Pionners

Pioneers of Stop Motion Animation

Joseph Plateau: was born in 1801, he lived till 1883 which was unusual for someone to live that long back in those days. He was the first person ever to demonstrate the illusion of the moving image, the way he did this was he used round counter disk and a series or repeating images on them. Each drawing to be a little different from the last. He called this device the Phenakistoscope, this device used a thing called Persistance Of Vison. persistance of vision is when the eye and the brain hold onto a series or images to form a single complete picture, in between each image there is 1/20 of a second blank space this is what you miss and it goes to the next image, this makes it look like its moving when in reality it is a still drawing. This device was invented by another two people in the very same year, Simon Von Stampfer who called his stroboscope. The projection of the images created the illusion of movement which it then eventually went into development for cinema. Plateau inspiration came from two people Peter Mark Roget and Michael Faraday, they were the original people to invent the device but Plateau developed it. He thought by moving the images slightly it would create the illusion of motion. The bad thing about this device is only two people could view this at one time, however two years later the Zoetrope was invented. this was an upgraded version of the Phenakistoscope and more then one person could view the moving images at one time. The Zoetrope was actually invented as a toy for children but the people who invented it was more fascinated and they classed the toy as being magical so it actually didn't get produced as a toy. Joseph Plateau was the main reason why we discovered animation and he influence's many animators to this day.

Image found at: commons.wikimedia.org

image found at: en.wikipedia.org

William Hornor: invented the Zoetrope. This device produced the illusion of motion from a fast sequence of static pictures. The device was a round cylinder with slits on the outside and then on the inside was a strip of images from a set of sequenced pictures. The way this device works is you would spin it really fast a lot like the Phenakistoscope and look though the slits at the images and you will see a succession of images, creating the illusion of motion. William invented the device in 1833 and he named the device Daedalum. However, the device failed to become popular until an America developer, William F Lincoln developed it and then it was renamed the Zoetrope. The Zoetrope was engineered to entertain people and it was designed as a toy which this then lead to the Zoetrope to be one of the longest toys using the principle of stop motion animation. The company Hudzo Design (2002) created a large 3D Zoetrope which was human powered, the device was shown in Nevada (Las Vegas) at an art and culture show because so many people attended the show the device got classed as an art form. When the Zoetrope was invented it was aimed at children because of the toy features also because most of the images inside where of animals and this lead to children to believe the device was more magical. As the Zoetrope developed even more it is used in channel idents and art shows, the target audience would be a range of people both who like the art and the creativeness of the device or even if they came across it on television people would watch it because it was a "cool" thing to watch.

Charles-Emile Reynaud: invented the Praxinoscope in 1877, this was a more developed version of the Zoetrope. This device occured by replacing the viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, so that the reflection of the images appeared more or less still in position as the wheel turned. Therefore, unlike the Zoetrope you did not have to wait until the cylinder get fast enough, where as you could just look though it straight away with the Praxinoscope. He had then taken the technique and projected it on to a screen at the theatre obitque, as the first presentation of moving images to an audience. Four years later he projected his first animated film to the public in Paris (France) he named the film Pauvre Pierrot. Because of Charles inventing the Praxinoscope sequences where no longer limited to a short cylinder movements the whole purpose of the Praxinoscope was to improve upon the zoetrope so that the illusion of motion could be viewed by a large audience at one time. The target audience, along with stop motion animation devices, i think became wider due to the fact that it can be viewed on screens, because of this the audience would of grown and the public awareness of the device, also how many people could view it at one time. The impact of this technique on the audience was that they didn't have to watch it though tiny little slits and instead watching animations on screen developing it into Cinematography.

Eadweard Muybridge:  was a photographer in 1830, photography was important to studies in motion and in motion picture projection in the eighteen hundreds he made images of animals and humans in motion, he was capturing what the human eye couldn't see as single movements. He experimented with horses, he placed cameras on to the horses race track and each camera would of been set off with a piece of string and it would capture the horse as it raced pasted. The final result is shown in the image below, whereby the illusion of movement has been created. Then Eadweard coped these images on to a disc to be viewed in a device he created, called the zoopraxiscope. He created this device in 1879, this may class as the very first movie projector. The way this device worked was simple is used disc with photographs on and it would project them on to a screen and because it was spinning fast it gave the impression of movement. The Zoopraxiscope was inspired from the Kinetoscope the first commercial film system.

Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time though a viewer window at the top of the device. This device was first seen in 1888 by Thomas Edison. Thomas encounter with Eadweard Muybridge inspired him to produce and develop the motion picture system. They both became to work together to try to figure out how they could put sound in the device so when people watched the film that was being shown they could also have sound to go with it.








The Lumiere Brothers : These two were the very first filmmakers in history, they began work on the moving image in 1892. However they didn't want anyone to copy there idea and got everything legally protected and they legally protected a number of processes leading up to their film camera. The bothers worked together to over come the limitations they saw in Edison's Kinetoscope. They came up with a plan to make their device much smaller and much more lightweight these are the problems that faced the two brothers. After the brothers created their film camera in 1895 it was classed as a improvement because the device had a printer, projector and also could shoot film and the brothers called the device Cinematographe. The brothers wanted to keep there invention private so no one could see it yet until they know it was going to work so it actually wasnt shown until three mouths later on march the 19th 1895. This would be the very first audience to view the brothers device, this was a big deal to the brothers because they didn't know if people would could and view there films but because the bothers continuous private screenings word was traveling fast and they went on to opening theatres or as we know them cinemas.

George Pal: he was animator who studied in the genre of science fiction. He went on to creating the puppetoons series in the 1940s which were animated puppet films using wooden puppets in a stop motion technique. Every wooden puppet that was shown in the series had 9,000 individually carved and machine wooden puppets. The technique was invented by George Pal, He is famous for several science fiction films in the 1950s/1960s. Also he was one of the references to the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show. He then signed to paramount pictures in holland where many other famous animators worked such as Ray Harryhausen. Because the genre of stop motion animation was science fiction. This shows how stop motion has changed over the years as nothing like this was ever seen before. He was famous for his puppets whereby some had lots of heads and bodies, this may have been the inspirations for the modern film Nightmare Before Christmas, because the character Jack Skellington  has around four hundred heads allowing jack to have lots of expressions and emotion.