Stop Motion Research Paper

Animation has evolved in many ways over the years, from stop-motion to 3D. Stop-motion is an animation technique that physically manipulates an object so that it appears to move on it’s own (Stop Motion). “The first place stop-motion show up is in 1898, in a movie called The Humpty Dumpty Circus, which has been lost to the world (Google). The basic process of animating a stop-motion film involves taking a photograph of your objects or characters, moving them slightly, and taking another photograph (DragonFrame). “The first example we can see is from 1902, called Fun In A Bakery Shop - a movie made by Edwin S. Porter and produced by the one and only Thomas A. Edison.” (Google). “You see stop-motion all the time- in commercials, music videos,

Adding life (Bloop). “In 1937, the Walt Disney Studios released it’s first fully animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and pioneered a new form of family entertainment.” (Google). Some movies include animation, but also live-action scenes, such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a 1988 American Live-action/animated fantasy film directed by Robert Zemeckis (Who). “Animation is a dynamic medium in which images or objects are manipulated to appear as moving images.” (Animation). “In 1834, William George Horner invented the Zoetrope, a rotating drum lined by a band of pictures that could be changed.” (Google). “Animation has come so far that it barely registers to us today.” (IADT). “The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927.” (Google). In traditional animation the images were drawn by hand to be photographed and exhibited on film (Animation). “Humorous Phases Of Funny Faces is a silent cartoon by J. Stuart Blackton released in 1906.” (Google). “A typical Pixar animation takes four to five years to complete.” (Pixar). The bulk of the production only takes about six to eight months

“2D CGI was first used in movies in 1973’s Westworld, though the first use of 3D imagery was in it’s sequel, Futureworld.” (Google). An animation in Futureworld of a hand originally appeared in the 1972 experimental short A Computer Animated Hand, created by University of Utah students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke (Google). “The first successful, fully animated cartoon was Gerti The Dinosaur, created by Winsor McCay in 1914.” (Broadcast). Afterwards in 1937, the American animated musical fantasy film Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs came out (Snow White). “Computer Generated Imagery, or CGI, has been around for decades, and it has progressed to the point where telling the difference between reality and on-screen artistry is becoming a challenge.” (The Advocate). Movies such as, So Dear To My Heart, Song Of The South, Bedknobs And Broomsticks, Mary Poppins, Cool World, The Pirate Movie, and many others combine live-action with animation (Rotoscopers). The more general term CGI encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to the moving images (Computer Animation). Animation production is a very coordinated process where different teams of artists work together while utilizing optimum resources and achieving the initial goal in the time available