"In your own words, describe how animation has changed from traditional techniques to those used today."
200 words plus.
Traditional methods of animation started as far back as the 19th century. In the 1800's The Magic Lantern was paraded around the United Kingdom of Great Britain by a number of projectionists who wanted to showcase their work around the towns and villages. One example of a popular work with children is The Rat Swallower. Here is an example on Youtube of a production using this method: click
The most common method of animation that has been used in modern times is the flip book. This is a fun method that anyone can learn to do very quickly. First introduced in 1868, it was regarded as a breakthrough within the animation scene. In today's culture, it is merely based as a novelty for children.
Stop Motion works in the same way as the flip book, only differing instead of hand draw images and flicking the pages, it is rather a combination of a number of images that go hand-in-hand with one another.
The most advanced piece of animation, which is growing stronger and stronger as time goes by, is Computer Generated Imagery(a.k.a. CGI.) CGI was created by graduated students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. 1973 was the year it was first seen, in feature film Westworld and then 3 years later in Futureworld. The major breakthrough for CGI was it's use in George Lucas' massive hit Star Wars, which used it for generating the Death Star and targeting computers on ships. Several films failed to use CGI efficiently until 1993 revived the promise it first showed, with Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. 2 years later Disney's Pixar made the first full length film fully using CGI. Toy Story became a great success and since then it has gone from strength-to-strength with 2009's Avatar claiming enormous critical acclaim, and is tipped for Oscar succes, with heavy investment on CGI.
