George Pal

George Pal was born in 1908 in Hungary. He was an animator and film produced in the genre of science fiction and fantasy. He created the Puppetoons series in the 1940s which were a huge success. He won an Academy Award for the "Development of a novel methods and techniques in the production of short subjects known as Puppetoons".

Pal created a series of animated puppet films called Puppetoons  in the 1940s. He created different puppets which consisted of various limbs and heads that were carved using wood. This created the illusion that the puppets had expression and movement within the structures. George Pal's technique of creating various heads with expressions has inspired  many film makers today such as Aardman where they used different expression and faces to create some of their characters for their films.

In 1940, Pal emigrated and worked for Paramount Pictures. He was mostly influences by films as well as film directors in the 1920s that worked with science fiction and/or fantasy. The audiences for his films are mostly children and maybe adults, depending on the film and what rating it had. I don't think George Pal's technique could be improved as there wasn't much wrong with it apart from the fact that it was quite time consuming to make several different heads with different expressions on it. His technique has inspired film makers today who use the same technique such as Tim Burton and Aardman.

Flip Book

This is a short animation I created by drawing a picture on a piece of paper, each time changing the movement of the character slightly to be a bit different to the previous one. After I finished drawing, I took pictures of each of the pieces of paper, put them together to create a gif to show the animation.

The animation shows a ball bouncing then a person walking to the middle of the page where he gets hit by the ball. The animation relies on persistence of vision to give the illusion of movement.

I could have improved my flip book by thinking of something more creative to draw for the animation. Also, I could have slowed the duration of each frame down to be 0.17 instead of 0.15 as I feel this is a bit too fast. I think this animation is effective in showing what a flip book does and how persistence of vision acts in stop motion animation.

Aardman Animations (Present)

Aardman Animations is an animation company founded by Peter Lord in 1972. The company created a short film called Morph, produced for BBC as a children's program which became highly popular. This later led to their big success. They have had many successful films such as Chicken Run, Flushed Away and Morph.

Aardman specialize in claymation and CGI(computer generated imagery) animation. Claymation includes creating clay models around armature to make it easier to create movement for the characters. A picture is taken each time the model is moved and later put together to create a short animation sequence. The pictures are at 24 frames per second which gives so that the animation sequence runs smoothly and look realistic. This technique relies on persistence of vision to create the illusion of movement in an animation.

For the film Chicken Run, it took a week in the studio to create just one minute of film as it takes a long time to get pictures of the models after every movement. The film has a 24fps frame rate and was created using clay for the models and armature to make it easier for the models to move.

Tim Burton (Present)

Tim Burton is a stop motion animator born in August 1958 in California. He worked at Disney as an animator before he set off to do his own work. He's known for creating visually striking films that blend in the themes of horror and fantasy. These films include Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Batman.

Tim Burton uses many different heads and bodies for his characters so they look a bit mis-matching. The characters he makes captures the most human expressions and emotions which creates a very realistic feeling within the animation. The sets that he creates are very detailed where Burton uses dark and gloomy colour schemes to produce a frightening and eerie  atmosphere. He uses armatures, which were devised by Willis O'Brien, to create his characters so that the movements are more realistic. Burton uses a 24fps frame rate so this creates a smooth movement within the characters as it's not too fast to miss the movement and not too slow to look jerky.

Source(s): http://animatedtv.about.com/od/showsaz/ss/animation101.htm

The Quay Brothers (Present)

The Quay Brothers, Steven and Timothy are identical twins born in Pennsylvania in 1947. They are best known for the puppetry and animation along with theatre and opera in many of their productions. They're main inspiration is Jan Svankmajer  and use his surrealist style for their feature-length films.




So far the Quay Brothers have only made two feature-length live action films and almost all of their films have no spoken content in them. They brothers tend to focus more on intense engagement within theatre and opera and working on stage designs, sets and projections for their films.

Most of their films mainly feature puppets made out of doll parts and other materials, either organic or not. The puppets tend to be partially assembled in a dark atmosphere. The brothers used armatures to create movement in these puppets which created realistic movement within the characters. An example of this is in 'Street of Crocodiles'.

Jan Svankmajer (Developer)

Jan Svankmajer is a surrealist animator born in 1934 and has inspired many of todays stop motion animators. He has gained a reputation over the years for his surreal and very creepy films that he creates where he combines pixilation and Claymation. Svankmajer tried to demonstrate a moral within many of his films. People may not understand his films much but when watching closely, there's a deeper meaning to the film, which is what surrealism tends to do.

