Different Types of Animation

Phenakistoscope

It is a disc that gives the illusion of movement through a spinning disc invented by Jonathon Plateau from Belgium in 1832. A Phenakistoscope was an early animation device, the disc had multiple drawings on it which would all be relatively the same but would have changed a little in each drawing so when the disc is spun, it creates the illusion of motion. The audience will see a small repeated action when looking on top of the disc as there is only a limited amount of drawings but in the day when this was created, this was a groundbreaking experience for the world of animation.

Zoetrope

Created in 1834 the zoetrope was a cylinder with vertically cut sides that a person would look through to see the moving imagery. By using a strip of card or paper and drawing the animations piece by piece, it would be slotted into this cylinder so when it was spun round it would create the fast illusion of the drawing coming to life and moving. The creator was called William Ensign Lincoln who was born in Trinidad and came up with the name zoetrope after the Greek words ‘Zoe’ meaning life, and ‘tropos’ meaning ‘turning wheel of life’.

Kinetoscope

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device designed for films to be viewed by one individual at a time through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector but introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video, by creating the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. The 35 mm film travelled continuously over a bank of rollers, each picture being viewed briefly through a narrow slot in the revolving shutter. First described in conceptual terms by U.S. inventor Thomas Edison in 1888, it was largely developed by his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892.

The Kinetoscope was an early exhibition motion device created by Thomas A. Edison, born in Milan Ohio, and William Dickson, born in Le Minihic-Sur-Rance, in 1891. Inside it, a strip of film was passed rapidly between a lens and an electric light bulb while the viewer peered through a peephole. The idea for the kinetoscope was for films to be viewed by one individual at a time through a peephole at the top of a device, customers would pay 25 cents to use the machine to see a small piece of animation.

The Lumiere Brothers

The brothers, individually named Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière born 19 October 1862 and Louis Jean Lumière born 5 October 1864, were from Besançon, France and created the Cinématographe. To make this piece of machinery work, two pins or claws were inserted into the sprocket holes punched into the celluloid film strip; the pins moved the film along and then retracted, leaving the film stationary during exposure. The first movies were born through the cinematographe allowing people to have a large, new, shared experience of cinema. The first private demonstration of the Cinématographe took place at the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, Paris, on March 22, 1895. The Lumière brothers and their camera operators made more than 1,400 films of subjects all over the world from 1894 to 1905. The first public demonstration of the Cinématographe took place at the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, on December 28, 1895.

Claymation

It is a form of stop-motion, characters that are constructed out of a malleable substance mainly plasticine are moved frame by frame and then played back in quick succession to give the appearance of movement. Will Vinton, born on the 17th of November 1947 in Oregon was the inventor of claymation, his work gained rapid popularity and ended up appearing in Michael Jackon’s music video Speed Demon in 1988. He ended up winning an oscar alongside several Emmy awards and Clio awards for his studio’s work. Vinton sadly passed away on the 4th of October 2018 in his city of birth. The oldest claymation film known is Long Live the Bull by Joseph Sunn in 1926. Claymation works by taking a shot frame by frame moving your malleable figurine moving it a tiny bit and taking another shot, this continues until you have finished the movement or scene you want, this is then sped up at the end when you have taken all your shots to end up with your finished piece. On average it takes around 3 years to do a well-animated stop motion film that is around an hour-long because of all the shots that have to be taken. An episode of Wallace and Grommit takes typically around 30 frames per day, their film curse of the rabbit took 15 months to make, this was with hundreds of people being in on this too. This is a children’s program that uses claymation from 1994.

Some popular films that have come from claymation include; Chicken Run, Coraline, Monkeybone, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Stop Motion

Stop motion is an animation technique where static objects are photographed frame by frame, moving them in small increments and continuing to photograph these frame by frame. The first stop motion film was created in 1898 and was called The Humpty Dumpty Circus created by directors J Stuart Blackton and Albert E Smith bringing in the first works of stop motion then lead on to more mainstream and modern works with stop motion. It is incredibly tedious and difficult to produce because of the precision and requires filmmakers who have lots of patience because of the time it can take to make one scene. As technology has improved and years have passed, computer-generated animation is by far the more preferable method filmmakers prefer as they can do anything with much more ease. The film The Nightmare Before Christmas took three years to create, one minute of the movie took about one week to shoot and ended up having 110,000 frames in total by the time the film was finished being created. The film was shot at 24 frames per second meaning the crew had to arrange characters and objects 24 times for every second of the film, this proves the patience and skill a filmmaker in stop motion requires, however, the hard work paid off as the film made $91 million in the box office in 1993 and is still a majorly famous film in modern-day.

This is a scene from Tim Burton’s film Corpse Bride in which stop motion is used 2005.

Some of the most popular films made with stop motion include; James and the Giant Peach, Coraline, Fantastic Mr Fox, Corpe Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Tim Burton is one of the most famous animators in the stop motion industry and it is what makes his work so unique, it is what makes his films stand out and gives the gothic look to them.

CGI

CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is the application of computer graphics to create animation and VFX in films, television programmes and videos. John Whitney was a pioneer in digital art and animation in the 1950s, he collaborated with Saul Bass, a graphic designer, to create the animated opening sequence for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The first movie to use CGI was Michael Crichton’s Westworld in 1973, it was then a few years later when  George Lucas used CGI in “Star Wars.” CGI has been improved vastly over the years and it began to be taken seriously with the release of Jurassic Park in 1993 when audiences were able to see lifelike dinosaurs on the screen before them. Following this, in 1995 with the release of Toy Story by Pixar characters like Woody, Buzz, and Rex blew audiences away. Pixar soon followed up with other CGI movies like “Monsters Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.” The 2009 film Avatar did something new, the film won three Oscars and became the highest-grossing movie of all time with its combined motion capture with facial capture. The result was stunningly realistic characters. CGI has also spread to other areas. It’s used in many television shows and video games today. CGI is made with different methods including;

• Using algorithms can create complex fractal patterns.
• 2D pixel-based image editors can produce vector shapes.
• 3D graphics software can generate everything from simple primitive shapes to complex forms created from flat triangles and quadrangles.

The movie Transformers is mainly made up of CGI with the movie being based on robots, in this scene, we see two of the robots Optimus Prime and Bumblebee fighting which we see the impressive use of CGI. The contact the robots make towards each other and the damage they cause makes it look extremely realistic and lifelike.

My Animation Timeline