Computer Animation
Though animation can be traced to the back to the 19th Century with flip books and zoetropes its history as an industry is entwined with the film industry. Georges Méliès’s accidental discovery of stop start animation, for example, lead to the development of many narrative devices that are now a standard part of post-production, including time lapses, dissolved and multipal exposure. Just as digital technology has revolutionised moving image cinematography, so too has the use of computers revolutionised animation.
For example, Nick Park’s clay animation films in the Wallace and Gromit series, which use stop start techniques, shoot at approximately one second of film per day. By contrast, the techniques used by Pixar on films such as Toy Story (1994) by-pass this process by scanning in three dimensional models, giving them ‘avars’ (hinges) to allow the image to move and speeding up production time considerable.
More recently, domestic packages like GIF Movie Gear allow audiences to produce their own animation for broadcast on YouTube. From a theoretical perspective it is clear that animation has been blurring the distinction between the real and the simulated for much longer than the term post-modernism has been in use....
