Ideas

Stop Frames
Stop Frames or Stop Motion is a animation technique that gives the illusion of inanimate objects moving, usual this is done with clay or Plasticine that have been modeled into a creature or person. They will take a photo of the creation, then move it slightly and take another Photo and again and again till the entire planned scene is finished.




Persistence of Vision
Persistence of Vision is the Illusion of the eye that makes the Illusion of Movement. The idea is that a image remains for about one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina but it can go to one thirtieth of a second depending on brightness, so if a series of still images are shown in fast succession we will see a moving image from this effect.









Frame Rate

Frame Rate is the number of images that appear per second in some sort of animation. the more there are the smother the animation looks. However if a Animation is made for 30 Frames Per Second you can't change it to 60 Frames to make it smoother as the Animation will be playing too quickly.

Eadweard Muybridge (1879)

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Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer that was famous for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. In 1879, he invented the zoopraxiscope, witch was a device for displaying motion pictures.

 

In the late 1800s Muybridge's former California Governor Leland Stanford contacted him to help settle a bet. Speculation raged for years over whether all four hooves of a running horse left the ground. Stanford believed they did, but the motion was too fast for human eyes to detect. In 1872, Muybridge began experimenting with an array of 12 cameras photographing a galloping horse in a sequence of shots. His initial efforts seemed to prove that Stanford was right, but he didn’t have the process perfected.

Between 1878 and 1884, Muybridge perfected his method of horses in motion, proving that they do have all four hooves off the ground during their running stride.

 

       The Zoopraxiscope was a projecting version of the old Phenakisticsope. The device projected sequences of images from glass discs and was devised in order to prove the authenticity of Muybridge's galloping horse pictures. The earlier Zoogyroscope took the 16 inch discs while the latter Zoopraxiscope took the 12 inch discs.

Charles-Émile Reynaud (1876-1877)

Reynaud devised the Praxinoscope, patented on 21 December 1877, a cylinder with a band of coloured images set inside. There was a central drum of mirrors, which were equidistant between the axis and the picture strip, so that as the toy revolved the reflection of each picture seen in the mirror-drum appeared stationary, without the necessity for complex stop-start mechanisms. The images blended to give a clear, bright, undistorted moving picture without flicker. With his mother he took an apartment at the Rue Rodier in Paris, using the adjacent apartment as a workshop where the Praxinoscope was commercially produced, receiving an Honourable Mention in the Paris Exposition of 1878.

The Praxinoscope incorporates the principle of William George Horner's Zoetrope, using a removable strip printed in a series of 12 drawings that makeup a cyclical movement. As the cylinder rotates, stationary mirrors in the center reveal a ‘single image’ in motion. This strip is placed inside a drum rotating about an axis used as a base.

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William Horner (1834)

 

The zoetrope was invented in 1834 in England by William Horner. He called it the "Daedalum'' ('the wheel of the devil). It didn't become popular until the 1860s, when it was patented by makers in both England and America. The American developer, William F. Lincoln, named his toy the 'zoetrope', which means 'wheel of life.


A zoetrope is relatively easy to build. It can be turned at a variable rate to create slow-motion or speeded-up effects. Like other motion simulation devices, the zoetrope depends on the fact that the human retina retains an image for about a 1/10th of a sec so that if a new image appears in that time, the sequence was seem to be uninterrupted and continuous. It also depends on what is referred to as the Phi phenomenon, which observes that we try to make sense out of any sequence of impressions, continuously relating them to each other.

A Show of the Zoetrope

Joseph Plateau (1832)

Joseph Plateau was a begin physicist, who invented a phenakistoscope, in 1832. This device  created an illusion of motion. The phenakistoscope uses the persistence of motion principle to create an illusion of motion, it has two disks that spin on an axis. The first disk has slots in round the edge, and the second contains a series of drawings, drawn around the disc in concentric.

After going to market, the phenakistoscope received other names, including Phantasmascope and Fantoscope (and phenakistiscope in Britain and many other countries).  It was quite successful for two years until William George Horner invented the zoetrope, which offered two improvements on the phenakistoscope.  First, the zoetrope did not require a viewing mirror.  The second and most influential improvement was that more than one person could view the moving pictures at the same time.  

Here is a Video showing you what the Phenakistoschop looked like to watch.

Introduction to Stop motion Animation.

Stop Motion Animation is created though the process of taking a series of pictures of a inanimate object to create the illusion of it moving, the more pictures will make it a smoother animation. Usually they use Clay or a Doll since both are able to be moved into many different positions, however this isn't always required as sometime a object like a pen can be used for a Animation.

There are many people who influenced Stop Motion Animation in it's Early Years like...

Joseph Plateau

William Horner

Emile Reynaud

Edward Muybridge

Edison

Lumiere Brothers

George Pal

Willias O'Brien

Ray Harryhausen

Jan Svankmajer