34.

1: Understand the techniques and development of 2D animation

Techniques –
There are so many different animation techniques around the world that have formed over
time and some still continue to be used today.
The earliest record of an animation technique is the Thaumatrope, invented in 1825 by a
man named John Ayrton Paris. The Thaumatrope was an optical toy played with by people
back in the Victorian times. It was a disc that had a picture/drawing on either side of the
disc, attached to two pieces of string. If you were to rotate
the strings quick enough, it would the make both pictures
appear as one due to the persistence of our vision.
After the Thaumatrope, William George Horner decided to
invent a drum that, when a strip of drawings/pictures was
placed inside it and spun, you could look through the slits in
the device and see the images come to life due to the
persistence of our vision once again. This invention was
called the Zoetrope.
Stop motion or stop frame animation is when the animation
is captured one frame at a time and the objects in the frame are moved in-between the
frames, so when you play back the animation it gives the appearance of movement. It’s
basically the same as hand-drawn animation but you use physical objects instead of
drawings. The first use of stop motion is from J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith in a
short film, called ‘The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1897. After that short film, the stop motion
technique became more popular and developed into different forms.
For example, one technique that’s branched from
stop motion is clay animation or Claymation. This
form is when each animated piece, usually made
out of clay or plasticine, is moved or ‘deformed’
between frames, which then creates continuous
movement in the sequence after its put together.
This form has been used for decades but isn’t as
popular as other techniques because it’s a process
that takes up a lot of time and if one frame isn’t
done correctly then the whole sequence is ruined
and they have to start again. The first use of Claymation was in a film called ‘The Sculptor’s
Welsh Rarebit Dream’ in 1908. The film was created by the Edison Manufacturing Co, a
company founded by Thomas Edison himself. This film was actually produced initially as a
trick film, a film that uses the stop trick special effect, an effect created by turning the
camera off and moving the subjects out of frame so that it appears as though they have
disappeared into thin air.
The most well-known and one of the oldest animation techniques is best known as cel
animation or hand-drawn animation. This form of animation is where each individual frame
is drawn by hand, a technique still used by some animators today. This technique was
invented by Earl Hurd and John Bray back in 1915. It then continued to be the superior
animation technique until the 1970’s when computer animation was created.
History and development –
Animation has been around for centuries and continues to develop all the time. 2D
animation started off as just pieces of narrative imagery, images that tell a story. One of the
earliest recorded piece of narrative imagery is cave paintings, otherwise known as parietal
art. Parietal art is artwork done on large blocks of stone or cave walls and goes as far back as
40,000 years ago in the prehistoric period.
The Bayeux Tapestry is a cloth that has been
embroidered with events that led up to the Battle
of Hastings on October 14, 1066. It is over 50 cm
tall and 70 m long and it is currently on display in
Normandy, France.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge discovered

something that really helped pave the way for
the motion-picture industry, that would be
created 5-10 years later. It started off with
Muybridge wanting to answer the question
‘when a horse trots or gallops, does it ever
become fully airborne?’. He began answering
this question by setting up 12 cameras in a
line across a track and then got a horse to
gallop by them whilst they took a sequence of shots. When going back to look at the
photographs all together, it was revealed that the horse has all feet off the ground in a brief
moment. This was a breakthrough for animation techniques because it showed that we
can’t just rely on our eyes to create actions for certain animals and objects, we now need to
use technology to help us get accurate results.

Gertie the dinosaur is an animated short film created in 1914 by the American animator and
cartoonist Winsor McCay. This was the first cartoon to use key frame animation, which is
where you animate your objects by creating smooth transitions within and between
different key frames along the timeline. When this was first shown to various live audiences,
Winsor would actually stand in front of the projector screen and interact with the animation
as part of an act.

Of course, I can’t do a history of animation

without mentioning Disney so let’s start off with
Steamboat Willie. Steamboat Willie is an
animated short film created by Ub Iwerks and
Walt Disney in 1928, which introduces Mickey
Mouse for the first time. This animation is a
breakthrough when it comes to sound because
it was the first cartoon with synchronized
sounds and a score. They decided on this because Disney knew it was the future and it was a
chance to enhance the audiences experience. Walt Disney once said ‘I only hope we never
lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse’. This quote proves that even
though technology and techniques were constantly advancing in front of Walt’s eyes, he
never forgot where it all began and never tried to push it too far like Ralph Bakshi did.

