Pioneers

Pioneers 

Joseph Plateau

Born in Brussels, on 14th October 1801 and lived to- 15th September 1983. He was a Belgium Physicist. He is known because he is the first man to demonstrate the illusion of the 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 the phenakistoscope. The reason Joseph got into art was down to the fact his dad was a keen and very talented artist, specialising in drawing flowers. After Plateau excelled at primary school he was sent to the ,  academy of fine arts. However at the age of 14 he became an orphan when Joseph's dad sadly passed away. His mum a year earlier.
Once recovering from numerous personal problems, he continued his time at the academy. Despite excelling his main interest was still Science. Carrying out his own experiments in the evenings.

William Horner 1786 - 1837

Horner was the man behind the replacement for the originally groundbreaking, phenakistoscope. Horner created the moving phenakistoscope. This was the first big step in transforming Stop Motion  . William George Horner was a British mathematician. Who created the  Zoetrop in 1833. The simple translation of Zoetrope is active and alive which to us means, its moving. The zoetrope consists of a cylindrical object which slowly moves round to present a series of images to create the illusion of movement, when the cylindrical object is spun round the images becomes clear and it looks like the images are in the form of film. There are slits in the cylinder for people to view the images however when it is spun fast enough the slits disappear. The zoetrope had the advantage over the phenakistoscope because it didn't require a mirror in order for it to work. Another advantage is, numerous people could view this at one time unlike the phenakistoscope. The zoetrope was designed to entertain people. It was originally called the Daedalum which means the wheel of death however this had to be changed in order for marketing. The zoetrope was costly to produce and this was reflected in the price, with mainly the middle class purchasing this. Zoetropes have now been developed for modern times and are now being put on a large scale. The more pictures that are used the longer the film is however it may have been difficult to create large scale zoetropes in the time it was created. After the zoetrope something very similar was created called a masstransiscope, this type of stop motion was created in New York. The movement is created due to drawings changing position on the wall and the motion of the train giving the illusion of movement. Here is a clip of the restored version of the original masstransiscope on a train journey.

The Zoetrope   is still useful today with companies such as Pixar using it, to help then produce the best film effectively. So they can see how bits of there film will look once movement will be added.

George Pal - 1st February 1908- 2 May 1980

George Pal was born in 1908. His parents were famous but they unfortunately split and was then brought up by his grandparents. As a young man his main interest was architecture, he studied it for until changing and deciding he wanted to be a  illistrater. This paid little if any at all so he decided to move to Germany, Berlin, this is when he first came across the UFA studios. Here he became head of their cartoon production in no time at all. This was the first indication of the talent he clearly was gifted with.George began to animate cigarettes, but no one had an interest for this,  Pal moved Paris hoping they would be  more interested in this style of work, the first company Pal went to made George famous because of the animations big success. He then moved to Holland and opened up his own studios called Dollywood Studios. After this he was signed to Paramount Pictures were some other famous animators worked such as Ray Harryhausen. At Paramount George Pal created lots of successful puppets,Parramount saw his talent and allowed him to do a feature film. His first one was called Destination Moon. He won numerous awards for the special effects in his feature films and therefore he decided to go on and create his own films at his studio. Some of his most famous work being, 'War of the Worlds' and 'The Time Machine'.  The genre for War of the Worlds was sci-fi which indicates how animation genre has changed over the years. Some of the puppets that George pal used had numerous heads so instead of having one head he could use more to make the character speak. This is now seen in more modern animation such as 'The Nightmare before Christmas', This is a great example of how Pal has gone on to inspire many-including Burton.George Pal also created animation for TV such as Phillips Broadcast made in 1938. This was created using puppetoons, the puppetoons were made out of individually carved pieces of wood. I believe Pal has become so successful because of his raw talent and skill, which has gone on to make him a true great in this field, he's been rewarded with a Hollywood Walk of Fame Star.

