A (very) brief history of animation
Friday's lecture took a whistle stop tour through animation starting with cave paintings and finishing up with a brief look at the making of Rango.
The first examples of trying to capture motion into a drawing can already be found in paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to depict a sense of motion. The first animation was made by Fady Saeed in Egypt in 1756. That's not the Fady who can be found on Facebook.
Shadow Puppetry was also an animation ancestor, e.g. the Indonesian animated shadow puppet called Wayang around 900 ad.
In the 17th to 19th centuries, simple animation devices were invented long before film projectors:
A huge Zoetrope was built as part of an advertising campaign for Sony Bravia.
Computer animation has taken over the role of traditional forms of animation in recent years with films too numerous to cover here. Some examples include Animation covers many different techniques and approaches. Here are a few: The first animation on standard film was Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton in 1906.
Jiří Trnka 1912,- 1969 was a Czech puppet maker, illustrator, motion-picture animator and film director, renowned for his stop motion puppet animations. Émile Cohl (1857 – 1938), was a French caricaturist. One of his notable films is Fantasmagorie made in 1908.
Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 short animated film by Winsor McCay that inspired many generations of animators to bring their cartoons to life.
Walt Disney was the pioneer of full length animated movies and his studio still leads the way today. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938) was the first full length animated movie to be created in Technicolor.
Dimensions of Dialogue by Jan Švankmajer
In Monty Python's Flying Circus Terry Gilliam used cutout images to create to create these surreal animations.
Silhouette animation again uses cutout images, the world's oldest surviving feature film is The Adventures of Prince Achmed from 1926.
Model animation uses animated characters which interact with live-action characters. Ray Harryhausen is perhaps the best known animators in this field.
The Fantastic Mr Fox is an excellent example of puppet animation.
Computer animation has replaced much of the traditional animation we used to see. 2D animation while 3D animation has become the standard for many of today's big movies with computer generated imagery (CGI) replacing many of the techniques of the past.
I'm hoping that our very own animator Greg Maguire will give a talk on 3D animation at some stage over the next few weeks.
There are of course numerous movies out there, search out your favourite and add a little research to your design diary.
Here's my latest favourite – Making of Rango.
Friday's session finished off with a brief look at a few Irish animation studios.
Oscar nominated Brown Bag Films
The site Animation Ireland lists a few others.
And finally…
…we looked briefly at the work of Daniel Merlin Goodbrey who is pushing the boundaries of comics.