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History of Animation - 2: Stop Motion

      Hello Everyone and welcome back! Last time we covered the early mechanically based origins of animation. At this point, it can hardly be compared to the animations that we are all familiar with today. However, with the invention of socket driven film stock, the earliest form of the projectors we are familiar with today, animation is set to make a giant leap forward that will transform it into the medium of today.
      The "first" animation film is difficult to centralize as different sources have different years and people as being the first to create an animated film. All seem to agree that the invention of the praxinoscope in 1877 by Charles-Emile Reynaud earned him the title of First Motion Picture Cartoonist. These films he produced were 10 to 15 minutes long and were shown in his own theater. These films were created by artists painting images directly onto the film stock, in Reynaud's case these images were usually in the style of stick figures. This being fed into the projector system would show these images in quick succession, giving the picture motion.
      The first film based animator appears to be J. Stuart Blackton. His first films, like Humorous Phases and Funny Faces (1906), were created with hand drawn images, similar to the newspaper cartoons of the time. He eventually began to experiment with a new technique, stop motion photography. Stop motion is still a viable form of animation that is used to produce films today. This is the art of taking pictures of objects, moving them slightly, and then taking another picture. Both Blackton's and Reynaud's early motion pictures were little more than short films that were made to impress for a few minutes. These two were the main competition in the industry and both would make major developments that would push the medium past just being a spectacle.
      There were many advancements that were made in quick succession shortly after this. Starting with the first animated motion picture to be in color. This feat is credited to Winsor McCay with his film Little Nemo in Slumberland, which was the first hand colored motion picture. However, it was McCay's work in Gertie the Dinosaur that would prove that animated motion pictures were capable of conveying emotion and story. Through his fluid animation style, he was able to create a character that had personality and feelings. Proving to the world that this medium of film making was something special. It is in this light that the mega monolith Disney would come into the game.





Sources:
https://www.filmsite.org/animatedfilms.html
https://www.britannica.com/art/animation
http://www.softschools.com/timelines/history_of_animation_timeline/251/
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/gertie-the-dinosaur-1914/

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