Animation Webquest

1) Before Disney’s first forms of animation there were 3 types of animation that were used to convey their stories, through persistence of vision. The first of which was a thaumatrope. In this form of animation two discs that are connected to one wire. As you spin the wire between your fingers the two separate discs look as if they are one. This early form of animation was invented in 1828 by Paul Roget. The second type of animation previous to Disney style animation was the phenakistoscope which consisted of a circular card that you spin around and the persistence of vision makes it look like one continuous film. This form of animation was invented by Joe Plateau in 1826. The last form of animation is the zoetrope which was invented by Pierre Des Vignes in 1860. It contains a strip of paper that has drawings on the inside of a drum.

2) In 1914 Earl Hurd received a patent for his innovation of using clear sheets of celluloid (cels), which eliminated the need to redraw background scenes, since sheets containing various movements could be laid on top of one another. Bray and Hurd formed the Bray-Hurd Processing Co. in 1914 and created a monopoly on the animation process since they owned the patents to these methods. It was not until 1932 that the patents expired and their animation process became public domain. Inspired by the Buster Brown comic strip, Hurd created the Bobby Bump series of animated films.

3a) Anthropomorphism; the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to animals and inanimate objects.

3b) One example is the toys in 'toy story' that are given the attribute of having a personality like a human. Disney use this technique in almost all of their films to date.

4) The Multi-plane camera is a special motion picture camera that is used in traditional animation. The process involves moving a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another. This movement creates a three-dimensional effect. Parts of the artwork layers are left transparent, to allow other layers to be seen behind them. Movements are carefully worked out so that they are photographed frame-by-frame, the result is an illusion of depth which again is created through different layers moving at respective speeds. The further away from the camera, the slower the speed for that layer. The multi-plane effect is sometimes referred to as a parallax process.

5) The 'Technicolor', three-colour process is a way in filming. Light passes through the lens. The lens fragments the light into 2 colours through filters into, magenta and green. Green is recorded as unkind of footage whilst magenta is split into 2 more colours, blue and red. there are now three colours, Blue, Green and Red. It's then all recorded on specific light sensitive bi-strips. 2)

6) Thomas Edison invented recorded sound in 1877. From 1889 through to 1893 the sound was recorded on the Edison cylinder and then 'loosely' synchronized with the picture.

7) Same; 1: The shapes and sizes are relativity the same between the two. 2: Characters move in the same direction and do very similar actions between the two.

Different; 1: The characters position on the screen/story board are different 3: The quality of the image and the finer details such as deciding what the facial expression is going to be in the final film is different. Overall, a story board is very important in the production of any film no matter how professional or long or short. A story board helps to lay out the persons' thought and ideas on a page to show all of the other team members.

8)

Dear Bill, (Major Fan’s name)

Throughout my animation career, many wonderful things have happened. In reply to your previous email I would like to outline my top five milestones and highlights of my career.

Firstly, I have been interested in art for basically my whole life, I would sell my drawings and painting to neighbor’s to earn a bit of extra money. I studied art and photography at McKinley High School in Chicago. I believe this is where I learnt the most about myself and the art that I could produce.

My second highlight would be when I saw the happy faces of the wounded people that got into the ambulance of the red cross. I drove the ambulance for them in the fall of 1918. Although wounded in some way, they were happy because of my artworks of cartoon characters surrounding the inside of the vehicle. If my artwork could make hurt people happy then imagine what it could do with the healthy!

One of the happiest and most fruitful events that outstand within my life thus far would be marrying Lillian Bounds, one of my first employees. This event was only possible because of my ‘Alice Comedies’ that were highly recognized in Hollywood in 1925. I was later blessed with two daughters named, Diane and Sharon.

The fourth event that put me in a new league in the animation world was ‘the Old Mill’. This short film was the first to utilize the multi-plane camera technique. Five years later we produced ‘Snow white and the seven dwarfs’ in the time of the depression. The film premiered at the Carthay Theater in Los Angeles.

Finally, I had a dream to create a clean and organized amusement park. My dream came true in 1955 and it was called Disneyland. The next year I became a television pioneer and I was among the first to present full-color progammes.

In conclusion, many have called me a legend; a folk hero of the 20th century. I aimed throughout my work to bring people closer to the future whilst recounting on the past. I would not have of been able to achieve what I did without my education, imagination, sense of optimism, new creations by breaking the boundaries and a drive for self-made success.

Regards Bill,

Walt Disney.

9) A) With ‘Ice Age 2’, the animators goal is to squeeze every drop of emotion out of the character and make sure the audience connects. Pure Digital Imagery helps with this because they can make the squirrel, Scrat, look more realistic through he addition of fur and its surroundings with the help of the technology that simply could not be achieved years ago. The artists sketch the first copy and then the digital animators at Blue Sky studios create a 3-D model of the sketch.

B) To achieve performance capture animation, a man has to get in a suit with special computer connected reflectors on it and act the scene out. This is on top of analyzing real gorillas actions. Then all of the data is sent into animation software to transform so that the movements are in scale to the gorilla and also the gorilla is in scale to the world around him, which includes humans, at any given point in the movie. The overall point of ‘performance capture animation’ is to achieve animated movements that cannot be observed in real life by animals. The movements need to be acted out by professional actors in data receiving suits.

C) In Sin City, they use green screen technology a lot. Green screen gives absolute control over every aspect of every frame. To achieve the ‘look’ of a person being dragged behind a car they put a car in front of the green screen and placed an actor behind the car. Once filmed and uploaded onto the computer, the animators could replace the green with and illustration of a street scene and simulate camera movement. They could then also create a speeding background and spinning tires. Wires were erased and ‘wind’ through ‘particle animation’ was added. Finally lighting and reflections were fixed and grays, blacks and whites were enriched to show off the scene better. The nine-second scene took three hours to shoot and two weeks to alter on the computer.

D) In Vendetta, they used the Digital Composting technique in many scenes, but mainly for a knife fight scene. Basically, Instead of throwing the knife during filming of actors, he keeps holding onto it as he pretends to throw. This data is then changed on the computer. The knife is painted out of his hand and the knife becomes CG (computer generated). The knife flies straight towards the viewer (and if he had let go, then extremely close to a camera operator). The editors also put in a reflection of the victims face in the blade; this was a tribute to the graphic novel. The effects supervisor, Dan Glass claimed that “You couldn’t have of filmed that knife fight for real with the detail that we wanted.”