Pioneers

Pioneers

Joseph Plateau (1801-1883) created and was the first to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. He used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images and called the device the Phenakistoscope. It used the persistence of vision principle and was when stop motion animation was first seen and how it was first developed. The same device was invented independently in the same year by Austrian, Simon von Stampfer, who called his the stroboscope. The projection of these photographs, creating the illusion of movement, eventually led to the development of cinema. Joesph's inspiration had come from Peter Mark Roget and Michael Faraday, who had originally invented it, before being developed by Plateau who had the idea of moving the image slightly in order to create the illusion of motion.

The limitations of this technique however, was that only one person could view the moving pictures at one time. But 2 years after the phenakistoscope was invented, the zoetrope was an improvement of this technique and more than one person could view the moving pictures at the same time.
As this device was invented as a toy, I think the target audience may have been childen. They may have been more fascinated and think of the toy as magical. Joseph Plateau was the main reason for the development of stop motion animation and therefore, he would have influenced many of the animators to this day.

The way in which the movement was created by the phenakistoscope, was that as the disks repeatedly rotated the illusion of motion was so fast that it looked like a film rather than a series of pictures. This is shown with the phenakistoscope below:

William Horner (1786-1837) invented the zoetrope. This is a device that produces the illusion of motion from a fast sequence of static pictures. It consists of a cylinder with vertical slits surrounding the outside and then on the inside is a band of images from a set of sequenced pictures. As it spins you look through the slits at the pictures and see a succession of images, creating the illusion of motion. It was invented by William in 1833 and he called it the daedalum. However, it failed to become popular until American developer, William F Lincoln developed it and afterwards named it the zoetrope. The zoetrope was designed to entertain people and was considered to be a toy, which was one of the long lasting toys using the principle of stop motion animation.
In 2002, the crew of Hudzo Design, created a large scale 3D zoetrope which was human powered. This was shown at a arts and culture event in Nevada. This event has thousands of people attending every year and therefore, in 2002 thousands of people will have seen the large scale 3D zoetrope as a form of art.
When the zoetrope was first invented I think that it was, like the phenakistoscope, aimed at children because of its toy features. Also especially as often some of the designs seem to be animals, and therefore, children would find this more magical.
However, as the zoetrope has developed and it has been used in channel idents and at art events the target audience would be a variety of people. Both who like art and see the creativeness of this device at an event, or if they just come across it on television.

Charles-Emile Reynaud (1844-1918) created the Praxinoscope in 1877, which was an improvement of the zoetrope. This occured by replacing the viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less still in position as the wheel turned. Therefore, unlike the zoetrope you didn't have to wait for the cylinder to get fast enough, you could just look through the mirror and see the images straight away. In 1888, he then took this technique and projected it onto a screen at the Theatre Obtique, as the first presentation of moving images to an audience. Then 4 years later he projected the first animated film in public, in Paris called Pauvre Pierrot. Whereby sequences were no longer limited to short cyclic movements. The purpose of the Praxinoscope was to improve upon the zoetrope so that the illusion of movement could be viewed by an audience at a larger scale.
The target audience, along with the stop motion animation devices, I think would become wider. This is because now the animation can be viewed on screens, the audience watching it would have grown. Firstly, because of the public awareness of the device and also because of the amount of people that were able to view stop motion animation at the same time increased.

The impact of this technique on the audience allowed the audience to view animated films without peering through a tiny slit in a cylinder, instead watching animations on a large screen, developing into cinematography.

Eadweard Muybridge, (1830-1904) was an photographer important for his work in studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. In the 1880's he produced images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not see as seperate movements.He experimented with a horse in motion whereby he lined up cameras against a horse race track whereby the shutter of each camera was triggered by a thread as the horse passed. The end result is shown in the picture on the left, whereby he illusion of movement has been created. He then copied the images onto a disc to be viewed in a machine he invented, called the zoopraxiscope. He invented this device in 1879, as what may be considered the first movie projector.The way it worked was that it projected images from rotating discs to give the impression of movement, The zoopraxiscope was one of the inspirations of the kinetoscope, the first commerical film system.
Kinetoscope - It was designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a viewer window at the top of the device. It introduced the basics of cinematic projection before video. It was invented in 1888 by Thomas Edison.
Edison's encounter with Eadweard Muybridge inspired him to develop the motion picture system. Eadweard proposed a collaboration to join their devices today, giving a combination device that would play sound and images at the same time. The collaboration was not untaken. However, Edison later filled for a patent announcing his plans to create a device that did such thing. Emile Reynauds projection device is often referred as a source for the development of the kinetoscope.
The image to the right shows how the kinetoscope was used. It shows someone looking in at the top of the device at the illusion of moving pictures inside.

The Lumiere brothers, Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948), were the earliest filmmakers in history. They began to create moving pictures in 1892 and they legally protected a number of processes leading up to their film camera. The brothers worked to overcome the limitations they saw in Edison's Kinetoscope. They noticed the camera of the device was too large and heavy and therefore, they would make their invention much smaller and more lightweight. Therefore, seen as an improvement.
This device was invented in 1895, combining camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinematographe.
They kept their invention very private and therefore on their first film screening, shown March 19th 1895, would have been the first time the audience has seen their invention. This would have been a big deal for both the lumiere brothers and the audience. Because of their continuous use of private screenings, the audience would have been very loyal to go and watch their films. Then the brothers began to open theatres, what are now known as cinemas.

George Pal (1908-1980) was an animator and film producer of the genre, science fiction. He made the Puppetoons series in the 1940s, which were animated puppet films using wooden puppets in a stop motion animation technique. A typical Puppetoon required 9,000 individually carved and machined wooden puppets. The technique of using puppets for stop motion animation was created by George Pal.
He is best remembered as the producer of several science fiction and fantasy films in the 1950s and 1960s. Also he was one of the references to the stage musical, 'The Rocky Horror Show'.

He was signed to Paramont Pictures in Holland where many other famous animators worked, such as Ray Harryhausen. Because of his genre of stop motion animation was, science fiction. This shows how stop motion has developed over the years, as nothing like this had been done before. He was famous for his puppets, whereby some had lots of heads. This may have been the influence for the modern film A Nightmare Before Christmas, whereby the model Jack Skellington has around four hundred heads, allowing the expression for lots of emotions.
For the series Puppetoons, I think the target audience would have been children. Especially looking at the television show's poster, shown on the right. The puppetoons are children, the colours and the fact the puppets are on a swing indicate it's aimed at children.