The Magic Lantern consists of a translucent oil painting and a single lamp, when you put them together in a dark room the image would appear large on a flat surface, some of the slides for the lantern contained parts which you could mechanically operated to present limited movement on the screen. They were majorly popular with travelling showmen and vaudeville performers. An example of the type of animation that was produced by the magic lantern was 'The Rat Swallower' which was presented by the Laterna Magica Galantee Show.
A Thaumatrope is a device in which you insert a disk or card with a picture on each side attached to a piece of string you could create a very basic moving image by twirling the strings quickly between the fingers. This was presented as a toy and was very popular in the Victorian times.
The Phenakistoscope is a device that used a spinning disk attached vertically on a handle. The centre of the disk is a series of pictures which are drawn to interact with the frames in an animation. The user would spin the disk and look through the moving slits around its circumference at the reflection in a mirror and it would show a small animated image. There was a downside to this form of animation, it could only be viewed by one person at a time. However, the Zoetrope was soon made after using the same principles to fix this problem. The Zoetrope was made in the early 1800s period. The device was made from a cylinder with slits vertically cut into the sides. Beneath the slits on the inside of the cylinder is a band which has a set of individual frames from a video/film, or a sequence of drawings/photographs. The earliest invention of the Zoetrope was made in China; it was a devise that was hung over a lamp. The rising air turned vanes at the top which were hung from translucent paper of pictures painted on them, which would appear to move if the device is spun at the right speed. Although, a more modern Zoetrope was then brought up in the early 1800's which could be spun manually, when spinning it gives the illusion of animation to the viewer.
Flip-book animation the simplest form of animation, it’s a series of drawings of a sequence of some kind in the same place but in a different position. Once all the drawings are complete then the pictures are stacked on top of each other, the traditional way of reading the flip book would be holding the book with one hand and then flipping through the pages with the thumb of the other hand, this gives the illusion of a moving image.
Flip-book animation the simplest form of animation, it’s a series of drawings of a sequence of some kind in the same place but in a different position. Once all the drawings are complete then the pictures are stacked on top of each other, the traditional way of reading the flip book would be holding the book with one hand and then flipping through the pages with the thumb of the other hand, this gives the illusion of a moving image.
The Praxinoscope is a device which was made after the Zoetrope, it improved on the Zoetrope by replacing its slits with an inner circle of mirrors. The mirrors are placed so the reflections of the pictures or animation would stay in place easier and make the image quality better and less distorted unlike the Zoetrope. Soon after, improvements where made to this device and a man known as 'Charles-Émile Reynaud' created a device which would allow the Praxinoscope to be projected onto a flat surface to show hand-drawn animated cartoons to a larger audience. Although this was overshadowed by the photographic film projector created by the Lumière brothers. These two brothers are known as the earliest two film makers in history, during their public debut their films where short and mostly no longer than a minute in length, however the people loved watching them.
The Mutoscope is an early motion picture device used to view animations or film scenes by inserting a coin and looking through the lens and moving hand crank to make the images move. This device used the same principles as a flip-book by having individual images (or frames) rapidly shown one after another to represent movement. The crank could be turned in either direction but it wouldn't reverse the scene. It was used greatly in the “peep show” business but was also used in the animation business.
Animation Technology after Film:
Technology has advanced since film had been invented, The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) is technology that replaced cel animation and its purpose was to computerize the ink and paint processes used in traditional animation. Using CAPS is cheaper than continuously using cels using India ink or other expensive techniques. It was created by the Walt Disney Company together with Pixar.
Stop motion was created after film, it is the technique of getting an object or a model and putting it in a position and taking photos one frame at a time. There are different types of stop motion animation, such as clay animation, puppet animation and cut out animation. Each of these are all different techniques used for stop motion.
Computer generated imagery (CGI) is creating a 3D model and animating it, almost in a virtual version of stop motion and can be used to create anything, such as characters, backgrounds and foregrounds. CGI has a similar sense to traditional animation due to it being very tedious and time consuming. CGI has now been used in almost every field; art, video games, films, television programs, commercials, simulators and printed media, it is used to create special effects or visual graphics.
Cel-shaded animation is computer graphics made to appear hand-drawn, similar to a comic book or cartoon. It is more popular in video games but is still used in animations, and more commonly it is used in anime. The name comes from Cel animation which is used for traditional 2D animations.
Traditional Animation:
Traditional animation which is also referred to Hand-drawn animation or Cel animation, It is the oldest form and most popular form of animation. In traditional animation the cartoon consists of each frame of the animation being hand drawn. Although traditional animation and Cel animation are the roughly the same thing, although Cel animation consists of layers. It is the process of drawing each frame in separate parts instead of drawing it all at once, Usually it consists of 2 to 3 cels, although the number depends on how many characters you use in that scene. The first cel is the mouth cel, which is the movement of the mouth to show speech. The second cel is the character cel, which contains the character which has been drawn, the only thing that appears on the character cel is the character drawn. The third cel will be the background cel, which will be the entire background of the animation; this doesn’t need to be changed unless the background is moving throughout the animation. The technique of using Cel animation has become obsolete in the beginning of the 21st century due to computer technology taking over.
Stop Motion:
Stop motion animation is the technique of creating or using real world objects and photographing them one frame at a time, this will create an illusion that the object is moving. There are many kind of stop motion animation, Clay animation is made by crafting a clay figure from clay or similar material to create a stop motion animation, usually the figure would have a wire frame inside them so that the figure can be posed correctly and accurately. Cut-out animation is a type of stop motion animation which is made by moving 2D pieces of material such a paper, card, cloth, ect. Puppet animation is a type of stop motion animation which involved puppet figures interacting with each other in an environment suited to them. The puppets have similar frames inside them to the clay animation to put them in positions that the user wants.
Digital and 3D Animation:
Digital animation is the technique of creating an animation using a computer to draw or create the characters or the models depending on whether it is in 2D or 3D. 2D digital animations are created and edited using a computer application to allow them to be moved and edited; an example of this would be Flash. The application that you use to create the animation will have automated and computerized versions of traditional animation techniques; these include tweening, morphing, onion skinning and other examples. 3D animations are modelled and edited using a computer application. To animate the model you have created or edited the model is given a skeleton structure that can control the mesh to allow it to move in a process called rigging. Various techniques can be applied to 3D models, examples of this is fur or hair, effects such as water and fire and other examples. These techniques fall under the category of 3D dynamics.