The films he creates are quite gory and horrifying and some may be funny. He uses a lot exaggerated sounds to create some strange effects to create a surreal atmosphere for the audience. Svankmajer tends to use the technique of speed change in his films to increase tension for the audience and create a terrifying atmosphere. Through stop-motion animation, Svankmajer makes inanimate objects come to life in his films.

His films are very disturbing to watch but interesting at the same time. The different techniques he uses keep the audience glued to watching the film as they want to know what might happen next. His work is very imaginative.

Ray Harryhausen (Developer)

 

Ray Harryhausen was born in California in 1920. He is best known as a visual effects creator and for creating his own stop motion model animation technique known as 'dynamation'. Harryhausen was inspired by Willis O'Brien's work in King Kong, this sparked his interest in stop motion animation.

Harryhausen combined animation with real-life action using puppets. This way, the animation would look more 'real'. He was one of the first to use model armature for his models. As not many people has used armature before it was hard to make the motion smooth.  the special effects of animation along with the live action as well as animated movies. For the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) he used a special technique where he would split up the foreground and the background of live action footage into two different images. After, he would integrate his animated models into the sequence and once again take a picture of it which resulted in smooth stop-animation and live-action animation.



Harryhausen also started playing with colour film when creating The Animal World, a documentary, He experimented with many colour sticks to overcome colour-balance and light-shift problems that he came across.

 

Ray Harryhausen's films were for all ages as he used humans and armature models so people could enjoy the film both ways. His work and technique inspired many such as Aardman and Tim Burton and other film makers. The only downside of using armature is the movement can be a bit restricted.

Willis O'Brien (Developer)

Willis O'Brien was born in California in 1886 .He was a special effects artist who pioneered the technique of stop motion animation. O'Brien is best known for his work on movies such as King Kong (1933) and The Lost World (1925) for which he won Academy Awards for in the visual effects category.




O'Brien was dedicated to the idea of building models just as animators draw cartoons and make them into motion animation. His technique was combining realistic stop-motion animated models with live action models, as shown in many of his films such as King Kong. He created movement by using armature when making his characters out of clay and slightly moving their limbs and taking a picture. This technique today is known as Claymation and has been adapted by many animators today such as Aardmann for Chicken Run  and Tim Burton for Nightmare Before Christmas.



Early in his career, O'Brien would create his characters out of clay but eventually he hired people to create more detailed and complex models based on his designs. These complex models included rubber skin built over the metal armatures and a special 'bladder' which could be inflated and deflated that created the illusion of the character breathing. He died before the film he was working on, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was released but was given the ASIFA-Hollywood award to recognise his career and contribution to cinema.

The Lumière Brothers

Auguste and Louis Lumiere's father Claude-Antoine ran a photography firm where both of them worked. They were the earliest film makers in history. When their father retired in 1892, the Lumiere brothers started working on the process of moving images which led to the invention of the revolutionary film camera known as the Cinematograph. 

The cinematograph is a camera for motion picture film, invented in the 1890s which also acts as a film projector and developer. Light from a lamp which was mounted behind an almost transparent film projected he fast moving images on the screen. The device was operated by a hand crank which needed to be turned to see the images. A glass flask of water was placed in the projector which acted as a block system and would protect the film and also extend its expiry date.

The brothers held their first private screening of projected motion picture in 1895 and held their first public screening of films at which admission were held in December 1895. This featured a short film, 'Sortie Des Usines Lumiere a Lyon'.

The Lumiere brothers based their invention from Thomas Edison's kinetoscope and tried to correct its flaws. The device was better than the kinetscope as the images were sharper had better illumination. The cinematograph was easier to carry around than Edison's kinetoscope as it was much lighter. It could be improved if the images were in colour but this would have taken a long time to do and it was just easier for the images to be in black and white.


I think the cinematograph is an important invention as it was the start of film and cinema. The invention of the cinematograph has definitely played a massive role in the creating of film and cinema.
 


Source(s):
http://www.earlycinema.com/pioneers/lumiere_bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematograph

Eadweard Muybridge

Eeadweard Muybridge was known as the 'Father of the motion picture', he was an English photographer who worked in photographic studies in the 1800s. Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope which showed a series of pictures in rapid succession, showing a short animation.  He was approached by an American racehorse owner and wanted to prove that a galloping horse cannot lift up all four feet off the ground whilst taking a stride.



