A CONDENSED INTRODUCTION TO FILM AND ANIMATION
The 19th century saw the development of many basic instruments that played with movement and, in a loose sense, animation. Zoetropes, magic lanterns, flip books and other similar innovations were the initial players. The content was predominantly hand drawn simple shapes, eyes moving to watch an object float across the view or a bouncing ball. With photography also making it's appearance the combination of the two in experiments was inevitable. Most examples of 'moving images' were looping scenes, their length increasing up to Edison's Kinetoscope which held 20 seconds of film. The development of these looped presentations was cut short when photography became motorised allowing longer narratives. It is at this point that film and animation splits, or rather - hand crafted techniques were seen as an inferior technique and disregarded. "Twentieth century animation became a depose try for nineteenth-century moving image techniques left behind by cinema." (Mirzoeff (2002)) This divide defined the characteristics of film and animation throughout the 20th century. Animation was a purely fictional medium and made no attempt to move outside this definition. Film on the other hand was seen as a presentation of the 'real', as Jean-luc Godard said "truth 24 frames per second" (Manovich (1995)). Every effort in cinema was geared towards removing any hint of production techniques that would betray deviation from 'reality'.
Animation developed into an art of character performance. Gertie the dinosaur, a 1914 animated show by Winsor McCay, is one of the earliest examples of a character the audience can empathise with. Of course it is here that Walt Disney makes his appearance, through his career he takes animated characters from small sideline entertainment to the red carpet with followings that could rival the top hollywood stars. Perhaps the most important and relevant contribution of animation from this period is the development of the 'Twelve Principles of Animation'. This is a conceptual tool set specifically for character performance but it's relevance to any animation makes it a required element to consider in the analysis of motion graphics.
As mentioned before, film developed around the idea of accurately recording and presenting reality. But, as would be expected of any statement, there was opposition to this view by those who saw film as an art form. In an academic context, film studies began importing applicable ideas from disciplines such as literature, linguistics and psychology. The subject continues to grow and evolve up to the present day.
Both disciplines independently developed techniques and tools to improve quality, speed of production and costs. Any new form of technology or innovation was gladly incorporated leading to the 1990s shift towards computer media. By this time the scale of film effects had begun to reflect in the success of a spin-off 'mini-genre' of short 'The making of…' documentaries. Clearly portraying the extent to which the 'truth' in cinema is manipulated was no longer a thing to be avoided, instead it was a source of pride for the studios. It is also through this shift that the division between film and animation vanished. Live action film became as much a raw material and hand drawn characters, both requiring refinement in post production along with painting, image processing, 2D animation, 3D animation and compositing. Animators and cinematographers again share common ground. "Bourn from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end." (Mirzoeff (2002)) It is from this convergence of discipline that motion graphics began to take on momentum, almost as a spin off from effects developed for use in blockbusters.
MAKE IT BETTER from Clim on Vimeo.