The history of film
December 28th 1895, the Lumiere brothers’ short film can be regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures.
In 1891, the American inventor Thomas Edison had perfected the kinetoscope.
In 1892, Emile Reynaud projected the first animated film on his praxinoscope.
In England, Robert W Paul and Bert Akers had invented the first British 35 millimetre camera in 1895.
In Germany, Metzler Danowsky and his brother Emil had invented the bioscope and had shown a paying audience in Berlin projected moving images two months before the Lumiere screening.
The history of animation
In the 17th century with the magic lantern. The magic lantern was a machine that projected images onto a screen in front of a wide audience engaged the illusion of moving images. These moving images were considered as animation.
In 1914, the first characteristic animation Gertie the Dinosaur was the first smooth drawn animation with body moving animals or creatures in good quality.
In 1937, with the development of techniques and the evolution of animation, Snow White was the first ever feature film to be created by Disney. The film used a bunch of different new techniques like rotoscoping, protecting us to get real human movement, or what happened is they would film an actual person dancing, then the animators would trace over the film frame by frame. Disney also created its own sound effects and music with its own orchestra for Snow White. Another factor that made Snow White famous was every character has his unique characteristic.
From 1969, claymation was being Hollywood’s way of creating real looking monsters. Claymation is where you create object out of clay or some sort of soft material, then you move it in tiny movements and take a frame until you have enough images to make a small video clip.
1970, animation was being used for advertising.
In 1986, Steve Jobs had just bought the graphics division from George Lucas, along with two talent, Ben, the head of the computer vision aid catalogue and skilled animator John Lasseter, produced the company’s new breed of animation. The company is Pixar.
CGI means computer generated imagery.
In 1995, Pixar released its first full feature CGI film with the help of Disney. This film is Toy Story.
In 2009, director James Cameron created the film avatar, which was mainly created by CGI.
Nowadays, animation and CGI have engaged and managed to find a way to work together.
The history fo VFX
In 1933, stop-motion brought King Kong to life.
In 1985, the first computer-generated character was brought to the screen in film Young Sherlock Holmes.
In 1989, the 75 seconds screen time of the liquid water tentacle in The Abyss took 6 months to finish, part of those were spent using an early version of photoshop. It is the first use of the program in the feature film. Two years later, Cameron recycled and improved upon the water effects and used them for the liquid metal cyborg in Terminator 2.
In 1993, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park revolutionised computer graphics. The team of go animators used the so called dinosaur input device essentially an armature that was hooked up to a workstation to convert their poses in real life into keyframes in the computer.
The first feature length film made entirely by computer animation was Toy Story in 1995.
The Matrix Reloaded (2003) used a process called universal capture which in essence produced the 3D recording of the real actors performance which could then be played back from different angles and under different lighting conditions.
In king Kong (2003), the actor provided a series of motion which was captured by facilities and converted to the motion of King Kong by computer. Also, there were 132 sensors attached to the actor’s face so that his every facial expression could be captured and shown on King Kong’s face.
In Benjamin Button (2008), Brad Pitt’s face was scanned and digitally aged, his facial movement was analysed and transferred to the digital head.