INTRODUCTION TO ANIMATION – HISTORY OF ANIMATION 

History of Animation Powerpoints -> Lectures will be added each week. 

Proto-Animation and Early Filmmaking 

Pre-History of Animation 

• Technology: The Magic Lantern and The Daguerrotype  
• Magic Lantern: Using light, magnify an image as an early form of a projector – used scientifically originally but was adapted for entertainment for the rich.  Glass slides with paintings. A little motion if you could move the glass in front of the light.  
• Seeing images projected with light onto a large screen was the foundation of cinema 
• Daguerrotype – 1839, the ability to take photographs began and started to evolve into taking photographs in quick succession 
• Cave Paintings – prehistoric animation? Animals with more legs than they actually have, they’re trying to make things move! 

• The Afterimage Effect – involves tricking the eye into temporarily perceiving an image even after the image has disappeared. 
• An important precursor to the persistence of vision and the illusion of movement achieved through animation and cinema. 
• Focus your eye on an image for an extended period – and when you take it away, the eye takes longer to adapt to the change, and you temporarily see an image  
• When an object spins fast enough in front of our eyes, we ascribe an image and form to it even when there is no form there – basis of the Thaumatrope 

The Cinematographe – The birth of Cinema 

• Patented by the Lumiere Brothers in 1895 
• Seen as the beginning of modern cinema 
• An all-in-one device – camera, film developer, and projector 

• Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory in Lyon (1895) – the first film screened at the Brothers’ first public show. 

Why Study Silent Animation? 

• “Cinema of Attractions” – Early filmmakers were not primarily concerned with narrative, but rather with the novelty of the cinema technology and its ability to make images move (Gunning, 2004) 
• Lightning Cartoonists 
• Vaudeville or music hall – a valuable source of early cinema 
• The lightning cartoonist as a forerunner to cinematic animation – rehearse a routine of a developing image, drawing an image super fast 
• Relatively few survive. 

• The Enchanted Drawing by J. Stuart Blackmon 

• Cinematic Manipulation and the Stop Trick – the artist as a magician  

• Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) – first animation (kinda) – Blackton 
• Early films, the animator progresses further behind the screen 
• Fantasmagorie – credited as the first real cartoon – 1908 – Cohl