DRAWING IN TIME

71CAliiE t SO 5.M71

DRAWING IN TIME

Why animate? Everyone knows its a lot of hard work doing all those drawings and positions.

So what's the hook? Why do it

Answer: Our work is taking place in time. We've taken our 'stills' and leapt into another

dimension.

Drawings that walk: seeing a series of images we've made spring to life and start walking

around is already fascinating.

Drawings that walk and talk: seeing a series of our drawings talking is a very startling expe‑

rience.

Drawings that walk and talk and think: seeing a series of images we've done actually go

through a thinking process — and appear to be thinking — is the real aphrodisiac. Plus creating

something that is unique, which has never been done before is endlessly fascinating.

We've always been trying to make the pictures move, the idea of animation is aeons older than

the movies or television. Here's a quick history:Over 35,000 years ago, we were painting animals on cave walls, sometimes drawing four pairs

of legs to show motion.

Iii 1600 BC the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II built a temple to the goddess Isis which had 110

columns. Ingeniously, each column had a painted figure of the goddess in a progressively

changed position. To horsemen or charioteers riding past Isis appeared to move!

The Ancient Greeks sometimes decorated pots with figures in successive stages of action.

Spinning the pot would create a sense of motion.

As far as we know, the first attempt to project drawings onto a wall was made in 1640 by

Athonasius Kircher with his 'Magic Lantern'.

Kircher drew each figure on separate pieces of glass which he placed in his apparatus and pro‑

jected on a wall. Then he moved the glass with strings, from above. One of these showed a

sleeping man's head and a mouse. The man opened and dosed his mouth and when his mouth

was open the mouse ran in.

Although photography was discovered as early as the 130s, most new devices for creating an

illusion of movement were made using drawings, not photos.

In 1824 Peter Mark Roget discovered or rediscovered, since it was known in classical times)

the vital principle, 'the persistence of vision'. This principle rests on the fact that our eyes

temporarily retain the image of anything they've just seen. If this wasn't so, we would never

get the illusion of an unbroken connection in a series of images, and neither movies nor ani‑

mation would be possible. Many people don't realise that movies don't actually move, and that

they are still images that appear to move when they are projected in a series.