Classical Animation

More than a century ago in 1896, an American cartoonist named James Stuart Blackton came up with an idea of making his pictures move.  James drew a series of pictures of the famous scientist Thomas Edison, which went played together, seemed to be in motion.  This was the birth of a famous art called Animation, which was further glorified by a person called Walt Disney.

The first pictures in motion ‘humorous phases of funny faces’ made by James Stuart Blackton when came to screen astonished people.  It made a series of short clips of animation in which there were faces of a man and woman, they began to interact, and the man blows his cigar and tips his hat.  This was released in 1906.  The first full length movies in this new art of stop motion (animation) was ‘The sinking of Lusitania’ released in 1917 following with Walt Disney’s ‘ Snow white and the Seven Dwarfs’ this was the first full length colored movie: this was made in the traditional method of ‘Cel -Animation’. ‘Cel –Animation’ was the ancestor of today’s classical animation a method used to make cartoon such as ‘Tom and Jerry’ and ‘The Popeye show’.

Today India having a population of more than hundred crores has a total number of twelve thousand animators approximately.   In which the share of Classical Animators is less than 25%.

Process

Classical Animation has more of analog application than digital, in this people have to draw each and every pose of an action, scan these drawing to the computer, color it digitally and play it using various software such as Flash, Animo or Toon Boom. 

Many people misunderstand 2D animation with graphic or web designing.  This is the result of various institute lacking expertise in 2D  Animation and greed of selling courses misguide people in exchange of business.  For a fresher who wants to step in to 2D animation needs to have an inbuilt configuration of extra ordinary drawing skills, acting and story telling. Which can be further polished to create professional Animators out of the budding talents.

Author: Tanmoy Kr. Jha
Director
Dynamix Studios