A Brief Look at Animation Development

This is the stuff that I couldn't really fit into the main page but I read about it and now it's your problem.

It's going to be a little more casual in here since it's a bit less researched and kind of just a satisfaction of my own curiosity. And if you read all of Hulagirl.txt before coming in here, you know we can go.... a little farther back ;^)

2000 BCE Egyptian Wrestlers

I love this one as an example of my favorite concept in comics. Scott McCloud defines the concept of Closure as how the viewer's mind fills in the gaps and missing information automatically when presented with a gap in information. It is utilized in comics to actually tell a story and convey action. You see the wind up to a punch and you see someone laid out on the ground, you will instantly fill in the gap with the punch itself. In your mind, effortlessly (for most). What we see with this painting of wrestlers is sequential art (much akin to comics). They art itself says nothing but as you scan across the image, you fill in the gaps and imagine the motion that is occurring. You complete the image and can learn these wrestling moves pretty well. The more quickly you can scan the image, the smoother the motion can seem in the mind despite the fact that Nothing is Moving. It's the interstitial space where the magic happens, baby! It's not perfect, there isn't much indication for when an image is supposed to be individual or part of a sequence (hadn't invented panel layout yet, smh amateurs) but sometimes it really works. You can follow your way through a wrestling move.

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113CE Trajan's Column

The thing about Trajan's Column that I find interesting in this study is how YOU the viewer have to circle around the pillar in order to see the story unfold. There are no panel divisions here either, it's a continuous image which means the scenes sort of blend into each other in a pretty nifty way. Characters will be in two locations simultaneously in the transition spaces, you can "follow" their action. It's that nifty little combo of you moving your perspective around the image to create the sense of progression that drew me to this particular example.

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1504 Da Vinky's Muscles of Shoulder, Arm, and Neck

Sometimes I hate how often I encounter Leonardo Da Vinci in my history journeys and say "You know, I think this guy might be famous for a reason." I don't remember what put this image in my reticle but as soon as I saw it, I knew it had to be included in the Sequential Art category. It scans across as a motion you can follow, the turn is apparent in the mind and the arm even extends out from its gently crooked position in the final step. Even though the left shoulder only appears in one of the "frames," I can feel it snap forward at the end. I'll eventually have to dig through and see if I can find more anatomical diagrams like this right here and gif em up. This was fun to animate precisely because it was already basically done. Just had to stack em up.
Da Vinci would have loved flipbooks.

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1600 Caravaggio

I ran into this one in a discussion about "strong diagonals" and "hard color and light contrast" and their usage in implying motion and, particularly, dragging the viewers eye around the image. As in Caravaggio's artwork grabs your eyes and forces them to turn where he wants them to be. I don't really have the art critique vocabulary to talk about that but I immediately locked on to The Entombment of Christ from 1601-1602. Now, this will sound a little weird perhaps, but if you see this image bigly and follow from the top right diagonally down to Christ's head, there is a sequence of hands and heads. A right hand that is up and out, followed by one that is swinging downward palm flat, followed by one scooping the armpit. There's a head that is up, then one tilted slightly more down, then another fully down. You can feel the sense of motion, that open arms collapse into a hug around Jesus.
It's an odd idea but I can't see the image any other way now. I'll show you what I mean in the example.

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Late 1600s Bois-Clair and the laths

Now THIS is getting us somewhere. This is a huge leap toward the idea of the lenticular flicker. Bois-Clair (you can find a lot of references to Gois-clair in the research into lenticular history because one person, (I think Frank Didik?) mistyped "Bois" as "Gois" which propogated through a lot of subsewuent research. I thought I was going a littl crazy while trying to find this dude.) developed this method of couching two images into one paintingby simply utilizing the third dimension. It is a lot trickier to paint this way, obviously, but it certainly forces the eye to pay attention when the painting they pass actually transforms as they walk by. Using a corrugated surface to control the perspective from which the viewer must view is quite clever. This is where I really started honing in on the idea of vertical lines. I suppose a better way to phrase it would be "lines perpendicular to the motion of the viewer" but golly that's a mouthful. Maybe we should call it Lenticular Motion, for my purposes.

