The History of Animation — Types of Animation Styles Explained [Shot List Ep. 14]

[Music] films are made up of sequences sequences are made up of seams and scenes are made up of shots in previous episodes we covered close-ups all right Mr DeMille I'm ready for my close-ups lighting and composition in this episode we'll be examining animation this is gonna be good this is episode 14 of the shot list animation before we get started make sure to subscribe and click the Bell to stay in the know on all things filmmaking let's begin the word animation comes from the Latin word animatio which means a bestowing of life animation is a type of filmmaking in which a still object is captured in multiple positions and these images are projected in Rapid succession to create the illusion of movement this still object can be anything from a drawing a puppet or a computer-generated image just like the time [Music] animation has been a part of filmmaking from the very beginning in many ways its roots predate filmmaking for centuries artists have been trying to convince Their audience their drawings are moving with magic lanterns which arose in the 17th century artists could simulate Movement by moving two slides in front of each other format tropes would use the rapid movement of two pictures to create the illusion of one cohesive image with kineographs or flip books a viewer could flip through drawings rapidly to simulate one fluid movement Edward mybridge pioneered the moving image with his rapid photography system called krona photography his horse in motion is considered one of the earliest Motion Pictures and my bridge went on to make animations of his photographs like this couple dancing which was made on Athena kistoscope a rotating disc with various images my bridge and others were employing what is called Persistence of vision to convince the audience their images were moving the Persistence of vision refers to when a person continues to see an object for a moment after the light has entered the eye this phenomena means that a succession of images can be interpreted as one fluid motion all of these pre-cinema Revelations and techniques meant that when film came along animation was quick to follow there are many forms of animation and today we are going to cover some common types starting with traditional animation can you paint with all the colors [Music] traditional animation also known as cell animation was the dominant type of animation of the 20th century in traditional animation animators Drew each frame by hand onto translucent paper J Stuart blackton's the enchanted drawing from 1900 is regarded as the first film with elements of hand-drawn animation in 1908 Emile Cole took a massive step forward with phantasma Gorey considered the earliest animated film using traditional animation methods Cole Drew each frame by hand and captured them with negative film inverting its colors animation continued to evolve in the 1910s with more complicated imagery animators were faced with a problem they had to redraw entire frames including the background over and over again creating inadvertent movement in the background and wasting a lot of time so in 1915 Earl Hurd and John Bray came up with the cell animation process where moving subjects would be drawn onto transparent sheets and placed on a static background the result was more efficient and effective animation one of the most popular styles of early animation was the rubber hose which featured characters with bendy and bouncy Limbs and which often used looping reusing frames to create a looped action entrepreneurial animators of the 1910s and 20s began to create Studios moving away from the solo animator method to churn out animation quickly one of these animators was Walt Disney Disney streamlined the animation process borrowing techniques from various Animation Studios to create an assembly line production style that quickly became the industry Norm by the release of the first traditional animation feature Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Animation Studios had developed a relatively consistent process like with live action everything started with a script then artists would develop a detailed storyboard for the entire film voice recording would then begin and sound Engineers would put together a soundtrack that would be near finished at Disney the next step is the creation of an animatic when the pre-existing storyboard is cut to the soundtrack then artists would paint backgrounds and key animators drew the most important frames of characters movements in each scene these frames are called keyframes and assistant animator would then add details and missing frames to the key animator's work to smooth out movements the animated elements would be handed over to clean up animators who would Trace all of the drawings onto new sheets so that there would be consistency from frame to frame with the animated images complete the ink and paint process would begin the drawings will be transferred onto the backside of transparent sheets of plastic called cells this is also where color would be added the Sheets Were then placed on the background paintings and would be photographed using special animation cameras also called Rostrum cameras as Disney's animators owned their skills a specific style emerged which would become known as the 12 principles of Animation a list codified by Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas the 12 principles