Animation's progress

To be honest, when I opened the pdf of this article, I truly did not expect to come across products from ancient history. But I soon saw the error in my thinking, of course those should be there, they clearly display concepts of story-telling. The ones from this period that stuck out most to me would have to be the wall paintings in France and Spain, it's simply amazing to me the detail in the running animals, as if an epic stampede or battle of sorts was to be taking place, some looking almost ethereal and spirit-like.

Another section I particularly enjoyed was the Persistence of Vision concept as well as the wikipedia article regarding the subject matter. It gave a bit of a new perspective on viewing motion, where if you were to just sit and observe things over time, and think of it in that manner, suddenly the whole world and time itself can begin to seem trivial as if we were all involved in a very large stop-motion film production.

The next segment was truthfully where I had expected this article to begin, with Muybridge and the horse photos which allowed people to finally see that in a horse's natural stride from time to time it is completely off the ground (Frame 3). And the "funny faces" are amusing, because to someone today though it may seem like a very simple concept like a flip book, back then it was revolutionary, similar to the beginning of cel animation and not having to recreate backgrounds time after time near identical to one another.

Fantasmagoric struck a chord with me instantly because of my fascination with the type of motion picture known as a phantasmagoria, which is pretty well described as a projection ghost show. Which is what Cohl tried to recreate and did so in quite an innovative manner drawing with black onto glass and then using the negative so it appeared to be chalk white figures ghastly moving against a black background in an eerie active manner. Interestingly enough, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll is also the name of the upcoming film by Marilyn Manson based on Alice in Wonderland, which supposedly uses a previously unheard of, and possibly illegal filming technique.

The section regarding the development of contemporary works such as Steamboat Willie and Tom and Jerry truly display how far we've come in a short period, from being limited to only a couple seconds or a few minutes of animations to whole shorts and television shows that can regularly be produced with a lot less work, allowing for more creativity and less time devoted to doing monotonous parts of the development process, let alone the importance of the integration of sound.

All in all though, the section that ultimately had the most influence on me would have to be the simple two lines describing the 15 minutes of computer animation in Disney's TRON, though it may not seem like much, those 15 minutes inspired countless animators to pursue new levels of realism and depth in computer animation pushing everything to limits never thought to be achievable, and inspiring namely the early animators and programmers at the Lucas Arts digital effects division (Later to become Pixar) and John Lasseter.

-"Steamboat Willie" Maddox
Sorry for the pun, I couldn't resist.