Animation

Animation: Where it came from and where will it be

Animation in the past fifty years has taken large steps in improvements to what it is today. It has changed in many ways from techniques to their usage in entertainment. It has opened opportunities for new employment in companies. It has allowed us to see things we could only imagine. It has also changed the way of life.

To animate, according to the New World Webster Dictionary, is to make something alive or to give it motion. An animator according to ?Animators? from ?Chronicle Guidance Publications? is: ?animators create moving illustrations for motion pictures, television, direct-to-video commercials interactive video games, and the Internet. Create a series of sequential drawings of characters of other subjects, which when photographed and projected at specific speeds become animated.? (?Animators? np)

Animation's history can go back all the way to three thousand years ago in Eastern Asia with shadow puppets. In that place and time, it was one of the more popular forms of entertainment. In the past one hundred and fifty years there were devices called zoetropes that were wheels with pictures inside them with little slits dividing the pictures. The person would then spin the wheel, and if they were to look through the slits they could see the pictures moving, like a little never ending cartoon.

A man named Winsor McCay created one of the first lengthy cartoons. He experimented with a cartoon called "Gertie the Dinosaur." In this cartoon he and his neighbor had to draw all the pictures themselves. Making it even harder to do is that he had to draw the background repeatedly again instead of using the cel animating method (?A Brief History of Gertie the Dinosaur? 1). This cartoon came about 80 years before the movie Jurassic Park. Then after about ten to fifteen years, because it took much time and money to make an animated picture, others started to arise. Favorites were Felix the Cat ("Concise History of Animation"np), Mickey Mouse, and later Loony Toons ("Chuck Jones History" np). Nevertheless, probably the big star back then was Felix the Cat created by Otto Messmer ("Concise History of Animation"np).

With the help increased of technology and just plain modern ingenuity animation has evolved into a highly technological tool to bring life on a screen. In this world there are many ways of creating animation such as key framing, cel animating, and rotas coping.