PIONEERS AND DEVELOPERS OF ANIMATION

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau 

(14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883)

Joseph Plateau was born in Brussels, At the age of fourteen he lost his father and mother, he spent a lot of his time with his uncle instead. He studied at the University of Liège, where he graduated as a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, He was a very cleaver and achieved high grades at his studies.

Plateau was best known for being the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistoscope.

(example of phenakistope)

The phenakistoscope (also spelled phenakistiscope or phenakitiscope) was an early animation device that used a spinning disk of sequential images and the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion.

It used a spinning disc attached to a handle. Around the disc's center were a series of drawings showing phases of the animation. The user would spin the disc and the scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images that appeared to be a single moving picture. This invention was the beginning of the early animations and very influential.

William George Horner

 (1786 – 22 September 1837)

The eldest son and born in Bristol, He was educated at Kingswood School. At the age of sixteen became an assistant master there. In four years he rose to be headmaster (1806), but left in 1809, setting up his own school, The Classical Seminary, Bath, which he kept until he died there 22 September 1837. 

The modern invention of the zoetrope, in 1834, has been attributed to him.

A zoetrope is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid motion of pictures.  It is a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder’s interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture. Here is an example of how pixar animations uses it today: http://youtu.be/3-rPn0a56WE

Charles-Émile Reynaud 

(8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918)

Reynaud was a French inventor, responsible for the first projected animated cartoons. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877 and the Théâtre Optique in December 1888, and on 28 October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris.

The praxinoscope was an animation device, The Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.

Théâtre Optique was a moving picture presented in 1892. It was the first presentation of projected moving images to an audience. Predating Auguste and Louis Lumière's first public performance by three years.

Eadweard James Muybridge

(9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904)

Eadweard James was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames and he emigrated to the United States as a young man and became a bookseller. He returned to England in 1861 and took up professional photography. 

Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.

The zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures, The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892–94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then colored by hand. Some of the animated images are very complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement

Thomas Alva Edison
 (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) 

 Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. 

The phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone or a record player, the first device for recording and replaying sound. The two names were originally those used by rival manufacturers. While other inventors had produced devices that could record sounds, Edison's phonograph was the first to be able to reproduce the recorded sound.

The greatest invention Edison created was the motion picture camera, which is a type of photographic camera which takes a rapid sequence of photographs on strips of film. Movie cameras are used and produced today, especially for the production of full-feature movies, this idea instantly traveled worldwide and improved to the the modern cameras today. 

The Lumière Brothers

 Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas (19 October 1862 - 10 April 1954) and Louis Jean (5 October 1864 – 6 June 1948)

The Lumière brothers are credited to be first filmmakers in history. They patented the cinematograph, which contrary to Edison's "peepshow"- one viewer a time, the former allowed viewing by multiple parties at once, like current cinema. Their first film, Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon, shot in 1894, is considered the first real motion picture in history. Curiously, their surname, "Lumière", is French for "light".

Their first public screening of films at which admission was charged was held on December 28, 1895.

SOURCES:

wikipedia