His study was known as 'The horse in motion' where Muybridge went to the racetrack and set up a series of cameras around it. As the horse would pass it, the cameras would go off. When all the pictures were put together, it showed that all four of the horse's feet were off the ground. In 1893, Muybridge held a lecture where he used his zoopraxiscope to show moving picture which made it the first commercial movie theatre.

The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass discs in rapid succession. The device has a disc which is mounted vertically on a handle and spun. A series of picture are drawn on the inside of the disc which show the different frames of the animation. As people spun the disc, the reflection of the images could be seen on a mirror attached to the device so people could view the animation.










Source(s): http://givegathergrow.com/Motion_Picture.html 

Emile Reynaud

Charles-Emile Reynaud was a French science teacher who projected the first animated cartoon films. He is known for inventing the Praxinoscope in 1877 which was an adaption of the zoetrope and the phenakistoscope. He also created Theatre Optique in December 1888.

The praxinoscope consists of a cylinder and a strip of paper which shows twelve frames for animation. As the cylinder is rotating, stationary mirrors that are in the centre show the animation in motion. This toy became a commercial success and got recognition at great exhibitions of the period.



The praxinoscope was an improvement of the zoetrope where the narrow slits were replaced with the inner circle of mirrors that reflected the pictures that appeared. As the wheel was turned, the viewer would look in the mirror and see a rapid succession of images which produced the illusion of a motion with a less distorted and brighter picture than the zoetrope.

There were some limitations to the praxinoscope which affected it. If the cylinder was spun too fast, the picture shown would look very blurry which defats the point of the praxinoscope. Also, if spun backwards, it did not make any sense. With the praxinoscope, unlike the phenakistocope more than one person could view it at the same time and also from multiple angles because of the mirrors all around.


By using the principle of the praxinoscope, Reynaud found out a way to project the many series of pictures onto a bigger screen which he called Theatre Optique. Unlike the normal praxinoscope that only showed a short animation, Reynaud used a longer roll of paper to increase the number of pictures so that the animation was longer. This was the beginning of cartoon animation.





Source(s):
http://www.emilereynaud.fr/en/index.php/post/The-Praxinoscope
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit11.htm

William Horner

William Horner created the zoetrope in the year 1834 which was based on Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope but was more convenient as it did not require a viewing mirror and allowed more than one person to use it at the same time.

The zoetrope was originally called the 'Daedalum' which meant "the wheel of the Devil". It's the third major optical toy after the thaumatrope and phenakistoscope which use the principle of persistence of vision to produce a motion.


The zoetrope has a drum with an open top which is supported on a central axis. A series of hand drawn pictures are drawn on strips of paper that are stuck on the inside of the drum and slots are cut at equal distances around the outer surface of the drum, just above the pictures. The drum is spun to create the illusion of motion. The faster the drum spins, the smoother the progression of the images. A small animation can be seen through the gaps of the zoetrope and because of the way it's made, more than one person can view it at the same time.



The slits in the zoetrope are all within equal distance of each other which cuts of vision for around a fraction of a second. The images that are drawn on the inside of the drum are slightly different from the one drawn before it. When the drum spins, there is an illusion that the images are moving due to persistence of vision and the little slits act as small pauses between the pictures to show that it is moving.



In present times, the zoetrope has inspired people to create 3 dimensional zoetropes which use strobe lighting as substitutes for viewing slits as they act as a shutter that synchronises with the spinning platform.




Source(s):
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit10.htm
http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/modern_zoetropes.html

Joseph Plateau

Who was he?
Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist born in the French Empire in 1801. He was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts as his father, who painted flowers, wanted Plateau to take after him. After his parents died, Plateau was in the care of his uncle where he spent most of his time in the countryside. He built demonstration apparatus, organised séances and astonished his audience with the originality of his experiments. 
After Plateau finished his studies at 'Atheneum' his uncle forced him to go to the University of Liège in the Arts and Philosophy Faculty.



Phenakistoscope
Joseph Plateau was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. In 1832, Plateau and his sons introduced the 'Phenakistoscope' which is a spindle viewer. It was also indepenendently invented by Simon Von Stampfer who called it the 'Stroboscope' in the same year.

The phenakistoscope uses the idea of persistence of vision to create an illusion of a motion. It uses two discs mounted on the same axis where the first disc has slots around the edge and the second has drawings of the action drawn around the disc in circles. Unlike Faraday's wheel which spun in opposite directions, the phenotistocope discs spin together in the same direction. When you view the disc slots through a mirror, the pictured on the second disc appear to move.

