A Timeline of Animated Film

ByJoseph Cross

Early Animation - ZoeTrope

• 1834 – William George Horner created the ZoeTrope.Essentially it was a drum on a turner base with slits cut in to the sides with images drawn on the inner edge of the drum.These images when spun fast enough would give the allusion of movement or animation

http://youtu.be/-3yarT_h2ws?t=27s If you click this link you can see a Zoetrope in action.

Flip Books• These were an early crude form of drawn animation from

the early 1800’s, where you would draw and image and then move it minimally for the next page and so on. Then when the book was ‘flipped’ it would look like a moving image and these have seen massive refinements in more recent times.

An example of this can be found here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onod2q_bedw

Drawn Animation

• 1906 J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is released. It is a three-minute short in which Blackton's hand can be seen animating drawings of faces and people against a plain blackboard.

This is a still from the animation which can be viewed by clicking the still.

Cel Animation• 1914 Earl Hurd invents the process of

cel animation.

Cell Animation is where you have a transparent sheet of cellulose acetate on which you paint upon to create part of your animation.

It is transparent so it can be placed upon backgrounds and other larger items, and then photographed to create a full image.

These images then go through a process of being cleaned up, refined and then finished and inked, to which they are then all figured out by the photographer, at which point they are edited in sync with the soundtrack to create the finished product.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oktGlZQgYWs The above still is from a video showing you the basic process in Cel Animation.

Evolution of the Character• 1922 Walt Disney animates his first animated

short, Little Red Riding Hood.

• 1928 Mickey Mouse makes his debut in the six-minute short Plane Crazy. (The character would not speak until the following year, in his ninth film.)

These were animated again using cel animation.

Drawn on Film• This is an alternative to Cel animation and skips out the

process entirely.The animator will take a blank film reel and lay it out on a work surface and use drawing and etching tools to create his images on each sequential frame, adjusting them minimally each time.

This video shows you how to do it.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn5e2NvvELI

RotoScoping• Roto Scoping is essentially being able to take a live action image

or scene and then trace over it to create movements or special effects.

To the left you can see the original image that was used to capture motion and the drawn outline to the right which can then be animated in whichever way the animator deems right.

A famous example of RotoScoping is seen in Aha’s Take On Me Music Video.

Claymation

• Claymation has been around for a long time as it is essentially a different form of stop motion animation, but using clay figures and moving them minimally and taking a photo.

http://youtu.be/gS5Vgqb7VTc?t=43s Click this link to view a how to video on Claymation

Computer Generated Animation Emerges

• 1982 Tron marks the first time that computer-generated images are used extensively within film.

Screen capture taken from the making of Tron Documentary found here;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrCdMHUNznc

The Refinement of CGI• 1993 Jurassic Park becomes the first live-action film to feature

photorealistic computer-animated creatures.

The animations are drawn up on a computer and their motions are pathed on a computer to be superimposed, once they have been skinned and finished, on to already filmed footage.

The Refinement of CGI• 1995 The first computer-animated film, Toy Story, is released to

theaters.

These are stills from a test that was made during the creation of toy story, as you can see the characters are built up from polygons made in to shapes of the characters woody and buzz which were drawn up by hand by the artists before porting them to computers. After the test you can see that the character models were rendered and then became more defined for the final release.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wwXwCiHqHk

Motion Capture• 2004 The Polar Express becomes the first fully-animated film to

use motion capture technology to render all of its characters.

These are stills from behind the scenes footage of the polar express, showing Tom Hanks in a motion capture suit, next to the final image. Motion capture essentially works by wearing a skin tight, all over body suit which has lots of little white balls stuck to it at strategic points on the body, mainly the joints. The computer program then picks up on these balls and tracks their movements as human body movements as a blank figure. These ‘blanks’ are then rendered and coloured and finalized as the final production image, however the movements the characters get are more realistic because they have been tracked by a real person, giving the animation a more life like feeling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLCqVGHpTM

Sources• http://movies.about.com/od/animatedmovies/a/history-animated-

films.htm Slides 3 - 7

http://www.aardman.com/the-studio/history/ Slide – 7

http://www.earlycinema.com/technology/zoetrope.html - Slide 2

http://animatedtv.about.com/od/thesimpsonsfaq/a/celanimation.htm - Slide 4

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z32h-b9-8Qw - Rotoscoping