Charles- Emile Reynaud 8th December - 9th January 1918

Charles-Emile Reynaud created the Praxinoscope, the improved version of the William Horner's Zoetrope. Created in 1877, it was very similar to the Horner's invention, only an inner cylinder was added which had mirrors facing the frames, which replaced the slits to look through. Because the slits were taken out of the design, the atmosphere created by this device was changed - a smoother animation was seen, so the mood went from 'action' by the Zoetrope to an almost 'romantic' feel on this device, the Praxinoscope. This was achieved by a more subtle frame change per image, and so the animation looked a lot more realistic. A lamp is installed in the middle of the Praxinoscope so the inner image can be seen clearer. When the device was spun and one was looking at the mirrors, a motion picture could be seen. It was an improvement to the Zoetrope because the animation was smoother, due to the lack of distortion caused by the slits.

Eadweard Muybridge 9th April- 8th May 1904

Eadward James Muybridge was born 9th April 1830 and died 8th May 1904. During his life, he was famous for his important pioneering work in photographic studies of motion picture animation projection. He did not create the 'motion picture' It was him who discovered 'capture motion'.

Most notably he was the creator of the ' Zoopraxiscope '
 Leland Stanford was a racehorse owner and entrepreneur. He commissioned Muybridge to devise ways of using the camera to analyse the movement of horses scientifically. He wanted to know whether all four of a horse's hoofs left the ground when it galloped. So how did he try and solve this
In order to solve this, Muybridge developed a method of taking photographs in a quick succession in order to record movement. Setting a battery of 24 cameras along side of a track, the horses would run across them. Meanwhile, trip wires were set up along it so the horse would trigger the wires attached to the shutter which exposed a frame as it went past. Here he found that a horse's hooves did in fact leave the ground as it galloped.




Muybridge shot many sequences of animals and humans using his motion photography process. He became well known for his work however, the movement portrayed was so new to his audience that not everybody believed that his pictures were true. So, to help demonstrate his photographic findings, during his lectures he invented the Zoopraxiscope. This projected his images in sequence and gave them the illusion of movement.
This became known as motion sequence photography.

Zoopraxiscope:

Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope in 1879 which was a conversion of his photographs into moving images. It was created to show the illusion of movement. It was very significant in the history of Stop Motion because it was the first time Stop Motion was projected effectively using photographs as the source of material. The life like motion that he created had not yet been achieved by many inventors.
The images were drawings or photographs placed along the rim of a circular glass plate, the shutter was a rotating opaque disk with radial slots, and a limelight source was used.

Was an English Photographer- Born in Kingston,England  - Famous for pioneering work in the studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He adopted the name thinking it was an Anglo-Saxon form of his original name. He immigrated to the United states of \America as a young man- not much was known of him until  until 1968.He became world famous when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley - California came out. 

Hes also known for his Pioneering work on Animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878. In this he used , several cameras to capture motion- in stop motion photographs- also his Zoopraxiscope. A device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography  

Auguste and Louis Lumiere  

The Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis were the first people to create a  that could produce pictures and film, a break through at this stage. This was all inspired partly from seeing Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope however also because they worked in their fathers photographic factory. The camera that they produced was called a cinematographe and it could film things for around 50 seconds. The first film of theirs that was shown to an audience was taken of some workers coming out of a factory in Lyon ( shown below ) , where the two brothers were born. This was also the first projected screening to an audience. One of the brothers films screened in Paris in 1895 was marked as the start of cinema, after this screening the brothers began to market their camera and this was soon in demand all over the world. It was the beginning of cinema. Their work was mainly of things in everyday life and the two brothers thought people would get bored of seeing things that they can easily see without the use of a camera. They believed it would be a medium without a future.  The main genre for the Lumiere brothers was realism because they took footage of things that happened in everyday life. They also produced some documentaries as well as short films. I think their work would have been aimed at adults because they may be more aware about the amazement of film in those days than children. I think they would appreciate it more than a child would because it was rare to see a film in those days. Also their work was mainly surrounded around daily life which may have been quite boring for children.