The History of Animation

The History of Animation

Q1. What is animation?

Animation is a series of moving images put together and played at about 12FPS. The first animations where on Egyptians Murals theses didn’t move but if you photographed each image and stuck them together then you could see the movement, after that came the bird in cage in 1881 this was simply a bird on one side and a cage on the other then you twist it and it looks like there was a bird in a cage this is due to persistence of vision.

Next came the flipbook, the flipbook was originally made for adults only, this was a bunch of different images stapled together and flipped to see the character move this was also due to persistence of vision, then we move on to 1906 when Blackton uses white chalk and a chalkboard to create ‘humorous phases of funny faces’ he was the first person to use stop frame to create his animation this was created by drawing an image talking a picture then slightly change a feature on it and take another picture.

Disney’s steam boat willy released in 1928 was the first animated cartoon to have a synchronized soundtrack to go with it, then eleven years later Disney released snow white and the seven dwarfs, what was special about this was it was the first full-length cell-animated feature in motion picture history. It was also a very big gamble for Disney as everyone including his wife said it would fail and he wouldn’t make any money form it and no one would want to go and watch it.

As we move into the future so has animation, it started up as drawn images on paper then photographed (cell animation) and now days its all computer animated, the principle is still the same as the image is still drawn but it isn’t photographed this is called CGI (Computer Graphic images) but it doesn’t stop there we can now make our own animations at home with flash which is used on websites and some videos.

Q2. What are the different types of animation?

There are loads of different types of animation from very simple flipbook to breathtaking CGI. But im going to explain a few examples starting with Stopframe:

The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning, such as the Morph character off of SmART.

Now we move on to drawn animation (traditional animation) also knowen as classical animation or cell animation, is the oldest and historically the most popular form