Understanding: Traditional Animation

Sequential imagery has been around from as early as 3000BC, and humans have always used this as a way of telling stories and documenting events, but it wasn't until the advent of film that artists started to record series of drawings to create "moving images". The first entirely animated film was created in 1906 by J. Stuart Blackton, and is called "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces".

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

In Europe in 1908, French artist Emile Cohl, created Fantasmagorie using what came to be known as traditional animation methods. Each frame was drawn on paper and then shot onto negative film which is what is responsible for the "chalk-board" look it possesses.

Fantasmagorie

In 1914, Winsor McCay created Gertie the Dinosaur. He was said to have been fascinated by the flipbooks that his son had brought home, and he "came to see the possibility of making moving pictures" of the cartoons that he created for newspapers. He created Gertie by drawing each frame on rice paper, and would mark the paper with registration marks to reduce jittering when the images were then filmed. During the production of Gertie the Dinosaur, he came up with the idea of keyframes, and would draw out the major poses of the dinosaur and later filling in the betweens. He never got the method patented as he refused, but is often credited for the keyframe method.

McCay later went onto produce "The Sinking of the Lusitania" in 1918. The short film is the earliest animated documentary and it took a grand total of  around 25,000 drawings to complete, making it the longest animation at the time of its release.