Animation Essay

TV and film is illusion. Any motion picture is basically frame by frame animation. The human eye sees it as movement because each frame is being updated quick enough for your brain to not notice it as individual frames. This is why stop frame animation can be viewed as motion rather than pictures. Going a bit off topic, in the days of shooting movies on actual film, which was very expensive, it worked out that 24fps was the lowest amount of frames that could still contain motion without the choppiness. So transferring that to animation, as long as you go above 20fps, you should still get that moving aspect.


Animation has been seen to have started from cave drawings...

Where animals are depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion - Wikipedia

This then goes onto the development of contraptions used to make animation easier to view. In 1824, there was the Thaumatrope, this was a disk with two images on either side which you would spin with the aid of a piece of string. An example of this would be a bird on one side of the disc and a cage on the other. This was a simple yet effective concept. It's easy to make and easy to use.
In 1831, the Phenakistoscope came along this would be another disk that spins round with each frame that goes round the edge. This animation goes round in a continuous loop. I think this is a good concept as you can easily make one yourself and instead of just two frames like the Thaumatrope you have an actual short animation.
The Zoetrope came in during 1834, it's very similar to the Phenakistoscope, but it's a flat strip that goes round in a loop, this has slits in so you can only see 1 frame at a time. This seems to be quite a popular form of animation. When I think of the older style of animation, I think of Zoetropes.
1868 came along with the flipbook/kineograph which is a book with each frame of animation on a separate page. The flipbook is one of the most popular forms of animation. When you're at a young age, you would have experimented with making a flipbook with your school books. These can be quite entertaining and easy to make. In the movie Hot Fuzz, PC Butterman makes one out of his notepad.
In 1883, the famous inventor Thomas Edison created the Kinetoscope. It was a new way to watch animations. The Kinetoscope works in a similar way in which projectors do in modern times. A reel of film would run past a source of light while a shutter opens so that you can only see one frame at a time instead of a continuous blur.
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 in 1897. A famous animator Harryhausen went on to create successful and memorable films using stop motion animation, these included It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and Clash Of The Titans (1981). Stop motion animation has always used mouldable materials such as clay and plasticine, with the odd substitution of other materials for specific effects (such as cling film for water). Looking back at Jason and the Argonauts, we can see that using stop motion animation was a great way at the time to having moving skeletons without the use of CGI (which was not around at the time). This was a remarkable use of implementing stop frame animation and real life to make it seem as if these actors were really fighting the skeletons.
Stop motion animation is still used today in such works as Wallace and Gromit. Looking from their first productions in 1989 to their work now, we can see not much has changed. They still use the same style of animation which is using plasticine to make the famous characters. The main differences of the modern take on Wallace and Gromit is the quality of the animation, models and voices. The overall look to Wallace and Gromit looks a bit different but the concept of the animation stays the same. Wallace and Gromit are animated by using a specific camera setup which records a still image so that the modellers can move the characters slightly, then recapture the image. This is done over a long period of time to create a moving image. Voices are then added on with foley to create a full video production. Wallace and Gromit are one of the most well known stop motion animation productions of all time.
After stop motion animation, CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) came in. The first fully animated CGI movie was Pixar's Toy Story in 1995. CGI is still a tedious procedure, but comes with many key benefits over the classic stop motion animation. Once a model is created, CGI artists can track motion in an infrared camera setup and apply it to models. This is the same with face and mouth movements for talking. CGI is used heavily today in recreating specific areas in which it would take too long and too high of a budget to create in real life.
Company's like Pixar rely heavily on CGI. Pixar's owner Ed Catmull came across rendering problems when it came down to exporting the animation. Pixar now sell a product called Renderman to help solve rendering and animating problems on a large scale. In these large productions, render farms are used. Render farms are a room full of servers with large processing power which help speed up rendering times. Pixar continue to bring out similar CGI films, such as the long running movie series Toy Story. Green screens tend to mostly be used for CGI in movies such as Star Wars and Harry Potter.
In modern day animation, CGI and stop motion are still used to create things in which are hard to create in real life. These techniques have improved a lot since their time. Cameras have got better for filming stop motion, and specific rigs have been made. As for CGI, new devices have been created to capture movements and add more realism to these computer made graphics.

Seth MacFarlane is the creator of Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show amongst others. He's animations mainly consist of cartoon animation. Seth Macfarlane began his life in animation by starting off making flip books at the age of 5. At the age of 9, he started making comic strips for the local newspaper in Kent, Connecticut. Seth was given an 8mm camera by his parents which led to him experimenting with animation at Rhode Island School of Design. Seth Macfarlane had intended to work for Disney, but later changed his mind upon graduation. Seth MacFarlane mentioned that his liberal use of Family Guy cutaways was inspired by the classic animation The Simpsons, such as Homer's fantasy of a land of chocolate. Seth MacFarlane doesn't mention much about his insperations, but there has been an acknowledgement to Woody Allen and Jackie Gleason.

Moving onto animation in video games, Assassins Creed used someone in dramatic arts. They tracked his body movement to implement it into the game. This made the video game characters movement more realistic.

Here is a video link to an example of the motion tracking on Assassins Creed. This works by lots of infra-red lights reflecting off of little balls on the actor's special clothing. This shows up on a computer, and they can attach the character to the movement.

There are other ways to animate video game characters. You could just video someone walking, slow it down frame by frame, and analyse it as a person to implement into the video game, but this takes a lot of time. For complex movements, like in Assassins Creed, it's much easier and much faster to use motion tracking.

Looking into idents, 20th Century Fox for example has a 3D animation. The Art Deco logo was designed by the landscape artist Emil Kosa Jr. The logo was created as a painting on several layers of glass, this was animated tediously frame by frame. The animation overcame some modifications several times depending on the movie, such as The Simpsons Movie had Ralph Wiggum humming the theme of the ident while standing in the 0 of the 20th text. In 1994 after a few failed attempts, including trying to film an actual 3D model. Fox's in-house television producer Kevin Burns was hired to produce the animation, this time he used the new to the time process of computer generated imagery (CGI). The idend required a virtual Los Angeles Cityscape to be designed around the monument. In the background, you can see the Hollywood sign which gave the monument a location (Fox's approximate actual address in Century City).

As for music videos, A-Ha's Take on Me used a live action video incorporation a pencil-sketch animation. The live action footage was traved over frame by frame to give the characters realistic movements. The animation consisted of approximately 3,000 frames which took 16 weeks to complete. The video pegins with a montage of pencil drawings in a comic book style showing a motorcycle sidecar racing, in Morten Harket is pursued by two opponents. This then cuts to a scene of a girl in a cafe. The comic character seemingly winks at the girl and his pencil drawn hand reaches to her and pulls her into the comic, we then see her in pencil drawn form. This video won six awards including: Best Concept Video, Most Experimental Video and Best Special Effects.

Using the Change 4 Life advertisement, we can see the use of stop motion animation. It makes a change using bright colours for a factual government video, as it will hold more interest. One of the points made was about the youth of this generation, this links to the use of colourful plasticine. The use of animation in an advertisement is a good way of telling a story in a short space of time. It's also an easy way to shoot pre-historic scenes like in the Change 4 Life advertisement. Animation is also a low budget way to shoot a lot of scenes, which is what the taxpayer wants to see in a government advert.