History of animation production #1: Origin and early animation

One can argue that after drawing, animation is considered one of the oldest form of art in the history of mankind. After all , the concept of moving objects had had to be ingrained in or mind from an early age , as it is what we observes every single moment of our lives. With that said however , it is still amazing to see how early animation had caught on in human culture, that you would think it is thanks to its simplicity in concept. What is an animation ? It is a set of sequential images depicting an object flowing through space, and then compiled together in a way that display said movements to the audience. Of course , that latter part would come.... well later , when technology came into play , but the first part has been around for ages :


 

The example above (which dated back over 5200 years ago !) depicts a goat leaping up a tree was found on pot in Iran 

Comic can be considered an early stage of animation, after all thats basically what a storyboard is right ? A very detailed comic. And whoever was better at it than the ancient Egyptian :

  

Famous drawings within burial tombs, suggest a scenery and moving people in it 

This example here would probably fit in more the concept of animation : a not-necessarily-sequential but-more-or-less-is images that depict wrestlers.

    Leonardo Davinci's Anatomical Studies of the Muscles of the Neck, Shoulder, Chest, and Arm, have detailed renderings of the upper body and less-detailed facial features. The sequence shows multiple angles of the figure as it rotates and the arm extends. Because the drawings show only small changes from one image to the next, together they imply the movement of a single figure

Although some of these early examples may seem similar to a series of animation drawings, the lack of any means to show them in motion and their extremely low frame rate causes them to fall short of being true animation. Nonetheless, the practice of illustrating movement over time by creating a series of images provided a foundation for the development of the art.

And then, came machines and contraption that would turn them into true animation. Come forward the Magic lantern , Phenakistoscope, flipbooks and the Zoetrope. Apart from having creative names, these devices paved the way for early animation till the advent of the film and projection and are still in used today in some part as a teaching tool for beginner animators.

The magic lantern was the predecessor to the projector. Invented in the 1600s ,It consisted of a translucent oil painting,a simple lens and a candle or oil lamp. In a darkened room, the image would appear projected onto an adjacent flat surface. One way of creating animation with this was depict in the picture below , by having a row of different paintings in front of the projection and slide them across, at least , that is the way that is thought to be :

  

Moreover , during the showing, smoke would be produced to create a sense of mystery and dread for horror images, which is considered one the earliest use of visual effects .

The Phenakistoscope and the Zoetrope works in a very similar fashion as the the latter took inspiration from the former. Both use fast spinning motion to play their animation , the Phenakistoscope using a disk and the Zoetrope using a cylindrical device. Viewers of both would view the animation through the smart use of optical illusion. Which would be very hard to describe in my own word so I would just let Wikipedia do the talking : 

"The Phenakisticope used a spinning cardboard disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed around the disc's center was a series of pictures showing phases of the animation, and cut through it was a series of equally spaced radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc's reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images that appeared to be a single moving picture.

When there is the same number of images as slots, the images will animate in a fixed position, but will not drift across the disc. Fewer images than slots, and the images will drift in the opposite direction to that of the spinning disc. More images than slots, and the images will drift in the same direction as the spinning disc." 

 

"The zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion. From the late 19th century, devices working on similar principles have been developed, named analogously as linear zoetropes and 3D zoetropes, with traditional zoetropes referred to as "cylindrical zoetropes" if distinction is needed."

 

So basically , if we have a film reel , the images are each frame the slots serves as the black bar that seperate each frame of animation that create an end to the prior movement before showing the other, other wise , they will start piling up on each other and create a blurred mess.

Both of these techniques of animation were the first examples of a widely-received forms of animation , especially in the zoetrope. However they both lack one thing , the number of frames they can play. With that came the first flipbook ever : the kineograph. Although having a limits of its own , the flip book still can do more than a dozen of frames, and unlike the two methods above , it doesnt require a large contraption to produce the movement. Many of the the early animators takes inspiration more from flipbooks then they would the other two.

And that basically covers the era before the film.