Epic
Animations
xxxxxx
A Brief History:
Where do we begin? First it's good to know Stop Motion Animation has been around for centuries. But it's not just an american film art, it's an art practiced in countries around the world. In places like Germany, Russia, USSR, France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Isreal, Japan, Norway and so on. Would you believe one of the earliest stop motion animated films to date actually came out of Germany in 1926. The name of the animation was The Adventures of Prince Achmed
and was a fairytale about a hero who reclaims a stolen lamp and then conqours an African sorcerer. And the first ever animated short came from a company Bryant and Main. They created a stop motion animated commercial by giving matches the apperance of Anthropomorphic qualities and making them appear to write on a chalk board the advertisements for their company.
One of the key elements to the history of stop motion animation was the use of plasticine other wise known as clay animation or clay-mation. Most companies when starting out in stop motion animation didn't have fancy little dolls, or robots, or lego's. So they went straight for the clay and produced some pretty hardy animations doing so. Gumby which was a cartoon that was pretty popular in it's day, was if you don't already know done in clay-mation.
The oldest 2dAnimator to date was a man by the name of James Stewart Blackton. He created a short called Humorous Phases of Funny Faces and he did so by drawing different faces on a black board and than re-drawing the same face over again in different positions in order to give the effect of motion. Then shortly after came a middle aged Perisian Emile Colh who's freshman effort Fantasmagorie was animated on 700 sheets of rice paper then projected as a negative in order to protect the chalk board effect.
In 1914 Windsor McCay an American Cartoonist came out with A story of a Mosquito, which was a cartoon animation that was drawn so precisely that people would accuse him of tracing. So later in order to prove his talent is real he published his live action show Gertie the Dinosaur. Then came John Randolp bray the head of John Bray Studio's who later hired a man by the name of Earl Hurd who he worked together with to develope the Cel technique and a man by the name of Grey Fleisher who developed the technique called rotoscoping which revolutionized the animation industry.
xxxxxx