Wednesday 10 September 2014



Stop Motion Animation



Stop motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or "clay-mation"

Joseph Plateau

Joseph Plateau was a Belgian physicist who was born on 14th October 1801 and died on the 15th September 1883. Plateau is known and most famous for creating the first illusion of a moving image. He called his creation the phenakistoscope. The creation was made up of rotating disks with drawn images that have been repeated but slightly changed in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other.

Wills O Brien
Willis H O Brien is a American motion picture special effect and stop motion animation pioneer. He has be recognised and thought of to produce some of the best known images in cinema history. Most of all though he is remembered because of his contribution in making the short films King-Kong (1993) The lost world (1925) and Mighty Joe Young (1949) which consequently made he win the 1950 Academy award for best visual effects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh-gUUsvS08

Ray Harryhausen

Raymond Frederick "Ray" Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American visual effects creator, writer, and producer who created a form of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation." His most memorable works include the animation on Mighty Joe Young (1949), with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), his first color film; and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans(1981), after which he retired.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szgam0NeUf0
William Horner
William Horner was a British mathematician; he was a: schoolmaster, headmaster and schoolkeeper, who wrote extensively on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, but also on optics. His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designation Horner's method, this then lead to him gaining huge respect in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819. The modern invention of the zoetrope, under the name Daedaleum in 1834, has been awarded to him. zoetrope is one of many pre-cinema animation devices that produce the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs in a short period of time creating the illusion. The zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. This amazing idea and creation was then later developed and improved in many many years down the line.


Emile Reynaud


Emile Reynaud was a French inventor, responsible for the first projected animated cartoons. Reynaud created the Prexinoscope in 1877. On 28th October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, it was caslled Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musee Grevin in Paris. The praxinoscope was an animation device, very similar  to the zeotrope. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a quick amount of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.


Edward Muybridge

Edward James Muggeridge was born on April 9, 1830 to John and Susan Muggeridge of Kingston upon Thames, England. At age twenty, he immigrated to America, first to New York, working as a bookseller, and then to San Francisco, where he acquired an interest in photography in 1855. At this time, he changed his surname to Muybridge. As Muybridge's reputation as a photographer grew in the late 1800s, former California Governor Leland Stanford contacted him to help settle a bet. Speculation raged for years over whether all four hooves of a running horse left the ground. Stanford believed they did, but the motion was too fast for human eyes to detect. In 1872, Muybridge began experimenting with an array of 12 cameras photographing a galloping horse in a sequence of shots. After experiementing for several years and study at university Muybridge finally presented his photographic methods using a projection device he'd developed, the Zoopraxiscope. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion.

Thomas Edison 

Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera and also the kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. The Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by one individual at a time through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector but introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video, by creating the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.


Lumiere Brothers.

Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Born -19 October 1862 in Besançon, France and died on the 10th April 1954 in Lyon. Louis Jean born on the 5th October 1864 in Besançon, France then he died on the 6th June 1948 in Bandol. Also they were the earliest filmmakers in history. Louis Lumière worked with his brother Auguste to create a motion picture camera superior to Edison’s kinetoscope. They called it a cinematograph, it was a motion picture film camera, which also serves as a film projector and developer. It was invented in the 1890s by Léon Bouly but because he did not have the funds to carry everything on the Lumiere Brothers bought the license off him which is why they are remembered for creating the cinematograph not Bouly.

George Pal 

George Pal was a Hungarian-born American animator and film producer, principally associated with the science fiction genre. He became an American citizen after emigrating from Europe. He was nominated for Academy Awards (in the category Best short subjects, Cartoon) no less than seven consecutive years (1942–1948) and received an honorary award in 1944. He was famous for making a number of films through out a long time period and that is the reason he was nominated for so many awards.


Jan Svankmajer

Jan Svankmajer is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others.