Developers
The Developers Albert E. Smith and Stuart Blacktop created something new from things like zoetrope’s’,Praxinoscopes and Thaumatropes. Which where all things pioneers made at that time. What these two pioneers did was create an animation that made the illusion of movement through stop motion. They called the animation the ‘Humpty Dumpty Circus’ and it was created in 1898. In which the stop motion revealed a toy circus coming to life, with animals and acrobats coming to life. The way they came to create this was because all started from the industry they both were in. When albert was younger he had a natural ability for mechanics but also gifted for magic and sleight-of-hand. It was this talent that lead him up to pairing with Stuart Blackton. However stuart Blackton was there person who did filming as a cartoonist for Edison in 1896. To film they used the projector from that project for their own acts. So the way they created he first stop motion animation was because they used the this was because Albert E. Smith borrowed his daughters toy circus and took several pictures of the sculptures moving fame by fame and projected it on the Vita Graph.
Will O’Brien was another developer who took things further with stop motion, He was born in 1886 and became interested in sculpting and making small human figures. He then started making wooden figures with joints that had a layer of rubber and made them move and appear more realistic. Having joints on the figures made everything easier to animate because it allowed you to move arms and legs bit by bit. His major project that changed the world of animation was King Kong. In order to make the animation he studied the movement of gorillas therefore he frequently visited gorilla enclosures. In order to bring King Kong, he studied their facial expressions and body movement and incorporated it into the animation. He would of had several heads made for the gorilla’s facial expressions. In the scene where King Kong is on top of a sky scraper there are planes moving in the background. So he embedded the live video behind the animation of the gorilla on the toy building. This technique is still used at standards of today’s animations. The special effects techniques that Will O’ Brien developed where outstanding at the time. Even the green screens used today came from him, he used blue screens to start with in order to include video footage in the background of the actors. Other monster films in the 90’s used these blue screens because it was the recourses he developed and used himself for his monster films.