History of Animation

I had a look into the history of animation, I looked at the earliest attempts to capture movement in drawings in cave paintings and illustrations. I also looked at the ‘toys’ which create illusions of animation most of which were invented in the Victorian era such as the zoetrope. I then started looking at actual animation how it developed and the differ-ent techniques developed and used over the years. The stills shown here are from anima-tions ranging from 1800 to 2009.

Experiments

I experimented with some of the things I researched when I was looking into the his-tory of animation. I created a flick book and a zoetrope and I also tried to use the tech-niques that Disney used in the production of snow white and the seven dwarfs to create an animation although this didn’t work very well as I couldn’t find materials that could achieve the same effect and I had trouble with the acetate being too reflective.

Animation

My final animation was created using stop motion animation. I created a scene out of plaster which I painted and the characters and objects were made out of plasticine. I used wire to connect the limbs of the characters to the bodies to allow for easier movement. I found I had to re-make sections sever all times as I kept knocking the characters over or the camera out of line which made the process longer. Also the characters didn’t last very long under the light.