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Chapter 4: A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION 3/20/92 4 advanced their chalk-on-a-blackboard drawings, as in Humorous Phases of Funny Face (1907) (fig . 6) . The technique of single frame recording individual and successive ink-on-paper drawings (fig . 8) was pioneered by two newspaper cartoonists who forged a relationship between the daily newspaper and the cinema : Emile Cohl in France (1908) and Windsor McCay in New York (1911) . The longer running times of roll media removed the constraint of drawing only cycles ; action could commence and continue without returning to its origin . Thus animation evolved from the concept of a phase picture to the concept of a shot, a contiguous piece of action . Another special effect was the multiple exposure, pioneered by Melies (1902) and others, which involved exposing, rewinding, and then reexposing a single strand of film emulsion . The multiple exposures could superimpose images, create dissolves, and let Melies act with himself on the screen . Edwin Porter combined multiple exposures with mattes to capture a moving exterior outside the window of the station house in The Great Train Robbery (1903) . Worked with a twist, multiple exposures may also be used to combine animation with live action, as in Edison's Enchanted Drawing (1900), which incorporated blackboard chalk scratchons and an actor (fig . 11), possibly shot with a split screen technique . Remember that in these days before optical printers or video compositers the entire image had to be exposed into one original camera negative . Reverse action, action that is running backwards, was discovered in 1903 . But it is worth observing that the purpose of the special effect was viewed quite differently by early directors : For Melies the 6 . Scratchon . Single frame photography of progressive blackboard scratchon drawing is technique used to make J . Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Face in 1907 . [locate and permission] 8 . Single frame photography of successive paper drawings breaks away from cyclic phase drawing and is a pathway to the cel system . In Windsor McCay's Gertie the Trained Dinosaur the entire drawing is recreated for each frame . 11 . Split reel technique was probably used in this 1900 short produced by the Edison Company called The Enchanted Drawing . In the action an artist sketches the face of a sad tramp on a paper pad . Next he draws a cigar and the tramp begins to puff large clouds of smoke as the actor leaps back in astonishment . [locate and permission eg in Madsen]
Chapter 4 : A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION 3/20/92 5 magician it was a vehicle to perform magic, for Porter the storyteller it was a vehicle to advance the photoplay, a story told cinematically and incorporating temporal devices, especially cuts which change the point of view, frame close ups, reveal different players' perspectives, and cross cut between parallel temporal action . Thus by the early 1910s the stage was set-technologicaly (cinema plus processes), dramatically (in the sense of the photoplay), and sociologically (in the sense of the vaudville theatre and audience)-for a cinema industry to evolve . And the special effects and single frame animation studio were now established as part of the film genre within it . The animation studio and techniques (1910-1920) During the first half of the 20th century, animation reached maturity . The technique of drawing on paper and photographing the successive individual frames, pioneered independently by Emile Cohl and Windsor McCay, soon evolved into a cartoon animation style quite independent of the trick film or live action . Cohl, among other inovations, delighted audiences with the use of the metamorphosis, a shape transformation in which an animated outline magically transitioned from one object to another (fig . 13) . Often the two extreme shapes have quite different meanings, and the effect is an alternative to a cut or dissolve . Meanwhile, McCay migrated his Little Nemo character from newsprint to the screen (1911) ; and with it came conventions of the newspaper cartoon, such as expression bubbles atop characters-a textbook example of McLuhan's adage of a new medium mimicking an established one . Next McCay brought Gertie the Trained Dinosaur (1914) to life, the first of a long linage of cartoon animals (again, fig . 8) . McCay has said that at first audiences were unaware of the technology and suspected tricks with wires, and that it was not untill he animated a dinosaur-truely a profound creature fresh on the heels of Darwin-that they understood that it was the drawing 13 . Metamorphis is the changing of one shape into another . In computer animation it may be a trivial as inbetweening a polygon in the shape of a keyhole to a polygon the shape of a circle, or as complicated as a fully rendered Buick melting and becomming a river of fire . It is one effect where the computer vastly expands the classical reportroire . The illustration depicts a problem slightly more complicated than trivial because it incorporates lines in addition to the outline . (Drawing by Dick Rauh and Suk-11 Hong .)
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Chapter 4: A HISTORY OF COMPUTER ANIMATION ... - Vasulka.org

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