Anime and Manga

Anime are responsable for some of the biggest japanese franchises in the world such as :

• Dragonball/Z/GT (above)
• Poke'mon (owned by nintendo)
• Yu-Gi-Oh!
• Beyblade
• Gundam wing
• Medabots
• Digimon

And many more, also many feature length films.


Traditionally anime have characteristic stylised propertions such as eyes, also uses blocks of shading as a style, I find this japanese genre quite artistic and beautiful at times. Most anime drawings consist of 2 or more blocks of colour shading and dis proportioned/exaggerated features such as large eyes and small nose, this may be useful for animating sections of the face to create expression...

Betty Boop: HA HA HA- rotoscoping

An early example of rotoscoping-(laying over film)

This is pretty excellent, especially for the time...if you excuse the trippy hysterics mid-way through...

Steamboat Willie-Cel Animation- November 18 1928

This was the 3rd Mickey Mouse adventure but the 1st to be released...therefor was Mickey Mouses' 1st appearance! Also this was the 1st cartoon with syncronised sound!

Emile Cohl

Paint on glass Animation

< Young Emile Cohl : "The Father of the Animated Cartoon"

Created one of the first cartoon characters, named 'Fantoche' (below)

A brief history taken from 'The Bioscope'...

"Cohl (born Emile Eugène Jean Louis Courtet) first established himself as a caricaturist, cartoonist and writer in the 1880s/90s. In 1908 he joined the Gaumont film company, originally as a writer. He soon graduated to directing comedy, chase and féerie (magical films in the style of Georges Méliès) films, but then moved to making animation films, a kind of film only just starting to be created, largely through the example in America of J. Stuart Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Haunted Hotel (1907) opened up a whole new world of cinematic possibility.

Cohl worked with line drawings, cut-outs, puppets and other media. He also took the idea of animation one step further by cresting a character, Fantoche. His first animated film, the delightful stick figureFantasmagorie (1908), is held to be the first fully animated film, employing 700 drawings on sheets of paper, each photographed separately. Cohl developed a distinctive personal style of animation, where a figure would metamorphose into some unexpected different image, taunting notions of reality and logical sequence."

The Earliest Piece of Film...

"A horse in motion"
Apparantly this was all to do with a bet someone made about whether a horse lifted off the ground at anytime whilst running...

Praximoscope

This method is identical to the Rotoscope method except it uses mirrors in the centre which reflece the images rushing past on the inside of the wheel.

Image projection- magic lantern

Wiki-The magic lantern has a concave mirror in front of a light source that gathers light and projects it through a slide with an image scanned onto it. The light rays cross an aperture (which is an opening at the front of the apparatus), and hit a lens. The lens throws an enlarged picture of the original image from the slide onto a screen.Main light sources used during the time it was invented in the late 16th century were candles or oil lamps.

The notorious 'rat-catcher' routine, made possible by using 2 pieces of moving glass, during the show the audience would provide the sound effects of the slide...

...Linked to the Planetarium attractions around the country, and even products based around the same sort of idea as the lantern, the product used in households put on a light show using beams of light that can rotate and change through the devices' projector.

Motion Capture

This is an example of a recent leap in Mocap technology from the Rockstar game 'LA Noire', I highly doubt this level of new technology would be availiable to me let alone the funds to hire suibtable actors.

'Uncharted' (Naughty Dog) Mocap performers and outcome.











A Mo-Cap suit, a computer would pick up the signals of the orbs on the suit to then create a wire-frame model for character movement.

An attempt at using the whiteboard approach (by me)

The History of Man...ish



Here is an animation I did a while back entitled 'The history of man...ish' using a (pretty unclean) whiteboard. However as this was a casual, unproffesional animation it is very basic and in one frame the whiteboard cloth can be seen, If anything this opened my eyes to how much care and time must be taken for it to really pay off.

Different types of animation:

Here are some examples of different means of animating...

• Stop-motion-Whiteboard-Verry effective as you can always see the image of the last thing drawn and change and alter it easily becasuse of simple erasing possibilities.
  

• Rotoscoping(Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films)-wikipedia, An interesting outcome but I feel the method to be too bland and lacks in imagination compared to other methods. Rotoscoping basically means later painting over real film stills. A full length film called 'A scanner Darkly' was made using this technique.
  

• Computer animation (use of computer animation software), most likely the easiest method.
  

Traditional (by hand sketches, later putting the stills together in sequence)-This technique dominated cinema until it was made near extinct by computer software...however I still apreciate this technique because the hard work put in has more soul than computer methods.

HOW TO ANIMATE TRADITIONALLY (...a handy tutorial)-'Cel animation' made obcelete in the 90s by computers

On inspection you may see that Disney have re-used some of their templates for cel-animation...this slightly spoilt my childhood memories...

An Impressive environmental piece...

This piece seems like something I would like to produce as it breaks the boundaries, using a 2D layout exploring a 3D environment and interacting with 3D objects is a beautiful achievement in my opinion. Something that makes an animation incredibly is the audience recognising how long and how much effort went into the final outcome.

Flip books- basic film reels

This is what can be achieved when enough time and care is taken in creation...

Flip books used to be around a lot when I was young and especially to a young mind it looks incredible when done well. I remember finding it strange with the illusion of having a video in my hands by flicking through a small booklet. A flip-book works in essentially the same way as a camcorder, by taking many many pictures so that the signal becomes fluid.

HOW A CAMERA WORKS

Bird & Cage optical illusion-Thaumatrope

Flowers and Vase


Bird and Cage



Also achieved by an optical illusion involving an after image, this is the most basic relation to animation by fusing 2 images in a loop.

The Phenakistoscope

SEE IT IN MOTION

Taken from wikipedia-
"The phenakistoscope use a spinning disc attached vertically on a handle. Around the center of the disc a series of pictures was drawn corresponding to frames of the animation; around its circumference was a series of radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc's reflection in a mirror.
The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images with the appearance of a motion picture. A variant of it had two discs, one with slits and one with pictures; this was slightly more unwieldy but needed no mirror. Unlike the zoetrope and its successors, the phenakistoscope could only practically be used by one person at a time.The phenakistoscope was only famous for about two years due to the changing of technology."

This is to do with persistence of vision, in the eye an afterimage is thought to persist for roughly one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina. This is what gives the illusion of fluid motion when still images are flicked through rappidly. However nowadays the shutter speed on video recording equipment is becoming so refined that it is close to trumping the time we take to see thing is reality.

Here is a modern-day Phenakistoscope

Research into 2D animation: historical and technical

"Animation" discovered from the Latin name anima, the "animating principle", the vital force inside every living creature.

During the Paleolithic Age, it is believed that Early man first used tools, possibly the most important leap for artistic expression for mankind aswell as multiple vital other aspects. Because of this, cave paintings began to appear, popular scenes being a hunt. They are often in areas of caves that are not easily accessed. Some theories hold that they may have been a way of communicating with others, while other theories ascribe them a religious or ceremonial purpose. Many cave paintings communicated a story in a storyboard fashion so anyone seeing them could follow the changing events throughout the paintings.

I remember seeing an animation on a cave wall, of the figures coming to life in a kind of naustalgic story-telling technique, this was intersting because of the concept and consistency of the genre of film. I think I saw this in 'Ice Age' and will search for this segment at a later date for research. An example of a modern day interpretation would be the Ps3/Xbox game 'Dantes Inferno' in which the prequel of events is stylised in stills as if coming from a crusader tapestry (below). I find this interesting because this was the way of the Age to tell stories of events but put together in a modern means, the compliments between old and new create an effective synergy.

Dantes' Inferno