Animation

Theory and Practice of Animation

Concrete animation

Concrete animation' refers to work that focuses primarily on materiality and process. It has a precedence in contemporary art practice and it has one foot in the pre-cinema past and one foot on a path leading to a future of digital and manual animation.(Griffin, 2007).
This article talks about George Griffin analysis of issues inanimation to describe a category of animation practice emerging today and to compare its various tendencies with his experience making films and books trying to understand the paradox of vision. That what you see (a sequence of static images) is not what you get (movement). "I propose to link concrete to actual materials, objects not just images, and the processes which cause them to spring to life".Griffin.
As the text goes he talks about different types of precedent animation that could explain what he means with concrete animation to understand the paradox of vision.
- Block Print as book
The subject was shot in real time, then duplicated, repositioned, and sped up on an optical printer cut up frame by frame and assembled into a round book, then finally animated page by page against theoriginal sidewalk and buildings in form of a round book, a cycle without end.
- Step Print as installation
This form of interactivity allows the viewer to discover the performance rather than submitting to it.
- Animation as sculpture
Consisting in domeshaped ‘Floats’ of vastly different scale and hand-operated sequence devices. For example the art of puppetry from CGI.
- Flipbook as sculptureThe viewer becomes the engine of re-creation, inventing moments that may never have existed.

- Touching objects
The final precedent for concrete animation is Jan Sˇvankmajer, the master of animated transformation, who uses objects we thought we knew well, material we use in everyday, waking life, like food, furniture, toys, tools, with animated life.

Heads or tails

This article is partof a research on the first signs of cinématographie-attraction. It talks about how some optical toys can be used in animated picture. This optical toys where: the phenakisticope, the zoetrope, and the praxinoscope. The text explains how this toys
The phenakisticope: it had a dozen figures arranged in a circle around its edge. The intervals between the phenakisticope's figures were measured togive the impression of a gradual moving forward of the action, making it impossible to identify
which of these figures was the very first in the series. And only the author could decide if he want this to happen or not because he could create an interrumption in the serie.
The zoetrope: it had the same principle than the phenakisticope but in the zoetrope the images and the apparatus whereseparated and with its rectangular
shape, the zoetrope strip necessarily came with a head and a tail. Dulac and Gaudreault considered this tecnique as a similarity to editing but because the images contained thresholds, the action was not able to start again narratively.
The praxinoscope functioned the same way and to the same basic principles as the zoetrope (rotating drum, flexible strip, etc.)but with a prism of mirrors was perfect for a narrative animation introducing what we know as framed imaged.
When the Lumière brothers arrived a few years later, they establishing projection as the standard when exhibiting animated pictures.

The cinema of attractions

This article talks about the attractions of cinema. In other words, about the way to make cinema more interesting andexciting to get the attention of the spectator, presenting something exclusive and unique. 
The text talks about how this attractions now day is the world where the action takes place as much as with the action itself. For example the Hollywood cinema of the last decade, wandering through the imagined landscapes of Middle Earth or Hogwarts.
One of the examples of the article is the case of the...