DEVELOPMENT- Genres and Forms

Advertising |

  • Advertising is a form of marketing which is used to encourage, persuade or even brainwash a particular target audience to either try to sell a product, convince their target audience to take some sort of action or promote a creation of some form. Advertisements can also reassure their target audience that the company is a reliable and trust worthy source. Originally advertisements would have been posters and eventually television adverts on TV although adverts can be displayed anywhere such as at bus stops, billboards, pop ups on websites for example with the internet social networking sites are a great way to advertise and to even get your target audience properly involved.
  •  images91JFE2PEAn example of one of YouTube's new overlay ads (circled).

 

DEVELOPMENT- Contempotary Work

The Brothers Quay  |

  • Stephen and Timothy Quay are identical twin brothers, they were born on June 17th 1947. the Quay brothers are stop motion animators who moved to England in 1969 to study at the Royal College of Art, London  after studying illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The Street of Crocodiles (1986), their first film shot. The film is a homage to Bruno Schulz, one of whose novels bears the same title. their films usually don’t have dialogue apart from a very few exceptions. They were also the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play The Chairs.
  • quay-brothers

Aardman Animations |

  • Aardman Animation or also known as Aardman Studios, is a British animation studio in the UK. It was founded in 1972 as a low-budget project by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. This studio is used to make stop-motion animation films, this studio is famously known for the two well known characters Wallace and Gromit, and successfully for the first time made the computer animation Flushed Away in 2006. This studio is mainly used to make animations by using only clay or plasticine.
  • Wallace and Gromit

 

 

DEVELOPMENT- Developers

Developers |

  • Willis O’Brien was an American motion picture special effects and stop motion animation pioneer. he was most recognized for his work on The Lost World (1925), Might Joe Young (1949) and the famous The Lion King (1933) But before all the success of being in that career he was a newspapers cartoonist and sculpture, he began making short films 1915 with his first ever 90 second film  The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy which had a budget of $5,000. Willis O’Brien was also the first person to win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects which was in 1950.
  • willis o'brien

 

