Windsor McCay

Windsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator whose pioneering early animated work set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades. His two best-known creations are the newspaper comic strip 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' and the animated cartoon 'Gertie the Dinosaur' which he created in 1914.

McCay created a number of animated short films, in which every single frame of each cartoon (with each film requiring thousands of frames) was hand-drawn by McCay and occasionally his assistants. McCay went on vaudeville tours with his films. He presented lectures and did drawings; then he interacted with his animated films, performing such tricks as holding his hand out to "pet" his animated creations.

The star of McCay's groundbreaking animated film Gertie the Dinosaur is classified by film and animation historians as the first cartoon character created especially for film to display a unique, realistic personality. In the film, Gertie causes trouble and cries when she is scolded, and finally she gives McCay himself a ride on her back as he steps into the movie picture.

J. Stuart Blackton

James Stuart Blackton was an alglo-American film producer of the Silent Era, the founder of Vitagraph studios and among the first film makers to use the techniques of stop-motion and drawn animation.

Blackton was a film maker whose success drew him to experiment with stop-motion and drawn animation. The first animated film he produced was 'The Enchanted Drawing'the film includes Blackton the lightning artist sketches a face, cigars, and a bottle of wine. He appears to remove the last drawings as real objects, and the face appears to react. The "animation" here is of the stop-action variety, the camera is stopped, a single change is made, and the camera is then started again.

The transition to stop-motion was apparently accidental and occurred around 1905. According to Albert Smith, one day the crew was filming a complex series of stop-action effects on the roof while steam from the building's generator was billowing in the background. On playing the film back, Smith noticed the odd effect created by the steam puffs scooting across the screen and decided to reproduce it deliberately. A few films, some lost, use this effect to represent invisible ghosts or to have toys come to life. In 1906, Blackton directed Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, which uses stop-motion as well as stick puppetry to produce a series of effects. After Blackton hand draws two faces on a chalkboard, they appear to come to life and engage in antics. Most of the film uses life action effects instead of animation, but nevertheless this film had a huge effect in stimulating the creation of animated films in America. In Europe, the same effect was had from "The Haunted Hotel" (1907), another Vitagraph short directed by Blackton. The "Haunted Hotel" was mostly live-action, about a tourist spending the night in an inn run by invisible spirits. Most of the effects are also live-action (wires and such), but one scene of a dinner making itself was done using stop-motion, and was presented in a tight close-up that allowed budding animators to study it for technique.

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is well known for his work on animation locomotion which used multiple cameras and camera equipment to capture movement. He is also known for his zoopraxiscope, a device used to project motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip.

Eadweard Muybridge was asked to help the former Governor of California Leland Stanford to prove that when a horse galloped all four of the horses hooves actually left the floor at the same time. Most paintings of horses prior to this were painted with the front legs extended forwards and the rear legs extended rearwards. Muybridge used a series of large cameras that used glass plates placed in a line, each one being triggered by a thread as the horse passed. Later a clockwork device was used. The images were copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disc and viewed in a machine called a Zoöpractiscope. This, in fact became an intermediate stage towards motion pictures or cinematography. This series of photos stands as one of the earliest forms of videography.

Short History of Animation

Animation is a graphic representation of drawings to show movement. This is done using a series of drawings linked together and usually photographed using camera equipment. The movement is created by a slight difference in each drawing which when played back in rapid succession gives the illusion of movement within the drawings.

Pioneers of animation include George Melies and Emile Cohl of France and Windsor McCay of the United States. Some consider McCay's Sinking of Lusitania from 1918 as the first animated feature film.

Early animations, which started to appear before 1910, consisted of simplistic drawings photographed one at a time, this would have been extremely time consuming as at a rate of 24 frames per second used as the average, there would need to be hundreds of drawings per minute of film. The development of celluloid around 1913 made animation easier to manage. Instead of numerous drawings, the animator now could make a complex background and/or foreground and sandwich moving characters in between several other pieces of celluloid, which is transparent except for where drawings are painted on it. This made it unnecessary to repeatedly draw the background as it remained static and only the characters moved. It also created an illusion of depth, especially if foreground elements were placed in the frames.