The first use of rotoscoping in a

film was in Disney’s Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs
back in 1937. rotoscoping is an
animation technique where
animators trace over live action
footage that they have filmed
and projected frame by frame
onto paper, either by using the
shots as motion references or
copying the frames directly
onto their work. Snow White
was the first full-length animated feature film using only hand-drawn animation, and it
really started to shape the future of animation and Disney itself.

Ralph Bakshi is an American Director and was most famous for his vulgar, adult-orientated
animated films. In the 1970’s he decided to be different and avoid mainstream animation by
creating independent productions aiming his content at adults instead. This work rather well
in his favor for a while as he released films like Fritz the Cat and Coonskin. The films he was
creating however created controversy in a lot of topics such as racism. Fritz the Cat was also
the first animated feature film to receive an X rating in the US.
Bakshi was criticized for using rotoscoping to make the animation seem more real and life
like because some people considered it to be cheating, even though Snow white and other
Disney animations were never criticized for using the technique. The problems with
rotoscoping and the boundaries he was pushing with his films ultimately made his career
suffer an awful lot. With this being said, he is still a crucial element of animation history and
how it has developed over time.

Motion capture first developed from rotoscoping, with films like Snow White paving the
path for them. It then continued to grow into the early 2000’s, when it really started with
The Lord of The Rings. It then developed and
became more popular with films like Avatar and
Planet of the Apes. This then evolved into
performance capture, which is like motion capture,
but just focuses on the face instead so you get to
see the emotions of the characters extremely well
and transfer them onto the big screen.

There are several advantages and disadvantages to motion capture. For example, a few
advantages include; complex movement is easily recreated with motion capture, its
effective and helps animators meet deadlines with ease, and the real-time results reduce
the costs of key frame-based animation. However, there are some disadvantages that go
along with it, for example; the hardware and equipment needed is hard to obtain and rather
expensive if it’s a small production, you still have to add tradition animation techniques
later in the production and it’s also still quite new and things are still being developed
therefore things can go wrong and you are limited to certain things.

Conclusion –
I feel as though animation as a media sector is continuing to advance constantly and trying
to keep up to date with the rapid growth and change in technology. There are a couple of
things specifically in the industry that I can see taking over and evolving in particular, such
as virtual reality, real-time rendering, C.G.I and animation for adults.

Let’s start off with virtual reality. The computer technology made its big breakthrough in
2016, when VR headsets such as HTC’s Vive, PlayStation VR and the Oculus Rift were
released. These headsets are mainly used for gaming but have also been utilized for
simulators and trainers. The development in VR is constantly improving and with stuff like
films being shot on virtual reality cameras, who knows where it’s going to go next, soon we
might only have to put on a headset and grab a set of controllers to do everyday things.

Next, I’m going to talk about the future of animation for adults and how that’s swiftly
progressing. The mature audience for animation started with Ralph Bakshi’s films and
continued from there really. The most recent advance is with companies such as Adult Swim
and ShadowMachine producing cartoons such as Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman.
These crude TV shows are very popular with a mature audience and as the teenagers turn
into adults they will still need animations to watch, so there will always be a market for the
content.

After motion capture was developed in films such as Lord of the Rings and Avatar, it was
then decided that they could use it to make
games. The first one to use motion capture
was back in 1994 with a game called ‘Rise of
the Robots’. It wanted to use the advanced
technology to create fluent, real movement
in the characters. It then went on to advance
into games such as the last of us, beyond:
two souls and the witcher. This is now a
major sector in animation and will continue
to develop into the future with things like
real time rendering. Real time rendering or RTR is when the animations are being rendered
so fast that they seem to appear as though they are being generated in real time. This
process is a lot more interactive than others and helps the characters and objects to look
‘photo-realistic’. At the moment, real time rendering is very new and there for is only
featured in a handful of games like Kingdom Hearts III, but I’m sure we will see the advances
within the process happening in the next decade or so.