DEVELOPMENT- Pioneers

Pioneers |

  • The Phenakistoscope was invented in 1832 by Simon von Stampfer from Vienna but  Joseph Plateau introduced the original inspiration for this invention to Stampfer, although he didn’t invent it he had his adjustments and later on changed the name to Phenakistoscope. Joseph Plateau was born on October 14th 1801, he was a Belgian physicist but he was also the very first person to discover the illusion of an moving image. Plateau used counter rotating disk with a number of repeated hand drawn image in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the others, this allows you to see each image through the slits while its rotating which makes it appear like the drawing is moving. he named this device in 1832 with the name of the Phenakistoscope. The projection of stroboscopic photographs, creating the illusion of motion, eventually led to the development of cinema. Other than inventing the Phenakistoscope plateau also studied the phenomena of capillary action and surface tension. Joseph Plateau died September 15th 1883, the mathematical problem of existence of a minimal surface is named after him. Unlike the Zoetrope and its successors, the Phenakistoscope could only practically be used by one person at a time.
  • The Zoetrope was invented in 1833/1834 by William Horner who was born 1786, he was a British mathematician, he was also a schoolmaster, headmaster and school keeper. Horner called the device was named the Zoetrope but was also referred to a ‘daedalum’ ( the wheel of the devil). Unfortunately this creation did not become popular until  around the time of 1860’s, this was when both English and American makers took over the invention. The American developer went on to rename this creation to Zoetrope meaning ‘the wheel of life’. The Zoetrope is a cylinder with spaced slits cut vertically all around the sides. on the inner side of the cylinder will be a number od images that have been sequenced which will appear to be moving when the Zoetrope is rotating to capture the illusion of the image to be ‘coming to life’
  • The Praxinoscope was invented in 1877 by Charles-Emile Reynaud who was born 8 December 1844, he was a French pioneer, responsible for the first projected animated cartoon films. This invention is the successor to the Zoetrope, is was an animation device. A Long side the previous inventions above, The Praxinoscope had a variety of pictures in the inner circle of the cylinder, but however they do have its differences. This creation replaced the narrow viewing slits that the Zoetrope and Phenakistoscope used with inner circle mirrors within the cylinder. when the viewer looked into the mirror they would see a rapid succession of images creating tis illusion of the images moving. this is easier to use as its brighter and less distorted then what the previous inventions had offered to its audience.
  • Edward Muggeridge was born on April 9th 1830, he died may 8th 1904. He was famous Photographer, important for his work in photographic studies in motion. also for his early work in motion-picture projection. he later on changed his name to Eaweard Muybridge because he believed it to be the  Anglo-Saxon form of his name. “Muybridge is also known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.”
  • The Kinetoscope was invented in 1897. Thomas Edison patented the Kinetoscope when his assistant W.K.L. Dickson invented the motion picture viewer, Edison initially considered it an insignificant toy. However, it turned out to be an immediate success. Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11 1847, he was an American inventor and businessman. This particular device to created for films to be shown to one person at a time by looking into the peep hole which was set at the top of this device. the illusion was captured by having a strip of perforated film showing various images over a light source had a high-speed shutter. Being previously inspired by inventor Eadeard Muybridge’s work, he decicded to pursue the development of the motion picture device system.
  • The Lumiere brothers was seen to be the first film makers in history. Auguste Marie Louis Nicholas was born on October 19th 1862 and his brother Louis Jean was born on October 5th 1864. Together they patented the Cinematographe, which is the opposition to Edison’s ‘peepshow’ Kinescope. The brothers created their own invention that was a camera but also involved both printer and project, they called this creation Cinematographe. this was the film speed of 16 frames per second, this was evidentially much slower than the Kinescope. This lead to using less film but also lead to grinding with Edison’s device. Sortie de l’usine Lumiere de Lyon was their first film which was shot in 1894. this was the first real motion picture in history. (Lumiere is French for ‘light’).
  • George Pal was born February 1st 1908, He is originally from Hungary but was an American animator and film producer.He’s work is known around the world and these include particular films which are of the science fiction category  some of his most famous work is ‘War Of The Worlds’  ‘The Time Machine’ and ‘The Seven Faces Of Dr. Lao’, He was also nominated for academy awards which is in the category Best short subjects, Cartoon and received an honorary award in 1944.

 

 

TECHNIQUES

Persistence of Vision |

persistence of vision

Persistence of vision is when a series of images are shown that appears to be moving when it is shown with in a quick succession. The actual term used is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina, and lends itself to animation by fostering the illusion of motion when images are viewed in closely-timed sequence to one another. The human eye always retains images for a fraction of a second (around 0.04 second). This means that everything we see is a subtle blend of what is happening now and what happened a fraction of a second ago.

In film and video, this phenomena is often claimed to account for our ability to perceive a sequence of frames as a continuous moving picture. However this idea was debunked in 1912 and there is no scientific evidence to suggest that persistence of vision works in this way.

Stop Frame |

stop frame
Stop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving by themselves. The first instance of the stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for Vitagraph’s The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897).
Stop motion creates the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning.
Frame Rates |
Frame Rates
Frame rates ( also known as frame frequency and frames per second)applies equally to a verity of occasions  not only to video cameras and film but to motion capture systems and is even used in computer graphics, its a image device captures unique  consecutive images called frames. Frame rate is most often expressed in frames per second (FPS) and is also expressed in progressive scan monitors as hertz (Hz).
“In the mid-1800s, inventions like the zoetrope demonstrated that a sequence of drawings, showing different stages of action, would appear as movement if shown at a rapid rate. The human eye can register 10-12 frames per second as individual images. However, beyond 10-12 frames per second, we accept the sequence as motion and the “seams” begin to disappear.” this information was taking from  http://vanillavideo.com/blog/2012/history-frame-rates-why-speeds-vary , this tells us how the human brain sees moving images in more detail.