Flipbook History

A flipbook is a simple form of animation consisting of a sequence of drawings, or photographs, that when "flipped" through by the viewer appear to create the illusion of motion.

This illusion is an optical phenomenon known as the persistence of vision. It is the result of the eye’s retina retaining an image for about 1/12 of a second. When successive images are shown at a faster rate, the eye will blend them together with the retina retaining one image as the second is superimposed over it. This creates the illusion of movement and is the fundamental principle involved in film and television recording and reproduction. Sound movies have been traditionally projected at 24 frames per second or faster making the illusion of movement very smooth.

Early photographic pioneers such as Edward Muybridge and Thomas Edison explored moving images using the flipbook concept. Still photographic images were mounted on stiff paper and when either flipped through by hand or later in a hand cranked arcade machine. The Kinetoscope and Mutoscope used the flipbook concept and became popular pre-movie entertainment media for many.

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Wallace and Gromit

1976 - Aardman Animations is set up by Peter Lord and David Sproxton and named after a cartoon character they created for the BBC series Vision On. Its headquarters are in Bristol.

1977 - Lord and Sproxton create a claymation character named Morph who soon becomes a big hit on children's show Take Hart.

1982 - Channel 4 commission a short series of conversation pieces.

1985 - Fresh from the National Film and Television School, a certain Nick Park joins the animation team at Aardman. He works on completing A Grand Day Out, Wallace and Gromit's first adventure in which the duo build a rocket and blast off to the moon in search of cheese, which he had begun as a student.

Dreamworks

In 1994, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen formed DreamWorks SKG. The company’s animation division partnered with Northern California-based PDI to produce CG animated movies, beginning with Antz in 1996. The two companies went on to create some of the most memorable, critically acclaimed and successful animated movies ever, including Shrek, which received the first-ever Academy Award® for Best Animated Feature Film, and Shrek 2 , which ended its theatrical run as the third highest-grossing domestic release of all time and the highest-grossing animated film of all time.
Following the acquisition of PDI in 2004, DreamWorks SKG spun off its animation division in November of that year into a separate public company (DWA). The new DreamWorks Animation SKG now produces two animated features per year.

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Pixar

Pixar has been making innovative movies such as Toy Story and The Incredibles for 20 years. They started off by making there first movie which was Return of the Jedi (1983).

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