It is debated whether time lapse is a form of animation or photography, nonetheless, it is a popular medium. The definition of time lapse is "a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than that used to view the sequence." In other words, time lapse is when pictures are taken at certain intervals (anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours, or even days) which are then stitched together and played as a video. Below are some examples.
A time lapse of a 3D chalk drawing of Super Mario. This won't have taken long, possibly only half an hour to an hour. A camera would have been set up next to the artist an it would have taken a picture every couple of minutes.
A time lapse of Earth from October 2011 to March 2012 created from images taken by the Electro-L Weather Satellite. This is of course very different from the others as it was taken from a satellite instead of a normal camera. It took much longer to make than the animation above too, about 5 months.
This is a time lapse of a pregnancy. This would have obviously taken about 9 months, and one picture would have been taken every couple of days or weeks, so rather than having a camera permanently there, like the one above, they would have just set a normal camera up to take the picture on a delay.
We are now animating the cut out models we made last week. The animation has no plot or story line. Instead, we are making the mis-matched features of faces from a magazine move and change around.
We completed the animation by cutting the eyes and ripping the mouths, leaving only the original faces. Below is our completed animation of the faces.
I, along with Beth Sigsworth, designed a basic cutout character, by using a face from a magazine and features cut out from other faces. When put together in different ways, the face becomes surreal and becomes a character which could be used in a cutout animation. Below are photographs of the face with different features.
Cutout animation is animation made with cut out bits of paper, card, photographs and other materials on a flat surface. The camera is above the cutout models, to create the illusion that it is stood up. Below are some examples of this kind of animation.
This is the Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger. It is a silhouette cutout animation made in 1926, and is the oldest lasting feature animation film. Because it is a silhouette animation, you do not actually see the models, but rather you see their shadow through a piece of paper. There will have been a light behind it to make the shadows stronger.
This is Les Trois Inventeurs, a cutout animation by Michael Ocelot from 1980. It was made using white paper and was intricately cut out to create this animation. It also looks as if lace or paper doilies has been used, which has a charming effect. Unlike the Adventures of Prince Achmed, the models here are actually seen and are not just silhouettes.
As with other types of animation, cutout animation is done by taking a picture, and then moving the models slightly, and taking another. Then, when put together, it creates the illusion of a moving picture - persistence of vision.
The Alien Ritual Dance is a stop motion video I made of two plasticine alien-like models. I made the dark green (looks blue) model last week (below) and this week I decided he needed a friend, to make the animation more interesting. This is Blorgan and his little friend Makra dancing the traditional dance of their alien tribe.
Today, we created models out of plasticine. Next week, we will make a stop-motion animation with them. I created an alien guy with orange eyes and an orange mouth-like thing. He has two arms and four tentacles. Here he is:
Model based animation is a type of animation where you create a model out of plasticine, or some other kind of material, and take pictures of it in one position, move it slightly and take another picture. This is repeated many times until you have enough frames to make a short video. Below are some examples.
This is a short clip of the well-known animation, Wallace and Gromit. It was created by Aardman Animations out of plasticine on metal armatures.
This is The Clangers, a model-based animation by Oliver Postgate. Unlike Wallace and Gromit, The Clangers is not made out of plasticine, but little knitted characters. It was originally broadcast by the BBC from 1969 - 1972.
Pixilation is a type of stop motion animation, using people as models. The pioneer of this type of animation was Norman McClaren with his film "Neighbours," shown in an earlier blog post. Pixilation is done by taking individual pictures of a person in slightly different positions so that when they are sewn together, they look like the person is moving.
This is an animation created by my group using iStopMotion at 12 frames per second. Once the film was finished, we uploaded it to youtube and then here. We, by using pixilation, made it look as though Ben, when jumping, was flying or floating and then sliding and Jack was sliding across the table.
Animation became even more popular from the 1950s with the introduction of television, and animations began being shown weekly. Some of the most popular cartoons and animations from the time were Looney Tunes, Top Cat, Wacky Races, Scooby-Doo and the Flinstones.
Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes began in 1930, and saw great success in its day, and still does today. In the 50s, its popularity strengthened with weekly television animations. It was mainly aimed at children, but was, and is, still loved by many adults. One of the most popular episodes of Looney Tunes is "Duck! Rabbit, Duck!" from 1953 (shown below).
