The Silent Era

THE SILENT ERA

The earliest known/existing cartoon as we know it is the 1908 French short film Phantasmagorie by Emile Cohl.

But in the west, thanks to men like Winsor McCay and not to mention Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer, who both created iconic cartoon star Felix the Cat, the cartoon industry rapidly expanded, with many new cartoon companies with their own cartoon stars and imitators popping up to cash in on the new cartoon craze. 

The film we will be looking at today will be Gertie the Dinosaur.

This version that we have screen shots of is quite possibly the extended version since the original survived but is less common (Link: https://youtu.be/36gqBoUSJ4M )

The animation of Gertie the Dinosaur which was made by Windsor McCay is quite a kid friendly one, looks really goofy and funny in some places but also really well made.The animation it self isn't as much as a film as it is a tiny episode of sorts. In the back you have the traditional piano music and then you have this beautifully hand drawn animation. Gertie the Dinosaur was drawn with black ink on white rice paper (like much of early animation).  Each piece of paper was only a little larger than a 5 X 7 photo (Which is very small).  McCay said it took around 10,000 drawings, although the figure may be closer to 6,000. The animation also had human interaction with it since each time Gertie was with its creator he would tell it to do things like "Do a barrel roll" and Gertie would do them without hesitation if not with just a bit of sass, the clever thing about this is that the animation was animated to do so, so all the creator needed to do is pretend to ask it to do something at a specific moment which the audience at the time loved.

( Information source links: https://silentology.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/gertie-the-dinosaur/ http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheSilentAgeOfAnimation )

Introduction

In this blog I will be covering the basics of 2D animation, such as its origins and current state.

The Zoetrope

Zoetrope is a type of pre-film animation device that creates the illusion of movement by producing a series of pictures or drawings to show progressive phases of a particular motion. The Zoetrope is made up of a cylinder with vertical cuts at the sides. When you look inside of the zoetrope, you will see a band with pictures from a set of pictures aligned in sequence. 
The cylinder has to spin in order for the user to see the pictures move through the slits. Without the slits, the picture will blur together, preventing the user from seeing the picture clearly. With the slits, the user is able to see the images move when in fact, what they are actually seeing is an illusion of movement. 
These types of devices have been in development since the 20th century such as 3D zoetropes and linear zoetropes. The type of zoetrope that will be discussed in detail is called the cylindrical zoetropes.

          The machine used strips of repeating animation to work just like the one below:

How it began?
 Ding Huan, a Chinese inventor, invented a device called “a variety of zoetrope” in 100 BC. The function of this device remains unknown to this day. All people know is that something along the lines of moving pictures was invented. Next, came the British’s turn to invent something similar, which they accomplished in 1833 or 1834.
This time it was William George Horner, a British mathematician, who developed a drum-like shape of the zoetrope. By the time he came around to building it, he had prior knowledge of the phenakistoscope disc. 
Horner’s version contained rotating discs with slits to view the pictures. He ended up calling his invention the daedaleum. His invention did not become a huge hit until the 1860s when an alternation to the device was made; allowing people replace the pictures with new ones. Milton Bradely, an English inventor, and William F. Lincoln, an American inventor, both filed a patent for it. The American inventor called his device zoetrope, which became an instant hit.

 The image above is an example of what it would look to use a zoetrope. This loop effect is what makes this thing great, it as short but fast paced animation that hanse end which is made using using several hand drawn images that are made to begin and end the same way.

Different Types? 

Amongst all the different types of devices to view moving pictures available, the zoetrope presented people with something different. It provided them with an ease of use, as it allowed more than one person to view the animation at the same time. The moving pictures were displayed on a strip of paper. 
When the drum, located on a spindle base, is spun, the pictures are quickly replaced before their eyes, without them even realizing it. In all, there are three types of zoetropes—linear, subway, and 3D. Linear Zoetropes:
 A dense liner screen with thin vertical slits. Behind the slit is a picture, which is illuminated.  Subway Zoetropes:
Director Bill Brand modified the linear zoetrope to create the subway zoetrope. He installed it at Myrtle Avenue station and called it the Masstransiscope. The device had a wall with 228 slits and behind each slit, there was a painted panel. When people passed it, they could see moving pictures.  3D Zoetropes:
 It contains drums with slits and uses flashing strobe light to illuminate the picture, making it seem as if it is one single animated object.

Without the invention of zoetropes, we wouldn't have movies, cartoons, or TV shows.  But the most important factor of this device is that it makes a never ending animation, which has a start but has no end which is the loop effect it creates.

Links to info source:https://www.opticalspy.com/spy-blog/the-zeotrope

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge, original name Edward James Muggeridge (born April 9, 1830, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, Eng.—died May 8, 1904, Kingston upon Thames), English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous.Muybridge’s experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when the railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of ²/₁₀₀₀ of a second. These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures. The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. 

The picture above is the one he did with the horse.

Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. Many of these photographs were published in 1887 in the portfolio Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. Muybridge continued to publicize and publish his work until 1900, when he retired to his birthplace.

His work is the reason animators have such a good understanding of human and all kinds of different movement, his work allowed us to make smooth and continuous animations like Gertie the dinosaur.

Reference link:Eadweard Muybridge - Wikipedia