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1834 William Horner's Daedalum

Now we have the more widely known examples of animating a static image. Simliarly to "closure" as described by Scott McCloud, this relies on the persistence of human vision or some similar combination of words idk or c. A vertical line limits your vision of the horizontal motion of the images. Your mind interprets the image as being one single motion instead of a sequence since your view is so constricted and the pictures replace the next so quickly. Like the name inspiration of Daedalus, creating a good animation was (and is still today) a punishment and a torture upon the animator.

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1868 Flipbooks

You can start to see the downsides of these earlier forms of animation. The more elaborate motions would require you to make the image smaller so you can fit more frames on the same device or to scale up the device. The solution, of course, is making it thicker instead. I've always loved flipbooks. It's a great way to waste time in scool by doodling little images in the corner of your binder and then riffling the pages. This is what I meant when I said Da Vinci would have loved the flipbook. imagine that shoulder up there (I mean, I already imagined it in motion for you but still). Interestingly, another name for these bad boys was Flicker Books. Which is what Captain Lenticular in the main page called his little toys. Flickers. What's important for our particular study is the way these sequential images are stacked on top of each other. Watch this boxing match:

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1877 Praxinoscope

Being real here. This is kind of just an evolution of the daedalum that uses mirrors. It means you don't have to constrict your view with those vertical slits and can just kind of Look At It and it Works. I think they look cool and wanted to show this off. Also the animation pictured is relevant to the next advancement.

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1878 Horse in Motion

Have you watched Nope (2022) by Jordan Peele? This is one of the historical moments that film references as the emotional setup of the main character's story arc. Gilbert Domm (jockey) and Sallie Gardner (horse) worked with Eadweard Muybridge who created a cannon battery of cameras to properly capture the fractional second sillhouettes of the figures. This is how we first visually demonstrated the fully airborne horse in motion. He mounted this images on a phenakistoscope and shined a light through it, creating a projection of the silhouettes on the wall. Now the viewer didn't need to be at a specific distance or angle or motion to see the image animate. Now me make movies like this (but with a lot less spinning). The key element here, for our studies, is the way this camera battery was retooled and developed and simplified to produce a much more convenient device for multi-angle and multi-image photographs. That's a big deal for lenticular action.

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1890s Autostereoscopic Work of John Jacobson and Auguste Berthier

At this point, we are going to be speeding in a straight line to lenticular stuffs. Back to the Bois-Clair ideas, we have a corrugated "lens" or "barrier" that serves the same purpose as the corrugations on the paintings. Key factor is the way Two Eyes are seeing slightly different views of the same image and the dividing lines let your brain take over to interpret three dimensions. Three dimensions? Yeah we aren't animating with this concept quite yet. Wiggling it does give you a sense of the subject ever so slightly rotating though. But soon.....

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1903 Frederick E. Ives

Ives is a big name already. Comics freaks might recognize the name already because he developed and patented one of the early halftone color printing processes. He also sorta kinda made the autostereoscopic assembly work practically. It would be pretty easy to point at him as an inflection point in the development timeline of lenticular images.

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00s-30s Soviet Film research and specialized cameras and projectors Motion Picture and Photography Research Institute

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1908 Lippmann's Integral photography

This is one of the coolest ones to me. Gabriel Lippmann makes a camera lens that resembles a fly eye. In the attached example, you'll see what I mean. Each little circle has a slightly separate image of the subject. Once he takes the photograph, he affixes the same sort of lens to the photo so it "decodes" the fly eye "encoded" image. All these slightly different angles of the same view get to follow your eyes since the curved little bubbles of the lens bend the light in accordance with the angle of your eyeline. Left and right get a different view. Three dimensions manifest. I would loooooove to see some actual work with these ones but it's hard to track down examples and they would really only work in person, I think.

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That's mostly it for now. Go back and finish reading Hulagirl.txt now that you have an idea of whadda hell goin on. Now that you have seen some hints of animation in the daedalum and such and the 3D effects of the weirdo photographers, all we needed was someone to combine the two ideas into Lenticular Animations. And that is coming soooooon :^) when a certain someone comes back from the war and establishes a certain company.