Animation has been around longer than anyone realize. Even though you may think it is something new that was developed over the last couple of centuries, it goes much further back than that. Different races, at different times in this world’s history, used primitive forms of animation to document events during their early lifetimes. You will learn more about this as you attend your classes at the online film school.
Animation is a method of taking different 3D and 2D artistic creations of images and forming them into a sequence, that when finished will give the illusion of the images moving. Hand drawn animation, Claymation, digital animation, CGI animation and stop motion animation are just a few of the animation types. You will learn about all of the different types and how each one is used.
During the Paleolithic area, our ancestors drew pictures of animals on cave walls. These images were normally of animals, and they would have several legs, more than the normal four legs. This was their way of indicating that the animal was moving since each leg would be in a different position. You can also see samples of animation on the walls of many Egyptian tombs. A good online animation school will cover all of this history.
During the 1900’s Claymation and animation became popular in the creation of short strips. Early inventions of animation included the Zoetrope, the Magic Lantern, The Thaumatrope, the Phenakistscope, and the flip book. Short films came into being around 1892 with a sequence of 12 pictures created by Musee Grevin in Paris. This was followed by short clips in the early 1900’s included “Humorous Funny faces”, “Fantasmagorie” by Emile Cohl and “the Cameraman’s Revenge” by Ladislas Starevitch.
El Apostal, made in 1917 was the first full length film to use animation. It was created by Quirino Cristiani from Argentina. The first film around that era to make an animation with colored, tinted scenes was the silhouette feature called the Adventures of Prince Achmed, produced by Lotte Reiniger and Berthold Barsosch.
CGI, Computer Generated Imagery, which has recently been re-titled as Computer animation is one of the biggest developments over the centuries. The Toy Story by Pixar was the very first to use this method of animation throughout the whole film. CGI and Traditional Animation are both tedious and time consuming. The only difference is that instead of hand drawn images, CGI uses 3D and 3D models for its characters and images.
There are many different courses you will take at a film school or an animation school. All of them relate to methods and techniques that you will use in animation and film production.
categories: animation,cartoon,illustration,history