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? began in 1969 with "What a Night for a Knight" and ran for two seasons and ended in 1970. It was the first incarnation of Hanna-Barbera's successful and much-loved Scooby-Doo series, still running today. Below is the opening titles of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? from season one.
The above are both cell based animations. Cell based animation is a common, traditional method of animation, where something is drawn on a sheet of plastic and then photographed, and then another drawn on another sheet of plastic, slightly different to the first one, and then photographed again, and so on. Cell based animation is a long process, hence digital animation is used nowadays.
Another popular animation from this time period is the Clangers, a model based animation. This was created by Oliver Postgate by using stop motion techniques. The Clangers was broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1972. Below is the Clangers episode "The Intruder" from series one.
In the 30s to 50s, animation was in its "golden age," when it began its rise and people were experimenting with all kinds of things.
One of the most famous and well respected animators of the time was Norman McLaren. He was a Scottish-born Canadian animator who was known best for his work with the National Film Board of Canada. He was a pioneer in several areas of animation such as pixilation, drawn on film animation, abstract film and visual music. Below is a pixilation animation of his that won an Oscar in 1952.
Hanna-Barbera was another great animation studio that saw its first success in the 1940s with Tom and Jerry. Hanna-Barbera founders William Hanna and Joseph Barbera first met whilst working for MGM's animation studio in the late 1930s where they developed the idea for Tom and Jerry. They wrote, produced and directed 114 Tom and Jerry shorts between 1940 and 1957, when MGM shut down its animation studio. They then saw great success throughout the mid to late 20th century with cell based animation and became a household name producing cartoons such as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and Top Cat. Below is the Tom and Jerry cartoon "Tennis Chumps" from 1949.
Walt Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, animator, voice actor, philanthropist, entrepreneur, entertainer, and was an international icon, famous for his cartoons such as the much-loved Mickey Mouse, which was based on a mouse he had adopted as a pet whilst working in his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City. He developed the character after losing the rights to Oswald the Rabbit. Below is Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie," a cell based animation which is considered to be the first cartoon to feature Mickey Mouse.
An early prominent competitor of Walt Disney were the Fleischer Brothers. Fleischer Studios is most notable for cartoons such as Betty Boop, Koko the Clown and Popeye the Sailor - cell based animations. The brothers also pioneered sound synchronization in cartoons, but this was overlooked as other cartoons, such as Steamboat Willie, were more popular. Below is Betty Boop's debut in an animation called "Dizzy Dishes."
The three "godfathers" of animation are George Méliès, Winsor McCay and Lotte Reiniger. They were pioneers in animation and film and without them, we would not have anything like film and animation as we know today.
George Méliès, born in December 1861, was a French illusionist and filmmaker. He started his career as a magician and then, when filming, he accidently discovered the substitution stop trick in 1896 when the spring in his camera broke, and he had to fix it. When he watched it back, he could see that from the time he stopped filming to fix the spring, to filming starting again, the objects had moved and it looked as though some had disappeared. He experimented with this and created several films, 531 in fact, from 1896 and 1913. His most famous film is "A Trip to the Moon" (shown below), which was made in 1902. He also used painted backdrops instead of proper sets, which made the film cheaper to make, and also effective to watch.
Winsor McCay is the second "godfather" of animation. He was born in 1869 and was an American cartoonist and animator. He is best known for "Little Nemo" which he created in 1905, and "Gertie the Dinosaur," 1914 (for a video of Gertie, please see below). He was a prolific artist who pioneered animation. He set a standard followed by the likes of Walt Disney, and his comic strip work has influenced generations of artists and animators.
Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger was born in 1899 in Germany, but later became a British citizen. She was a master of cut-out animation and was also a film director. As a child, she fell in love with cinema, she particularly loved those of George Méliès (above). Below is her silhouette animation of Hansel and Gretel from 1955.
Persistence of vision means that when we see a series of images together, that are subtly different, our brain relates the previous image to the current one and relates them to one another, so we see them as them as a moving picture - a video.
A form of early animation, which used the theory of persistence of vision, was the Zoetrope. To see the images, you had to look through one of the slits on the side, and when spun, the inside images would move and it would look as if they were moving.
