The Quay Brothers are two of the world’s most original filmmakers. Identical twins who were born in Pennsylvania in 1947, Stephen and Timothy Quay studied illustration in Philadelphia before going on to the Royal College of Art in London, where they started to make animated shorts in the 1970s. Most of their animation films feature puppets made of doll parts and other organic and inorganic materials, often partially disassembled, in a dark, moody atmosphere. Their best known work is Street of Crocodiles, based on the short novel. Before turning to film, the Quays worked as professional illustrators.
Street of Crocodiles:
Tim Burton:
Tim Burton (born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 9 and Alice in Wonderland, his most recent film, which was the second highest-grossing film of 2010. He worked as an animator, storyboard artist and concept artist in films such as The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron and Tron.
Aardman has a deserved reputation as a world leader in model animation. Their award-winning work leads the field producing a unique brand of independent film alongside work for broadcast and advertising spots.The studio has had seven Oscar® nominations, and has won four.
Joseph Plateau (October 14, 1801 – September 15, 1883) was a Belgian physicist best known as the inventor of the stroboscope. He was the first scientist at Ghent University studying light and applying that knowledge to develop something we now all know as “moving images” or movies.
The stroboscope is a device that employs bright pulses of light to illuminate a vibrating or rotating object and to make it appear motionless or moving very slowly. The stroboscope works by permitting the eye only a brief glimpse of the object or a portion of it at time intervals that correspond to the object’s rate of vibration or rotation. The rate of movement and the light pulses can be adjusted to match.
In 1836, Plateau invented an early stroboscopic device, the “phenakistiscope“. It consisted of two disks, one with small equidistant radial windows, through which the viewer could look, and another containing a sequence of images. When the two disks rotated at the correct speed, the synchronization of the windows and the images created an animated effect. The projection of stroboscopic photographs, creating the illusion of motion, eventually led to the development of cinema.
Plateau used a disk with radial slits that he turned while viewing a rotating wheel; when the rotational speed of the disk and the wheel matched exactly, the wheel appeared motionless. By the later 19th century the camera was being used to capture stroboscopic images for motion studies, and stroboscopic photography has since become the major application for these devices.
The zoetrope was invented in 1834 in England by William Horner. He called it the ‘Daedalum’ (‘the wheel of the devil). It didn’t become popular until the 1860s, when it was patented by makers in both England and America.
The zoetrope worked on the same principles as the phenakistiscope, but the pictures were drawn on a strip which could be set around the bottom third of a metal drum, with the slits now cut in the upper section of the drum. The drum was mounted on a spindle so that it could be spun, and viewers looking through the slits would see the cartoon strip form a moving image. The faster the drum is spun, the smoother the image that is produced.
Emile Reynaud (praxinoscope):
Charles-Émile Reynaud (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918) was a French science teacher, responsible for the first projected animated cartoon films. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877 and the Théâtre Optique in December 1888, and on 28 October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris. This film is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used.
Reynaud died in a hospice on the banks of the Seine where he had been cared for since 29 March 1917. His late years were tragic from 1910 when, crushed by the new Cinematograph, dejected and penniless, he threw the greater part of his irreplaceable work and unique equipment into the Seine as the public had deserted his “Théatre Optique” shows which had been a celebrated attraction at the Musée Grevin between 1892 and 1900.
Eadweard Muybridge:
Photographer Eadweard Muybridge was born in Surrey, England on April 9, 1830. His large images of Yosemite Valley made him famous. Muybridge’s experiments in photographing motion began in 1872. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. The project was then interrupted while Muybridge was being tried for the murder of his wife’s lover. Although he was acquitted, he found it expedient to travel for a number of years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by Stanford. In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2 1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford’s contention. The results of Muybridge’s work were widely published, most often in the form of line drawings taken from his photographs.
Muybridge gave lectures on animal locomotion throughout the United States and Europe. These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures. The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. These consisted of photographs of various activities of human figures, clothed and naked, which were to form a visual compendium of human movements for the use of artists and scientists.
Thomas Edison (kinetoscope):
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio. At thirteen he took a job as a newsboy, selling newspapers and candy on the local railroad that ran through Port Huron to Detroit. He seems to have spent much of his free time reading scientific, and technical books, and also had the opportunity at this time to learn how to operate a telegraph. By the time he was sixteen, Edison was proficient enough to work as a telegrapher full time. While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that, “does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”, this was to become motion pictures. Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in 1891, and began commercial production of “movies” two years later in a peculiar looking structure, built on the laboratory grounds, known as the Black Maria.
The first great invention developed by Edison in Menlo Park was the tin foil phonograph. While working to improve the efficiency of a telegraph transmitter, he noted that the tape of the machine gave off a noise resembling spoken words when played at a high speed. This caused him to wonder if he could record a telephone message. He began experimenting with the diaphragm of a telephone receiver by attaching a needle to it. He reasoned that the needle could prick paper tape to record a message. His experiments led him to try a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, to his great surprise, played back the short message he recorded, “Mary had a little lamb.”
The word phonograph was the trade name for Edison’s device, which played cylinders rather than discs. The machine had two needles: one for recording and one for playback. When you spoke into the mouthpiece, the sound vibrations of your voice would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle. This cylinder phonograph was the first machine that could record and reproduce sound created a sensation and brought Edison international fame.
The Lumière brothers:
The French inventing team of brothers Auguste Lumière (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948) was responsible for a number of practical improvements in photography and motion pictures. Their work on color photography resulted in the Autochrome process, which remained the preferred method of creating color prints until the 1930s. They also applied their technological talents to the new idea of motion picture photography, creating the first projection system that allowed a film to be seen by more than one person at a time.
Auguste and Louis Lumière were pioneers in the improvement of photographic materials and processes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Using their scientific abilities and business talents, they were responsible for developing existing ideas in still photography and motion pictures to produce higher quality products that were practical enough to be of commercial value. Their initial business success was manufacturing a “dry” photographic plate that provided a new level of convenience to photographers.
George Pal:
George Pál (February 1, 1908 – May 2, 1980) was a Hungarian-born American animator and film producer. He is associated with the science fiction genre. As an animator, he made the Puppetoons series in the 1940s, then switched to live action filmmaking with Destination Moon in 1950. His films include When Worlds Collide (1951), War of the Worlds (1952), Tom Thumb (1960), The Time Machine (1961), and Doc Savage (1975).
In 1928, Pal graduated from the Budapest Academy of Arts with a degree in Architecture and highly developed drawing skills. He found employment at Hunnia Films in Budapest. Later on, through his films, Pal became an architect of worlds. At Hunnia, Pal drew lobby posters and created embellished titles for silent movies. He also quickly learned the craft of motion picture cartooning.
From 1941 to 1947, Pal created more than 40 Puppetoon films, and received a special Academy Award in 1943. His studio staffers included Willis H. O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, Wah Chang, and Gene Warren. He was also close friends with animation producer, Walter Lantz, as well as film pioneer, Walt Disney.
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