Pioneers

-Stop Motion Pioneers-

Joseph Plateau 

Joseph Plate, born in Belgium 1801, was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of movement, he did this by using a counter rotating disk with repeating images in the small additions of motion of one side and the other side are regularly spaced slits. This device he called a phenakitoscope. Without the work of Plateau, stop motion animation would not be what it is today, he discovered the main technique to creating the illusion of movement is to use repeating images in small increments for whats know as today as each frame. 

William Horner 

The zetrope was invented in England by William Horner in 1834, he named the device the 'Daedalum', this means 'the wheel of the devil, however is was later developed by an American, William F Lincon and named the zetrope which means 'wheel of life'.

With similar principles to the phenakitoscope, the images for the zetrope were drawn on a strip of paper which was set at the bottom half of a circular metal drum. The drum was mounted on a device so it could spin, the viewer would look through slits in the top half of the drum to see the moving image, the faster to drum span, the smoother the image.

William Horner further developed the ideas of Joseph Plateau and projected the potential of stop motion.

Emile Reynaud 

French science teacher, Emile Reynaud brought a new and more developed illusion of movement to the public eye. Emile Reynaud invented the praxinoscope in 1877. 

The praxinoscope is similar to the zetrope, it uses a strip with printed images on it which fit into a metal drum which rotates on an axis. What makes it different to the zetrope is that Reynaus added a cylinder in the middle of the drum with mirrors on it to reflect the images on the side of the drum, also he added a candle and lampshade on top so the images projected can be viewed in low light. The mirror system allows the image to only be seen in one place to give a better projection of the illusion of movement.

Edward Muybridge

Edward Muybridge was a photographer that spent the majority of his life living in the United States. He is well known for this zoopraxiscope, the device is used for projecting motion pictures that pre dated the flexible perforated film strip.

in 1882, Muybridge created Horse in Motion, for some people this was considered to be the first moving picture. It was in 1879 when Muybridge created the zoopraxiscope, this device could project images in sequence that gave off the illusion of movement. It is said that Muybridges designs went on to inspire Thomas Edison and William Dickson to design another device that created the illusion of movement called the kinetoscope.

The Lumiere Brothers

Auguste and Louis Lumiere were born in Lyon France. In 1894 they developed a camera and called it the cinemattographe. The Lumiere brothers films they produced would normally be around 50 seconds long, they would only be taken in one shot with the camera staying on a tripod fixed in the same position all the time. They were the producers of the first movie seen by an audience with moving image alongs side the picture being projected onto a screen. The work of the Lumiere brothers are known as the starters of cinema and strongly influenced further development of cinema seen today. 

George Pal

Being a director, producer and animator, George Pal won many awards. Born in 1908 in Hungary but lived in America. He was principally associated with the genre of Sci Fi. George Pal was nominated of Academy awards no less then seven convective years.

Pal was part of the development of films such as 'The Time Machine' and the original 'War of the Worlds'.  War of the Worlds is a Sci-Fi movie which highlights how the animation genre has changed and developed over the years. George Pal used puppets that needed alot of different heads to give the illusion of speech, this was a mojor development in the stop motion industry that Pal was the founder of, this is how Pals work inspired stop motion animators today.