Animating with Stop Motion Pro

Chapter 4

Animate Voices

J. Stuart Blackton (1875-1941) was an American film pioneer who is often cited as the father of the drawn animation film. He founded the Vitagraph Company and, building on the work of Méliès, created a combination stop motion and drawn animation film titled The Enchanted Drawing, made around 1900. In this film, Blackton sketched on a blackboard a character smoking a cigar. Blackton then plucks the cigar off the board, transforming it into a real cigar as the drawn face reacts. From here, Blackton went on to direct Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906. Needless to say, this frame-to-frame drawn animation was quite time consuming, perhaps even more so than puppet animation in that the characters needed to be redrawn ...