Animation |
Storytelling has been part of human existence since the beginning. Sometimes the stories stemmed from fact and other times creations of fiction, but all stories have included a bit of imagination, it is the nature of the beast. This use of imagination sometimes did not spill over to the listener's point of view, and other times, the story needed to be documented. These purposes lead to the ideas of animation, pictorial images that represented ideas and happenings to a viewing audience. Basic cave drawings representing life scenes and battles must have dazzled their original viewers. Studying the discoveries of these art forms can show the beginnings of animation and how the illusion of movement in art was born. Expression of movement initiated as lightly drawn positions of the moving object superimposed over a fully saturated version of the object. Although animated movement was not yet accomplished, the idea was implied, the story was told. We can still see this type of drawing in todays world of art and animation. Children representing movement as squiggly lines or storyboard artists giving reference movement ideas to animators. This idea of implied motion set the building blocks for what animation would become.
Chinese artists developed a way to bring life to their drawings and paintings during the 1600's. The Magic Lantern used painted glass slides that were fed into an enclosed cylinder and projected onto a screen with the help of an oil lamp. After experiments and manipulations of the contraption, use of multiple layers of paintings were used interchangeably to create the illusion of life through movement.Finally interactive animation had become part of our world. The ideas of animation and illusion intrigued all of humanity, young and old. This infatuation with the art form inspired the development of many gadgets that captured the imagination and pushed the world of animation.During the Victorian Era, simpler forms of animated drawings came into use. The Thaumatrope was developed as a toy for children. A string attached on a card and twisted rapidly gave the illusion of one object. The idea of a bird in a cage was one of the more well-known of these illusions. One one side of the card, the bird was free and flying, on the other side, was an empty cage. When the card was spun, the bird was "magically" put into the cage. This phenomenon was created from a process called Persistence of Vision. Persistence of Vision is a naturally occurring process where the human eye compensates for movement. There is no frame rate to visual perception only iconic memory. The knowledge of this phenomenon allows for an artist's ability to manipulate a person's perception and fake movement. George Horner took this idea and built what he called a Zoetrope in 1834. he device is basically a cylinder with vertical slits around the sides. Around the inside edge of the cylinder there are a series of pictures on the opposite side to the slits. As the cylinder is spun, the user then looks through the slits producing the illusion of motion.
The human condition has now been enlightened to ideas of developed animation. Any image could now be conceptualized, drawn out, painted or colored and shown as a "moving" picture. The next step would to be to do what the Magic Lantern provided and project the moving images on a screen, in 1877, Charles-Émile Reynaud did just that.The Praxinoscope is a more advanced form of the Zoetrope . It used and outside mirror to view the images. This idea was further pushed until it was projected on a screen and called Théâtre Optique.The cat has been let out of the bag at this point. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, chief engineer with the Edison Laboratories, invented a practicle form of a celluloid strip containing a sequence of images, the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images. This lead to the use of the Kinetograph, the first moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, a moving picture projector. The curiosity in creating a believable living image was peaked with these moving images. Still cameras gave way to cameras mounted on tripods. Black and white images gave way to hand-colored images. Theatres opened. Nickelodeons became popular. Yet again, the boundaries must be pushed by imagination. "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots", a one minute film by the Edison Company, initiated the use of special effects. The mock execution was filmed with an actress and then the camera stopped, a dummy replaced the actress and then the cameras completed filming the head being chopped off. Now that the idea was out, many films were created using the same technique; people vanishing and deaths. Trick photography became a rage with double exposure of film to create ghostlike images or twins. Reverse motion was used to create illusions of time, as well as shooting the film footage at different speeds than it would be played. The idea of animation and effects had come a long way from the days of cave drawing.
In 1905 Edwin Porter made "How Jones Lost His Roll", and "The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog". These films had intertitles which were formed by the letters moving into place from a random scattering to form the words of the titles. This had to be shot one frame at a time and needed a special camera to do it. This opened up a whole new world with a whole new set of possibilities. Stop-Motion Animation began to be developed using clay or cloth-based figures to make fantastic creatures. These films drew a large audience and developed the interest into fantasy and effects driven movies. By 1919, camera techniques and editing techniques were added in to all of this mix and gave the audience such things as keyhole views, superimposed multicamera shots, and anamorphosis. The simple art of telling a story through animation had become a lot more complex at this time. New technical artists were needed to build sets and develop lighting. Camera operators that carried the vision of the storytellers. Editors that new the tricks of compositing and rotoscopes. Animation certainly became a complex world.
Step in to the world of computer graphics. The mixture of technology and art has always been a beautiful thing. Now it is the time of expression in this world of computers. The simple act of explanation in story can now be translated into the language of mathematics. Those geeky enough to understand the laws of trigonometry and have a huge imagination, can now create an entire world based on technical processes. Chaotic ideas of art mixed with logical processing used with talent and technique allows for the most photorealistic forms of animation to date. Animation will continue to grow in its use and the forms of its creation. The early days of stick fugures and cave drawings have been developed into two dimensional moving images and are ow rendered into three dimensional forms of entertainment. The days of walking into fully animated projections are coming soon. Interactivity with animation is the next step, and from where the art form started, it is not much bigger of a step. I look forward to being part of that movement. |
