1835 (circa) - Joseph Plateau - Fantascope (morphing animation disc) Uploader: magical media museum
Original upload date: Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT
Archive date: Sun, 18 Dec 2022 03:43:58 GMT
While some early animation discs featured more sophisticated animations than others, this one is unique in its quality and it was far ahead of its time by creating a detailed morphing effect. The disc
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has 16 slits, but the artist found a way to animate many more stages of the transformation by putting the circa 60 faces into a spiraling range. The idea of morphing would stay an occasional rarity in animation and only became more common in cinema in the early 1990s when computer techniques made realistic morphing much easier.
Joseph Plateau invented the very first true animation device around December 1832, which would be dubbed ''phénakisticope'' by French publishers.
The original hand-painted disc of the shown animation is in the Joseph Plateau Collection of the Ghent University Science Museum, among several others that also have been published by Ackermann & Co in July 1833 in London as ''Phantasmascope'' and later as ''Fantascope''.
The disc in the video has sometimes been attributed to Belgian painter and lithographer Jean-Baptiste Madou and shows similarities to some of his works. He was a friend of Plateau and is known to have painted a figure on a fantascope-anorthoscope disc for Plateau. Other reasons for the attribution are unknown. Plateau was a skillful artist himself and it seems more likely he created the design personally, possibly partly inspired by Madou's work.
The published lithograph disc seems to be very rare. Apart from the Science Museum copy, it is also seen in German filmmaker Werner Nekes ''Media Magica'' compilations, but further copies have not been documented.
This re-animation of the disc's artwork does not replicate the actual viewing experience of a stroboscopic disc, but presents the work of the animator in a fashion that's optimized for the online video medium.
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