are aimed at making animation realistic and fluid such as squash and stretch follow through and overlapping action and anticipation these principles spread far beyond Disney and became guiding rules for many animators across the world in the 1960s United Productions of America or UPA took Disney's approach and pushed animation towards more abstract styles which allowed for experimentation and smaller budgets animators continue to use the 12 principles to push boundaries today even though the animation process itself is much different since Disney's Little Mermaid in 1989 traditional animation has shifted onto computers for most of the industry this is replaced the expensive inking and coloring process as well as the photography process but depending on where you look the foundations of traditional animation remains the traditional animation style has resulted in some of the most beloved movies and characters of all time and has many offshoots like the following technique rotoscoping rotoscoping is one of the most crucial Technologies in animation's evolution the term refers to drawing over live action footage frame by frame before rotoscoping animation artists had difficulty creating realistic movement in their characters animator Max Fleischer presented a solution with a technique he quickly patented he would project live action footage onto a translucent easel and draw a silhouette of the subject otherwise called a mat [Music] this allowed him to mimic realistic movement while still being able to put the subject in any context he called the process rotoscoping and he employed it throughout his groundbreaking out of The Inkwell series Fleischer went on to create famous cartoons like Popeye Betty Boop and would use rotoscoping to create complex dance sequences ever the adapter Walt Disney quickly brought the tool to his Studio [Music] rotoscoping continued to be used throughout the 20th century the technique was employed in Star Wars to create lightsabers the tool is still used today albeit with the help of a computer on films like Richard linklater's A Scanner Darkly link later and his team use a program called Roto shop which vectorized the drawings and interpolated in between frames gentlemen you are about to witness for approximately 61 cents of ordinary household materials the perfect homemade silencer tourism silencer rotoscoping can also be seen as a precursor to motion tracking which uses its same principles but with more control afforded by new technology therefore rotoscoping has made an indelible mark on filmmaking in animation and Beyond [Music] Japan is another animation Powerhouse which leads us to our next topic anime anime simply refers to any type of Animation coming out of Japan so there is a wide variety of material which fits under the term but there are several qualities that recur in a majority of anime which differentiates itself from U.S animation the most significant difference between anime and US animation is that anime emphasizes detailed visuals while the US and Disney in particular focuses often more so on movement most traditional animation in America is animated on ones or twos meaning that there is a new image every one or two frames accordingly in anime movement is on threes with a new image every three frames in both cases this can vary but less drawings allow for more detail in each image the 1988 anime film Akira for example boasted background detail and glowing lights that were groundbreaking for the time yeah yeah [Applause] famed anime director Hayao Miyazaki often will animate on ones twos and threes depending on the detail and importance of the action in a scene as Miyazaki producer irukatsu kihara explains before CGI Studio Ghibli films contained eight cells and 24 frames per second but those cells are not always distributed evenly put simply hold a single cell for a number of frames and use the remaining seven cells to glide through a specific motion anime often has a slightly altered production process than traditional animation in the US the voice recording process typically happens after the animation is produced [Music] Souls usually the camera in anime is more active than in the US with pans Dutch tilts and zooms creating motion outside of its character animations anime's distinctive style has had a wide-ranging influence and is often credited with being on the Forefront of creating animation with adult themes growing the audience for animation exponentially not all animation however is rooted in drawing there is also stop motion stop motion refers to animating any object by taking pictures of them in slightly altered positions including puppet work and claymation stop motion has its roots in the very earliest days of Cinema when filmmakers like George melier were trying to find new ways to shock Their audience Melia and others discovered that they could make inanimate objects move by using stop motion and started to employ the technique in their live-action settings as stop-motion evolved it remained intertwined with live action used to create a variety of special effects in 1925's a lost world entire scenes of dinosaurs would use stop-motion animation eventually stop-motion films independent of live action began to proliferate resulting in iconic films which are still beloved to this day in the 1970s animator Will Vinton coined the term claymation for stop-motion work that employed plasticine clay or other malleable substances which allows for characters