Skip to main content

History of Animation - 5: Something Different


      With the advent of WWII, many artists and studios had to find other means to portray their stories. In this time period, hand drawn and stop motion were the two most conventional means of producing animated films. But these required resources that were not always available during WWII. A very popular medium during this time was puppet animation. This is basically stop motion animation, however most of the films produced using this technique used clay or solid objects in their productions. Puppet animation, as the name implies, incorporated puppets. The work of Jiri Trnka is known for this kind of work. With adaptations of popular books like The Emperor's Nightingale (1948), popularized this form of animation.
      Puppets are very different in their production and how they are presented on-screen when compared to objects and clay. With clay, a characters features can be modified, like allowing the character to blink or move their mouth while they talk. Most puppets of this time did not have moving facial features. So this forced artists to become creative with how the characters' emotion is presented to the viewer, as they could no longer rely on the face. This means that the rest of the body is much more important than the face since the arms and legs of characters can move. It certainly was something very different from the hand-drawn characters that were the standard of the time.
      Animators in the west saw these works and were intrigued. Leading to many american filmmakers to produce works using puppets and stop motion. These ties would lead to recent films that utilize the technique of stop motion. These films would continue to grow in production and length. Because of this growth, the cost of hand drawn and stop motion animation skyrocketed. Hand drawing animations required thousands of different images to be drawn by artists and stop motion required repetitive and precise object placement. This would be solved by a brand new machine and animation technique, computer animation.


Sources:
https://mubi.com/films/the-emperors-nightingale
http://animataurus.com/puppet-animation/
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art of Game Design: Chapters 6 and 7

    The Art of Game Design  continues to be an intriguing read that surprises me in new ways with each chapter. Chapter 6 focuses on the importance that theme has on games and how theme should be treated in a game's design. Theme isn't just something that the player learns from the game, it is the thought or idea that the game should try to represent in every possible way it can. This chapter covers two forms of themes, experienced and resonant themes. Experienced themes are just that, the themes that are experienced by the player through the game's story and setting, however resonant themes are a bit different. Resonant themes are the ones that are below the surface and aren't really experienced but have some deep truth that parallels those truths that the player holds. These are the themes that resonate deeply with players and make a story truly meaningful to a player's core.      To people who do not really play video games, they can be easily seen as a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Magazine Columns - Backbone of Every Good Layout Response

There are many aspects that must be considered when designing a magazine. The content is very important, but one aspect of the design that no one really thinks about is the layout of the magazine. The grid is how images and text are placed around the page. It can determine the size of objects and how much white space is between each element on the page.  Most text in magazines appears to be set out into 3 columns. However, one of the most common layouts utilizes 12 columns in order to appear to have 3 columns. This gives much more layout control over what is shown and how it is shown. Its very surprising that a 12 column layout results in 3 columns of main text. However, the goal of this is so that it is modular. In computer science, one of the most important things that you consider when coding is to try and make your code modular. When you can use the same layout on every page, it means that it is dynamic and interesting since each page will feel like it follows the same rules. T...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Art of Game Design: Chapter 8 and 9

    Chapter 8 in the book The Art of Game Design  is all about the actual production process that is followed after brainstorming is complete and a team has an idea for what game they will be developing. One of the topics that this chapter focuses on are the ideas of software development, waterfall and a more circular idea designed by Barry Boehm. As a computer science major, I have encountered both of these ideas through my time in college and in the busniss world. Both theories have their positives and negatives, but the idea of "waterfall development" is a much stricter way of approaching software development when compared to Boehm's approach.     With a waterfall approach, this does not leave any room to go back and revisit the original idea and add or remove core features. This approach was used in the development of many old forms of windows, which also coincided with how the software was sold. For example, Microsoft's windows operating systems. Win...
Post a Comment
Read more