History of Computer Animation :: Computers Animation Essays

History of Computer AnimationTo look at him, you would not think that Phil Tippett is the source of some of the most horrific and terrifying monsters ever witnessed by the human race. A quite normal-looking man of average height, with thinning grey hair, he has been at the forefront of movie verve for almost three decades. Phil Tippett is one of the greatest animators of all time, starting off with the age-old techniques of stop-motion and then moving on to the good computer generated wizardry of today. I chose to write roughly him because I greatly admire the work he had done in the industry and he has witnessed prime(prenominal) hand the technological advances that have occurred during the course of his career. I am also interested in him because as well as being involved in the field of cgi special effects (a career which I also wish to pursue), he was also closely involved in the ground-breaking (for the time) special effects and animation in the Star Wars Trilogy, which hap pens to be another love of mine.Born in 1951 in Illinois, Tippett has had a womb-to-tomb fascination with the art of animation. During his childhood he was transfixed by films such as King Kong and Jason and the Argonauts. He was fascinated by the surreal images in these movies and wanted to know how they were achieved. He went to his local library to investigate the subject and discovered the principles of stop motion. One of his favourite childhood hobbies was to make stop motion films with his fathers old movie camera. Tippett had been a lifelong devotee of stop motion as practiced by masters like Willis OBrien in King Kong (1933) and Ray Harryhausen in The 7th sail of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Stop motion was, and still is an intricate, painstaking art in which animators pose and photograph miniature figures frame by frame. He wasnt alone. Just about every top animator or effects man today has favorite Harryhausen figurines, such as the part-rhino, pa rt-centaur Cyclops, the serpent woman, and the two-headed Roc bird from Sinbad or, from Jason, the harpies that are a nonplus between gargoyles and pterodactyls, and the seven-headed Hydra and its spawn (ILM). In traditional stop motion (still practiced by Henry Selick in marvels like The Nightmare Before Christmas and jam and the Giant Peach), the camera records a series of subtly different poses rather than actual shifting, so the resulting flow of images is inherently surreal -- ultra-sharp and jerky.