to be more freely shaped the process is laborious and expensive and so a claymation feature didn't appear until vinton's the Adventures of Mark Twain in 1985. today stop motion continues to be seen in work from directors like Henry Selleck Tim Burton and Wes Anderson puppets are generally made with pliable and metal skeletons underneath silicon layers it is now done with the assistance of computers which can erase elements that are holding characters in place and smooth out movement stop motion remains a tool which is still going strong today its aesthetic is instantly recognizable and sometimes even replicated in films which aren't in fact stop-motion let's look at a style that uses stop-motions approach cut out animation cutout is one of the earliest forms of animation the technique refers to two-dimensional stop-motion capturing objects like paper or Fabric and adjusting them from frame to frame in order to create the illusion of movement because the subjects in cut out animation are reusable from shot to shot the technique proved to be cheaper and less time intensive than traditional animation Argentinian artist kierina christiani pioneered cutout techniques and made the feature El apostol in 1917 but the film unfortunately was destroyed but the earlier surviving animated feature also used the cutout Style in 1926 lot reiniger created The Adventures of Prince Ahmed she borrowed practices from Shadow play a pre-film form of entertainment where puppets would be moved around in front of a light cut out waned in popularity as cell animation became dominant but the technique still found life in smaller budget formats Terry Gilliam for example used cutouts in much of Monty Python's work oh one of the most popular animated television programs initially used the cutout technique [Music] I sure am hungry how can you eat when you're farting fire shut up dude you're being totally immature you see this was the pilot episode done before we had a series so Matt and I had to do the whole thing by ourselves for several months we were locked into a cold dark little room for long periods of time today South Park has kept its cut out style but it's all computer generated using the program Maya while cut out animation may seem like a dated style its techniques are crucial to much of the computer animated 2D projects we see today using software like Adobe animate after effects or tomb boom Harmony computer animators will create individual elements within parts of characters and move them just as lot reiniger would have by hand this technique is called puppet animation just like in the 1920s this method saves time since animators don't need to redraw characters from frame to frame the cutout animation style is linked to our next technique 3D computer animation while traditional cell animation was the dominant technique of the 20th century 3D computer animation is the dominant form of Animation today the practice refers to any animation which is created digitally and which has a sense of depth that is not usually achieved by traditional animation scientists began developing computer animation technology as early as the 1960s in 1972 Edwin catmore and Fred Park developed a computer animated hand and face at the University of Utah just like with stop-motion computer animation first started as a way to create special effects in live-action films the 1982 film Tron Everly relied on computer animation to create its virtual world ready [Music] technology had finally Advanced enough to create entirely computer-generated animations VeggieTales which premiered in 1993 became the first TV show completely made of 3D computer animation in 1995 Pixar released Toy Story the first feature with 3D computer animation and changed the industry forever through Infinity creation of 3D computer animation varies by Studio usually the animation team begins with modeling where the characters shape and size is sculpted on geometric planes then an animator will create a skeletal version of a character this skeleton contains avars points which can be moved from frame to frame later then moves the avars into their desired positions for each keyframe in a process ingeniously called keyframing and the computer does the tweening animating the in-between frames do these words sound familiar that's because it's a similar process to traditional animation just this time the computer has automated some of the roles some 3D animation objects will use motion capture to make movement more realistic hardening back to Fleischer and his rotoscoping since Toy Story's release 3D computer animation has advanced rapidly in 1995 Woody had 700 controls Joe Gardner in Seoul has 1266 due to advances in textures and hair movement some animation today can be nearly indistinguishable from live action [Music] animation is a testament to experimentation for over a century animators have been pushing their medium forward inventing new technologies and combining Styles creating Unforgettable movies along the way and no matter the form of Animation storyboards are almost always present don't get lost at your keyframes and click the link below to use Studio binders storyboard software some of your favorite animated films let us know in the comments until next time keep moving one frame at a time just keep swimming just keep swimming just keep swimming swimming swimming what do we do we swim swim [Music]

2023-05-09 17:20

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