The Pioneers in Animation Animation Essay

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Animation has its roots in traditional art. Its evolution over the years has been facilitated by not only artists but also visionaries and technically skilled experts. Presented below are the noteworthy pioneers and their creations that helped animation reach unprecedented heights as we see today. It was in 1895, three years after Emile Reynaud, inventor of the praxinoscope, an animation system using loops of 12 pictures, showed the first animated film in Theatre Optique system, devised by him, that two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, presented the first authentic demonstration of what we now think of as cinema. Lumiere Brothers' characters which were images of real people became a better alternative to the Emile Reynaud's presentations of moving drawings. Georges Melies, a fantasy filmmaker- the maker of Voyage to the Moon (1902), was prided himself as 'stage-illusionist' and used the medium of cinema as a natural extension of his magical arts with their transformations, and mysterious disappearances. Many of the visual tricks employed in his fantasy film Voyage to Moon were achieved by 'stopping the film', altering the image and photographing the new scene. This later became one of the basic techniques of 3-D animation films. Hence, arguably, George could be termed as the first filmmaker to use Stop Action {or Stop Motion}. Stuart Blackton, a Briton, is the pioneer in "Chalk Animation". His work in Humorous Phases of Funny Faces", made in 1906, is based essentially on line animation. It is commonly known that the first animated work on standard picture film was Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) by Blackton. It features a cartoonist drawing faces on a chalkboard, with the faces apparently coming to life. Blackton's process of drawing a picture, photographing it, rubbing a part of it out and then redrawing it was the most basic use of the
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