ANIMATIONS

Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images to create an illusion of movement. The most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although there are other methods. This type of presentation is usually accomplished with a camera and a projector or a computer viewing screen which can rapidly cycle through images in a sequence. Animation can be made with either hand rendered art, computer generated imagery, or three-dimensional objects, puppets or clay figures, or a combination of techniques. The position of each object in any particular image relates to the position of that object in the previous and following images so that the objects each appear to fluidly move independently of one another. The viewing device displays these images in rapid succession, usually 24, 25, or 30 frames per second.Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion drawing can be found in paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion.A 5,000 year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahri Sokhta has five images of a goat painted along the sides. This has been claimed to be an example of early animation. However, since no equipment existed to show the images in motion, such a series of images cannot be called animation in a true sense of the word.A Chinese zoetrope type device had been invented in 180 AD. The phenakistoscope, praxinoscope, and the common flip book were early popular animation devices invented during the 19th century.These devices produced the appearance of movement from sequential drawings using technological means, but animation did not really develop much further until the advent of cinematography. The cinematographe was a projector, printer, and camera in one machine that allowed moving pictures to be shown successfully on a screen which was invented by history's earliest film makers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, in 1894.There is no single person who can be considered the creator of film animation, as there were several people working at about the same time on projects which could be considered animation.Georges Melies was a creator of special effect films and was generally regarded as one of the first people to use animation. He discovered the technique by accident when stopping his camera from rolling in order to change something in the scene, and then continuing rolling the film. This idea was later known as stop motion animation. Melies' camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as Melies restarted rolling the film; his end result was that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse. He was just one of the great contributors to the development of animation in the early years.The earliest surviving stop-motion advertising film was an English short by Arthur Melbourne Cooper called Matches: An Appeal . Developed for the Bryant and May Matchsticks company, it involved stop-motion animation of wired-together matches writing a patriotic call to action on a blackboard.J. Stuart Blackton was possibly the first American film-maker to use the techniques of stop-motion and hand-drawn animation. Introduced to film making by Edison, he pioneered these concepts at the turn of the 20th century with his first copyrighted work, dated 1900. Several of his films, among them The Enchanted Drawing and Humorous Phases of Funny Faces were film versions of Blacktons lightning artist routine, and utilized modified versions of Melies early stop-motion techniques to make a series of blackboard drawings appear to move and reshape themselves. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is regularly cited as the first true animated film, and Blacktoni is considered the first true animator.Another French artist, Émile Cohl, began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in 1908 called Fantasmagorie. The film largely consisted of a stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the animator’s hands would enter the scene. The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look. This makes Fantasmagorie the first animated film created by using what came to be known as traditionalanimation. The author of the first puppet animated film was the Russian-born director Wladyslaw Starewicz, known as Ladislas Starevich. Following the successes of Blackton and Cohl, many other artists began experimenting with animation. One such was Winsor McCay, a successful newspaper cartoonist who created detailed animations that required a team of artists and painstaking attention to detail. Each frame was drawn on paper, which invariably required backgrounds and characters to be redrawn and animated. Among McCays most noted films are Little Nemo , Gertie the Dinosaur and The Sinking of the Lusitania .The production of animated short films, typically referred to as cartoons, became an industry of its own during the 1910, and cartoon shorts were produced for showing in movie theaters. The most successful early animation producer was John Randolph Bray, who, along with animator Earl Hurd, patented the cel animation process which dominated the animation industry for the rest of the decade. ElApostol was a 1917 Argentine animated film utilizing cutout animation, and the world's first animated feature film. Unfortunately, a fire that destroyed producer Frederico Valles film studio incinerated the only known copy of ElApostol, and it is now considered a lost film.Computer animation has become popular since Toy Story , the first animated film completely made using this technique.In 2008, the animation market was worth US$68.4 billion.