Walt Disney was next to take 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 feature 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.

Types of Animation

Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although there are other methods.

Zeotrope
A zeotrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. It wasinvented in china around 180 AD. It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder's interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture. Cylindrical zoetropes have the property of causing the images to appear thinner than their actual sizes when viewed in motion through the slits.

Flash Animation
Flash animation is a technique of animation using the program Adobe Flash to create an animated film which has a cartoon quality. The style is quite simplistic and unpolished but is very widely liked. There are dozens of flash animated TV series, countless TV advertisements and award winning short films. On the 26th of February 1999, a major milestone for Flash animation, the popular web series WhirlGirl became the first regularly scheduled Flash animated web series when it premiered on the premium cable channel Showtime. A more recent example of Flash animation is the Family Guy series which is extremely popular.

Stop Motion
There are many different ways of using stop motion animation. You can use manipulate clay whilst taking pictures to make it look as though it is moving on its own. This technique of using models was used by the Aardman company when they created the famous Wallace and Gromit. Another famous animator was Jan Svankmajer who mixed the use of models and live actors. One of his most famous compilations was 'Alice', a strange take on the novel Alice in Wonderland. There are many children's animations created with stop motion from the clangers to the magic roundabout. Stop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic. The first example of the stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. In 1902, the film Fun in a Bakery Shop used the stop-trick technique in the "lightning sculpting" sequence.

Mind-map of Ideas

I wanted to create mind-maps of my ideas to make it easier to choose what to do as my project. I found that I could see all of my choices and decide which one to follow. the first mind-map is of my initial ideas, it consists mostly of different types of media to help me come to the decision of doing an animation

The second mind-map is of my initial ideas surrounding animation narrowed down to show all of the routes I could take. I need to do a small amount of research on each to get a better idea of each to choose which I will explore further and which I will use in my final piece. This mind-map covers the different styles of animation and my ideas relating to them, I found it easier to choose stop-motion animation by looking at my ideas and seeing what interested me more.

project proposal form

For my project I have decided to try and promote my local area using stop motion photography. I will experiment with different types of stop motion animation to create a final piece which is artistic and serves the purpose of showing off Bath. I will research different techniques of animating and look at artists and animators I like the style of. I also want to look at current advertisements of Bath as from what I have noticed the current adverts are quite boring and may not appeal to all audiences.

I am going to experiment with stop motion using photography. There are a lot of photographers I like and I want to try and find a way to incorporate this into my animation. Bath is a beautiful city which is brought to life in Photographs so I will look at photographers of Bath and other city's. I think the use of photography to advertise is very effective and I want to look at the techniques photographers use, for example David Hockney's 'joiners' collection is a good example of photo-montage. I will experiment with photo-montage trying to find places in Bath which are famous but also places which might not be as well known.

I particularly like the 'white board' method of stop motion animation, where a picture being drawn is photographed at different stages to make it look as though it is drawing itself. I like the way Dryden Goodwin animates his drawings so I am going to research him further. I also like the graffiti artist Blublu and would like to experiment with graffiti but don't think it would be the most effective method of advertising Bath. I will however look at some of his work to see if I could take any aspects of the artwork to benefit my own.

My idea's for my project are to find atmospheric areas of Bath and photograph them. I will them look at these and decide what could be done in which place. I would like to create a photo-montage of some places and attempt to animate people walking around in them. I will do this by taking photos of a location I like and then taking a series of images of people walking through. I could then use Photoshop to create the animation. I also want to hand draw some of the animation so I could get print-outs of each shot of the person walking then draw them then scan them back into Photoshop or photograph them to add to the final piece.

I think this idea is interesting as I haven't seen it done before. I will need to do a lot of research and test pieces to ensure nothing goes wrong. I hope to create a final piece which is entertaining and serves it's purpose effectively. I want the final outcome to successfully show areas of Bath in an artistic way.

For this project I will need a camera, tripod, editing software and possibly actors. I will need to plan each step effectively to ensure I don't run out of time. The first stage will be research, then I will do some test pieces, then compile my final piece.