Traditional animation research Jaie Blunt

A zoetrope is a cylinder circle that is used to create the illusion of motion; it works by having pictures that are slightly different to each other. The zoetrope has slits vertically down its sides. The user looks though the slits at the pictures across, because of the gap that the slits create the pictures dont become blurred and seem to consist of one continues motion. The first known zoetrope like device was created in Chine by a man named, Ting Huan. An English mathematician named William George Horner created the more famous device in 1833. It didnt become popular until the 1860s, when both people in America and England patented it, the device was improved in some ways from the old design by now looking like a mettle drum, with the slits cut above the images, it also had a spinning top placed in the Centre of it, the faster it spun the more smoothly the pictures would appear to move. This works using our human instinct to create order from chaos when we look at different pictures like this our brain trys to connect them, and so gives the illusion of movement. After the zoetrope was the praxinoscope, it was invented in France in 1877 like the zoetrope it used a series of images placed around the inner service of a cylinder it improved on the zoetrope by replacing the slits with an inner circle of mirrors. Someone looking in the mirrors would get the same illusion of motion that the zoetrope offered but with brighter and less distorted picture then the zoetrope had to offer. In September 1980 in new york, an independent film maker named Bill Brand, created the same effect in a subway tunnel, it worked by having slits in the walls of the tunnel with a picture behind each one so that people going by in the train would see an animation from the window.

Traditional 2d animation is made using hundreds of drawings. Creating one scene of something happening and then creating another scene of something else happening only slightly differently, the drawings are then shown back to back in rapid succession to create an animation usably they are shown at 24 frames per second. The first 2d animation ever made was called Fantasmagorie the animation was about one minute long and took about 700 drawings to create, it was created by Emile Cohl he created it by placing each drawing on an illuminated glass plate, then traced that drawing with slight variations on top of it until he had 700 drawings. Cohl drew black lines on the paper and then printing in negative he gave the illusion it was done with chalk. Several companies in the 1930s-1970s where well known for there work in 2d animation including, Disney creators of mickey mouse, Donald duck, and goofy. Along with warner brothers, creators of the bugs bunny porky pig and others who went on to create the Looney tunes. Also HannaBarbara who created the Flintstones and Scooby Doo. These companies help to show what 2d animation could do. In the 1960s animation moved away from theaters and came to television. Several TV programs where created during this time including the Jetsons and the Flintstones, each show would try to keep with changing one part of the scene per frame to keep costs down, this usably just meant having someone talking for a while.

Cell animation was a popular thing and was created in the 1900s one of the earliest form of cell animation was Humorous phases of funny faces, it was used frequently by Disney in there earlier films such as snow white and the seven dwarfs. Cell animation worked by first creating the background, then putting cellophane over it and putting in the characters drawing this means you can have a scene of a cartoon mouse walking across a screen, without having to change the background once.

It also meant that animators wouldnt have to redraw the same thing twice, if they had the cells they needed. For example if you had one scene in a dock of mickey mouse whistling in front of his house, and then him whistling in front of his boat you could just use the same cells over rather than redraw the scene again, by taking those cells and placing them over the different background. Cell animation also aloud animators to focus more on the rich detail and different styles, because they could see though the cellophane to the work they had just done, this is where animators would begin to focus on the different movements and lighting such as the movement of grass or the flapping of a birds wings. Cell animation has a completely different look to computer generated film, because it is all hand drawn, it was also very costly in both time and money and for that reason is not really used today. Very cell had to be registered, which meant that the cell would need to be perfectly in line with the next this meant using a hole puncher and placing them over the same object. N argument could be made that because of the animators personal detail in every single cell it is more unique and made to that drawing.

Flash is mostly used in advertisements and it widely known, but not used as much as it used to be. Flash was first started by Jonathan Gay as an application called Smartsketch; SmartSketch was not very popular as it was made for penpoint computer that stopped being able to sell. The application was then moved over to pc and mac, when the internets popularity increased in 1995, futureWave added cell animation to the SmartSketch system and released it as futuresplash animator on multiple platforms. Future wave later approached adobe with an offer to sell it to them, but adobe turned them down that time, futuresplash animator was used by

windows in its early days of the internet and by Disney for their weekly Disney subscription service called Disneys daily blast it was, well received and used by a few other companys that where lesser known. In 1996 futuresplash was sold to Macromedia and released as flash, adobe then ran flash after then purchased Macromedia in 2005. Flash is still used today on many sites mostly for its easy coding structure, it is used mostly for advertisements and is played though installing adobe flash player to the users computer, it can be used to create and edit flash animation.