Frame rate

The measure of the number of frames displayed sequentially per second of animation in order to create the illusion of motion. The higher the frame rate, the smoother the motion, because there are more frames per second to display the transition from point A to point B.

persistence of vision

WHAT IS PERSISTENCE OF VISION?

Stop Frame ( freeze )

Stop Motion Animation is a technique used in animation to bring still objects to life on screen. This is done by moving the object in increments while filming a frame per increment. When all the frames are played in sequence it shows movement. Clay figures, puppets and miniatures are often used in stop motion animation as they can be handled and positioned easily. Films like the original King Kong and Star Wars made heavy use of stop motion animation using miniatures and puppets. This was the only way to bring objects that cannot move by themselves to life on screen. 

Lumiere Brothers

The Lumière brothers

The Lumière brothers were born in Besançon, France, in 1862 and 1864.

They patented a number of significant processes leading up to their film camera - most known for their film perforations as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. The cinématographe was patented on 13 February 1895 and the first footage ever to be recorded using it was recorded on 19 March 1895. This first film shows workers leaving the Lumière factory.

In 1907 they produced the first practical colour photography process, the Autochrome Plate.

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison

Edison originally got his idea for the patent of the kintoscope on October 17, 1888, saying that he would make a machine that could record and reproduce objects in movement. 

The design for the kinetoscope was made of a closed
 cabinet in which the film was spooled. To operate the
 machine, the user opened the top and looked through
 a small hole, and as the film was moved across a series
of rollers, a backlight would lighten it, creating the illusion of a moving picture, as long as the film was rotated at the correct speed. When the kinetoscope was first shown to the public in 1894, it became a big hit.

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge 

Muybridge was an eccentric English inventor/photographer, who became known to the world as a leading pioneer in motion photography. He became renowned for his work on animal locomotion, which involved using multiple cameras to capture motion in stop action photography. Muybridge produced at the time ground breaking photographs where he developed a miraculous process for capturing movement on film, which in turn laid the groundwork for the motion picture industry.

Muybridge died on May 8, 1904 at his birthplace. His contributions to art and photography spurred the works of other inventors, including Thomas Edison and Etienne-Jules Marey. Muybridge’s innovative camera techniques not only enabled people to see what our naked eyes could not pick up, but also formed an important scientific study that also contributed to the development of moving film. He created an array of  beautiful and fascinating sequence of images that to this day continue to inspire us.                   In 1872, the former governor of California Leland Stanford, a race-horse owner, hired Eadweard Muybridge to undertake some photographic studies. Stanford had reputedly taken a bet on whether all four of a racehorse's hooves are off the ground simultaneously. On 15 June 1878, Muybridge set up a line of cameras with tripwires, each of which would trigger a picture for a split second as the horse ran past. The results, as shown in this plate, settled the debate.

Emilie Raynaud

Emilie Raynaud

The Praxinoscope was the first invention of Émile Reynaud in 1876. Patented in 1877, it's a toy giving the optical illusion of movement.

It used a drum, just as the zoetrope had, with the images drawn on a band placed around the inside of the cylinder.

But rather than having slits through which the images were watched, the cartoon strip was reflected in a series of mirrors, mounted in a ring set halfway between the outer edge of the drum and the central axle .When the drum was spinning, the viewer watched the progression of images in the mirrors. A candle was set above the axle allowed the images to be seen more clearly. 

William Horner

William Horner

William Horner invented the Zoetrope in 1834 and he first named it a Daedalum (wheel of the Devil).  The Zoetrope was inspired by  Plateau's invention which was  called the phenakistoscope. Horner's invention somehow became forgotten for nearly thirty years until 1867, when it became patented in England by M. Bradley,   Lincoln renamed the Daedalum, giving it the name of zoetrope, or wheel of life.

The Zoetrope was based on another pioneers invention which was Plateau's phenakistoscope. Horner's invention strangely became forgotten of for nearly thirty years until 1867, when it became patented in England by M. Bradley, and in America by William F. Lincoln.  Lincoln renamed the Daedalum, changing the name to zoetrope (wheel of life)

            Examples :

Who's Knocking At The Door, a French zoetrope from the 1870

A Couple Waltzing, by Eadweard Muybridge, 1893

A soldier on horseback

Comets and Planets

Geometry

Now here is an example of one of my favorite , the amount of time and the detail put into this makes it so interesting and gives a little chill down the spine because of the way the woman turns into a monster.

Wills O'Brien

Wills O'Brien

The father of "stop-motion" animation, Willis O'Brien (born in 1886 died in 1962) was a Hollywood special effects innovator known for his work using small models of a gorilla in "King Kong". O'Brien's pioneering efforts transformed the possibilities of film making, inventing a new kind of visual language later exploited by others in movies such as "Jaws" and "Alien"

One day, while making models with his friend, an idea was born. Young O'bie recognized that he could animate the models on the same kind of way that cartoonists used to animate drawings: by building a model and then moving it's parts one frame of film at a time, he could give the models cinematic life. Though this process of stop-motion animation had been invented and used already

Joseph Plateau

Joseph invented the very first stop motion device , which is called the phenakistoscope, this man started the revolution of stop motion animation. Joseph and his sons introduced this device in 1832 otherwise known as the 'spindle viewer'.

The Phenakistoscope, works by the use of the persistence of vision, giving the illusion of movement , which Tim Burton Wanted to create within his animations, so tim burton would have been inspired by the early workings of stop motion animation, and how to incorporate this into his animations. 

Brief introduction to Stop Animation

A brief history of stop motion animation

Stop motion animation has been around for a long time,almost as long as traditional film making. Originally stop motion involved animating objects which included the animated movement of' any 'non-drawn' such as toys, blocks or any inanimate object you  wish to use. Animators experimented with clay animation and puppet animation e.g. Wallace and Gromit, Flushed Away etc.

Some early examples of stop motion films and techniques can be seen in the 'The Humpty Dumpty Circus' (1898) and in 'Fun in a bakery Shop' (1902). In 1907 'The Haunted Hotel' was a very successful movie with the cinema audience of the time. In 191 one of the first clay animation movies using stop motion was released to great critical acclaim. It was called 'Modeling Extraordinary' In 1916,the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She released her first clay film in 1917.