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The first use of animation in movies was in 1899, with the production of the short film Matches: An Appeal by British film pioneer Arthur Melbourne-Cooper- a thirty-second long stop-motion animated piece intended to encourage the audience to send matches to British troops fighting the Boer War. The film contains an appeal to send money to Bryant and May who would then send matches to the British troops which were fighting in the Boer War in South Africa. It was shown in December 1899 at The Empire Theatre in London. This film is the earliest known example of stop-motion animation. Little puppets, constructed of matchsticks, are writing the appeal on a black wall. Their movements are filmed frame by frame, movement by movement. The relative sophistication of this piece was not followed up for some time, with subsequent works in animation being limited to short, two or three frame effects, such as appeared in Edwin Stanton Porter's 1902 short "Fun in a Bakery Shop", where a lump of dough was made to smile over the course of a three-frame sequence. Works rivaling the British short in length did not appear until 1905, when Edwin Porter made How Jones Lost His Roll, and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog. Both of these films had intertitles which were formed by the letters moving into place from a random scattering to form the words of the titles. This was done by exposing the film one frame at a time, and moving the letters a little bit towards their final position between each exposure. This is what has come to be called "single frame animation" or "object animation", and it needs a slightly adapted camera that exposes only one frame for each turn of the crank handle, rather than the usual eight frames per turn. In 1906, Albert Edward Smith and James Stuart Blackton at Vitagraph took the next step, and in their Humorous Phases of Funny Faces,[15] what appear to be cartoon drawings of people move from one pose to another. This is done for most of the length of this film by moving jointed cut-outs of the figures frame by frame between the exposures, just as Porter moved his letters. However, there is a very short section of the film where things are made to appear to move by altering the drawings themselves from frame to frame, which is how standard animated cartoons have since been made up to today. The technique of single frame animation was further developed in 1907 by Edwin S. Porter in The Teddy Bears and by J. Stuart Blackton with Work Made Easy. In the first of these the toy bears were made to move, apparently on their own, and in the latter film building tools were made to perform construction tasks without human intervention, by using frame-by-frame animation. The technique got to Europe almost immediately, and Segundo de Chomon and others at Pathé took it further, adding clay animation, in which sculptures were deformed from one thing into another thing frame by frame in Sculpture moderne (1908), and then Pathé made the next step to the animation of silhouette shapes. Also in France, Émile Cohl fully developed drawn animation in a series of films starting with Fantasmagorie (1908), in which humans and objects drawn as outline figures went though a series of remarkable interactions and transformations. In the United States the response was from the famous strip cartoon artist Winsor McCay, who drew much more realistic animated figures going through smoother, more naturalistic motion in a series of films starting with the film Little Nemo, made for Vitagraph in 1911. In the next few years various others took part in this development of animated cartoons in the United States and elsewhere. |
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