Influences

Joseph Plateau was influenced by Mark Faraday and Peter Mark Roget. Faraday had previously invented a device which he called "Michael Faraday's Wheel" that consisted of two discs that spun in opposite directions from each other. From Faraday's wheel, Plateau took it a step further by adapting Faraday's wheel into a toy he later named the phenakistoscope.

Present Day
The projection of stroboscopic photographs on the phenakistoscope which created the illusion of motion, eventually led to the development of cinema. Joseph Plateau has made a massive impact towards moving image. If he had not developed the phenatistoscope then we may not have developed film and animation the way we have today.

Basic Principles of Animation

Squash and Stretch
Squashing and stretching gives the illusion of weight and volume to an object and character in an animation. The use of squash and stretch differs depending on the animation where in short style of picture, squash and stretch is broader but subtler in a feature. Squash and stretch is used in all kinds of character animation, from bouncing a ball to the weight of the person walking.
The diagram shows a ball bouncing where on the left the ball is the same size all the way through the animation but on the right it changes shape and size. Squashing and stretching the ball in this animation makes a huge difference as the animation looks more realistic.

Anticipation
This refers to the preparation the audience go through before the character is about to perform an action in the animation such as: starting to run, jumping or a change in facial expression.
 For example, when a character is about to jump, they bend their legs before leaping. The bending of legs is the anticipation movement before the jump is executed.
Almost all real action has anticipation. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a character's personality.

Staging
Staging refers to the pose or action that should clearly communicate to the audience the mood, attitude, the reaction or idea the character is trying to convey for the continuity of the story line. Using long, medium or close up shots effectively helps tell the story and gives the audience a better understanding of the character. Staging directs the audience's attention to the story or idea but too much action in a scene looks clustered and causes confusion.It's necessary to make sure the background in the scene isn't over powering the character so that the audience's attention stays on the character and not on the background.
The picture shows poor staging and good staging. The poor staging image doesn't show the character's faces as they are facing each other and this deprives the audience of their facial expressions which may be important in conveying the scene. Although, the 'good staging' image shows the characters faces and expressions which gives the audience a better understanding of the scene and characters.

Straight ahead and Pose to pose animation
Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and continues to drawing to the end of the scene where you can lose size, proportion and volume with this method. Many fast, action scenes are done this way as it has spontaneity and freshness. Pose to pose is more planned and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene and size, volumes and proportions are better controlled this way.

Follow through and overlapping action
Follow through is when the other parts of the character, (e.g. the tail, clothing, hair) catch up with the main body of the character. Overlapping acton is when the character changes direction while their clothes or hair continues forward. As the character is going in a new direction, their clothes will follow a few frames later. "Drag" would be when the character, for example, is running and their head, ears and upper body do not keep up with the main body, this action is done more subtly.

In this example, as the head goes up, the hair moves as well as part of the follow through action to make the animation look more realistic. The same happens when the head goes down, the hair moves along with it.


Slow-Out and Slow-In
The more drawings an action has, the slower the animation will be as there are more frames. On the other hand, the fewer frames there are the faster the animation will be. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the animation/action making the scene seem more life-like.
The movement of the human body needs time to accelerate and slow down. All moving objects start slowly and finish slowly, therefore there are more frames at the beginning of the animation, fewer in the middle and more towards the end. This technique helps to recognise what the object if because if it went too fast, we would not be able to recognise it.


Arcs
Most action follow an arc or slightly circular path for greater realism in an animation. Arcs give an animation a more natural action and better flow. As an object's speed and momentum increase, arcs tend to flatten out but arc more as the object gets slower, as shown in the diagram.


As the swing is in the air and falling down, the movement is slow so there is more of an arc which straightens out as the swing goes faster.





Secondary Action
This adds and enriches the main action as well as adds more dimension to the character animation. For example, a man walking down a road will move their arms backwards and forwards to make the action of walking look more realistic.





Timing
More drawings between poses smooth out the action and make it look less jerky. Fewer drawings make the action look faster and more defined. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement. There is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood emotions and reaction to another character or situation.


Exaggeration
This is like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. The key is to take something and make it more extreme in order to give it more live. For example, exaggerating the proportion of a lamp to give the sense of a father and son.

Solid Drawing
The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation, the same drawing. The principle of solid drawing means taking into account forms in three-dimensional space, giving them volume and weight.





Appeal
All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal corresponds to charisma in a character. Appeal includes easy to read design, clear drawing and personality development that will capture and involve the audience's interest. For example, for likeable characters, a symmetrical or  baby-like face tends to be effective. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.



source(s):
http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html
http://ticktockcrocodile.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/slow-in-and-slow-out.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation