures. The device was a round cylinder with slits on the outside and then on the inside was a strip of images from a set of sequenced pictures. This device used to work by spinning it really fast a lot like the Phenakistoscope and look though the slits at the images and you will see a pattern of images, making the illusion of motion. 

William made the device in 1833 and he called the device Daedalum. Unfortunately, the device wasn't to popular until an America developer, William F Lincoln decided to take over and develop it further, then it was renamed the Zoetrope. The Zoetrope was produced to entertain people and it was created specifically as a toy which was then lead to the Zoetrope to be one of the longest toys using the principle of stop motion animation. 

Company, Hudzo Design (2002) made a large 3D Zoetrope which was human powered, the device was showcased in Las Vegas at an art and culture show. Due to many people attending the show, the device was labelled as an art form. When the Zoetrope was created, its market audience was aimed at children because of the toy features. Also because most of the images inside were of animals and this lead to children to believe the device was a magical creation.

Persistence of Vision is the philosophy of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to continue for one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina.

The Phi Phenomenon is the optical illusion of perceiving continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession.

It can be moved at a different rate to make slow-motion or sped-up effects. Like other motion simulation devices, the zoetrope relies on the fact that the human retina retains an image for about a tenth-of-a-second so that if a new image appears in that time, the sequence was to be without a break in continuity.  

Joseph Plateau was born in 1801, he lived till 1883 which was unusual for someone to live that long back in those days. He was the first person ever to demonstrate the illusion of the moving image, the way he did this was he used round counter disk and a series or repeating images on them. Each drawing to be a little different from the last. He called this device the Phenakistoscope, this device used a thing called Persistance Of Vison. This device was invented by another two people in the very same year, Simon Von Stampfer who called his stroboscope. 

The projection of the images created the illusion of movement which it then eventually went into development for cinema. Plateau inspiration came from two people Peter Mark Roget and Michael Faraday, they were the original people to invent the device but Plateau developed it. He thought by moving the images slightly it would create the illusion of motion. The bad thing about this device is only two people could view this at one time, however two years later the Zoetrope was invented. 

This was an upgraded version of the Phenakistoscope and more then one person could view the moving images at one time. The Zoetrope was actually invented as a toy for children but the people who invented it was more fascinated and they classed the toy as being magical so it actually didn't get produced as a toy. Joseph Plateau was the main reason why we discovered animation and he influence's many animators to this day.

Sources - http://www.randommotion.com/html/zoe.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_George_Horner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Plateauhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenakistoscope

Types of stop motion

Willis O Brein – King Kong, Clash Of The Titans

Ray HarryHausen – Inspired by WOB, Dynamation, Gomat ion

Jan Swaninger (Clay) lunch

 Phil Tippet – Robobcop

The frequency at which frames in a television picture, film, or video sequence are displayed.

There are three mainframe rate standards 24p, 25p, and 30p.

However, there are many variations on these as well as newer emerging standards.

24P

25P

30P

48P

50I

60I

50P/60P

72 P

Persistence of vision, eyebrain, hold onto a series of images to form a single complete picture.

The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, were sons of well known Lyons based portrait painter Antoine Lumière. They were both technically minded and excelled in science subjects and were sent to Technical School. By early 1895, the brothers had invented their own device-combining camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinématographe. Patenting it on February 13th 1895, the Cinématographe was much smaller than Edison’s Kinetograph, was lightweight (around five kilograms), and was hand cranked. The Lumières used a film speed of 16 frames per second, much slower compared with Edison’s 48 fps - this meant that less film was used an also the clatter and grinding associated with Edison’s device was reduced.

Louis photographed the world around him and some of his first films were 'actuality' films, like the workers leaving the factory. The brothers began to open theatres to show their films (which became known as cinemas). In the first four months of 1896 they had opened Cinématographe theatres in London, Brussels, Belgium and New York.

                In 1907 they produced the first practical colour photography process, the Autochrome Plate.

Joseph Patuea

William Hatner – Cylinder, images, spin, imahges blend together

Emile Reynald (Praxinscope) – Animation device

Edward Maybridge

Edison (kinetoscope/)

Lumiiere Brothers

George p

0al

Timeline

100 BC: Ding Han.

1834: Zoetrope, William Horner.

1872: Edward Muybridge begins studying motion with strategically placed cameras.

1882: Etienne Jules Marey develops an early prototype for a compact movie camera.

1890: Thomas Edison develops the Kinetoscope, a private viewing station with one long film strip.

1893: Edison opens the first movie studio in New Jersey.

1895: The Lumiere Brothers create the Cinematograph, a combination movie camera and projector.

Edison makes trick film Execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

1898: Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton create The Humpty Dumpty Circus, the first animated puppet film.

1902 - Fun In A Bakery Shop (Thomas Edison)

1902: George Melies makes A Trip to the Moon.

1906 - Stuart Blackton creates Humorous phases of funny faces (chalk on board).

Emile Cohl makes Bewitched Matches on a table top.

1910 - the beautiful leukida

1910 - Paper cut out (Emile Cohl)

1911 - little nemo (winsor McCabe)

1912: Starewitch makes Revenge of the Cameraman, the first narrative puppet film

1914 - Use of backgrounds (J.R bray)

1915: Willis O’Brien starts experimenting with animation.

1917 - The krazy Kat (Silk hat harry)

1919: O’Brien creates dinosaur animation for Ghost of Slumber Mountain.

1923 - Alice in wonderland (Walt Disney)

1925: The Lost World is released, featuring animation effects by Willis O’Brien.

1926 - The pen wiper (Joseph Sunn) Claymation

Lotte Reiniger releases the first animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed; Charley

Bowers makes his first known live-action/stop-motion short, Egged On.

1930 - The eating bird (Harold L miller)

1933 - King Kong (cooper\ shoeshack) - Willis O'Brien.

1941: Starewitch’s first feature-length puppet film The Tale of the Fox is released in France.

1946: Jiri Trnka opens his studio in Czechoslovakia.

1949: Harryhausen works as O’Brien’s protégé on Mighty Joe Young.

1953: Harryhausen’s first Dynamation film, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

1958: Harryhausen ventures into color with his animation for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

1959: Art Clokey’s Davey and Goliath is commissioned by the Lutheran Church.

1961: Bob Godfrey brings cutout animation into popularity in the UK with his film Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit.

1963: Jason and the Argonauts is released. Animated by Ray Harryhausen.

1965: Trnka’s last film, The Hand, is released.

1975: Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner’s Closed Mondays becomes the first stop-motion film to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short.

1976: Peter Lord and David Sproxton found Aardman Animation Studios in Bristol, and create the Morph character for the BBC.

1977: Co Hoedeman’s National Film Board of Canada film The Sandcastle wins the Academy Award for Best Animated Short; Star Wars is released, featuring stop-motion by Phil Tippett and revolutionizing special effects; Spike and Mike’s Animation Festival is born.

1979: The Brothers Quay make their first films; Nickelodeon debuts on cable TV.

1980: The Empire Strikes Back is released, featuring first uses of go-motion technique by Tippett at ILM.

1981: Dragonslayer and Harryhausen’s last film, Clash of the Titans, are released.

1982: Tim Burton directs his first stop-motion short Vincent at Walt Disney Studios, with animation by Stephen Chiodo, and develops art for The Nightmare Before Christmas.

1984: Clay animation short Sundae in New York by Jimmy Picker wins an Academy Award.

1985: Burton leaves Disney and directs his first feature, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. 

Vinton makes his first feature, The Adventures of Mark Twain.

1986: Peter Gabriel’s video Sledgehammer is released.

1987: The New Adventures of Gumby and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse provide a training ground for a new generation of stop-motion animators.

1988: Vinton’s A Claymation Christmas Celebration wins an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program.

1989: Nick Park’s A Grand Day Out and Creature Comforts are released; Video Lunchbox frame-grabbing systems begin making their way into stop-motion production.

1990: Production begins on The Nightmare Before Christmas and Jurassic Park; Cristoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein’s film Balance wins an Academy Award.

1991: Creature Comforts wins an Academy Award. Created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations

1993: Jurassic Park, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Nick Park’s The Wrong Trousers are all released.

1994: Bump in the Night debuts on television; Wrong Trousers wins an Academy Award.

1995: Pixar’s Toy Story is released, ushering in a new medium for feature animation.

Nick Park’s A Close Shave is released.

1996: Henry Selick’s James and the Giant Peach is released; Close Shave wins an Academy Award.

2000: Chicken Run is released, the first feature produced by Aardman and Dreamworks.