Summary of Animation History

So, let me do a sum up for this class. It is about what we did in the past 10 weeks of animation’s history, and they are stop motion, rotoscope, and pixilation.

Stop motion is an animation technique that physically manipulates an object so that it appears to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a fast sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of re-positioning. Stop motion animation of using plasticine is called clay animation or “clay-mation”. There is not all stop motion requires figures or models, many stop motion films can involve using humans, household appliances, and other things for comedic effect. Stop motion can also use sequential drawing in a similar manner to traditional animation, such as a flip book. Stop motion using humans is sometimes referred to as pixillation.

Here are a nice simple stop motion video and my first project’s video capture.

Rotoscope is an animation technique, which used by animators to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, when realistic action is required. Originally, photographed live-action movie images were projected onto a glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. Although this device was eventually replaced by computers, the process is still referred to as rotoscoping. In the visual effects industry, rotoscope is the technique of creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.

The following video is an explanation of rotoscope, and I will post my second project’s video capture afterward.

Pixillation is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken, and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet. This technique is often used as a way to blend live actors with animated ones in a movie, such as in “The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb” by the Bolex Brothers.

Here is one of the pixillation product that I like the most, also with my third project’s video capture.

After exploring all these projects, I made the final with cross-overing stop motion and pixillation. Here is my final video’s capture.

Have a great winter break and this should be my final post for ending this quarter. DAB!

Chinese Animation

Chinese animation, which also called Donghua in Chinese, refers to animation made in China. In the first century BC, the Chinese craftsman, Ding Huan, invented a device “on which many strange birds and mysterious animals were attached” that were said to have “moved quite naturally”, but it is unclear if this and the other devices historian, Joseph Needham, calls “a variety of zoetrope”, which involved any true illusion of animation or simply featured static or mechanized figures actually moving through space. Chinese modern animation began in 1918 when an animation piece from the United States “Out of the Inkwell” landed in Shanghai. Cartoon clips were first used in advertisements for domestic products. Although the animation industry did not begin until the arrival of the Wan brothers in 1926, they produced the first Chinese animated film with sound, “The Camel’s Dance”, in 1935. The first animated film of notable length was “Princess Iron Fan” in 1941. “Princess Iron Fan” was the first animated feature film in Asia, and it had great impact to Japanese war time animator, Momotaro, animated feature films and later on Osamu Tezuka. Nowadays, Chinese animation is drastically reinventing itself in the animation industry, and it also influences from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Here’s a brief history of Chinese animation video that I would like to share.

And here is another Chinese emotional Chinese animation called “Lovesick”. This short animation film tells a touching love story between Wang Chutong and Liu Niang, and it was claimed to be a short movie that will bring you to tears, as per netizens. Hope you guys love it. 🙂

Enjoy!

Documentary Animation

We have discussed about documentary animation, right? And here is the “documentary” animation that I wanna share to you guys. It’s called “Penguins of Madagascar” from DreamWorks. Hehehe 😉

Jk bros, here’s the real one that I would like to share. But first, please allow me to remind what documentary animation is to you guys (in case some of you forgot). 🙂

Documentary animation is a genre of  film which combines animation and documentary. The first recognized example of this genre is Winsor McCay’s 12-minute-long film, which produced in 1918. The Sinking of the Lusitania, which uses animation to portray the 1915 sinking of RMS Lusitania after it was struck by two torpedoes launched by a German U-boat; an event of which no recorded film footage is known to exist. Early examples of fully animated educational films are The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923) , and Evolution (1925), which created by Max and Dave Fleischer. Walt Disney also used it in films, such as Victory Through Air Power (1943), How to Catch a Cold (1951), and Our Friend the Atom (1957).

The following video is the trailer of “Waltz with Bashir”. It is a 2008 Israeli animated war documentary film, it is written and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman in search of his lost memories of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon War in 1982 . This film and “$9.99” are released in 2008, they are the first Israeli animated feature-length films released theatrically since Alina and Yoram Gross’s Ba’al Hahalomot (1962). Waltz with Bashir premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it entered the competition for the Palme d’Or, and since then has won and been nominated for many additional important awards while receiving wide acclaim from critics. It won a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, an NSFC Award for Best Film, a César Award for Best Foreign Film and an IDA Award for Feature Documentary, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature.

And what I wanna sum up is that sometimes the making of the story can tell a better story than the story itself. 🙂

Enjoy!

Pixar History

 

Since we have discussed some of the Pixar’s history and products before, I would like to share this video to you guys. Pixar is referred to as Pixar Animation Studios, is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California that is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder. Disney purchased Pixar in 2006, a transaction that resulted in Jobs becoming Disney’s largest single shareholder at the time. Pixar is best known for CGI-animated feature films created with RenderMan, Pixar’s own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface, used to generate high-quality images. Pixar has produced eighteen feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995), which was the first-ever computer-animated feature film, and its most recent being Cars 3 (2017).

Wanna know more about Pixar? Watch the following

And here is Pixar’s newest animation movie, which also done with CGI,  will be shown on 22 November  in US, and 28 December in Hong Kong this year!! The story follows a 12-year-old boy named Miguel who sets off a chain of events relating to a century-old mystery, leading to an extraordinary family reunion.The concept of the film is based on the Mexican holiday of Dia de Muertos. The screenplay was penned by Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich, and the story by Unkrich, Molina, Jason Katz, and Aldrich. Pixar began developing animation in 2016. Unkrich and some of the film’s crew members also visited Mexico for inspiration. The skeletons in the film were redesigned to be more appealing. I really suggest all of you guys, especially the one who falls in love with music and skeleton (like me), to watch this amazing Pixar’s

Enjoy the trailer and have a good winter break with this movie! 🙂