What would completely clinch it for me though, is if anyone can dig up an old enough reference to puppetry that describes the act of performing with puppets as animation. I found a book about puppetry from 1920 on Google's book search that uses the terms animated and animation. That's not old enough to predate cinema though.
There are a couple of problems with that notion.
1. You're also going to find old texts that refer to any type of movement as "animation." Does that mean everyone in the world is a professional animator, since all work involves movement? However, we've already been down that road. :rolleyes:
What you'd need to find are eras where people who used puppets were commonly called "animators" instead of "puppeteers." "Call in the animator to perform the Punch and Judy act!"
2. Calling puppetry "animation" makes it difficult to distinguish from "puppet animation," a form of stop-motion.
Even if it was once called "animation," it can't anymore in order to distinguish it from the "illusion of motion" industry. Sometimes the definitions of terms or the terms themselves need to change to make room for newer terms. For example, we now have "2D animation" or "traditional animation" to distinguish it from 3D animation. We now have "snail mail" or "postal mail" to distinguish it from e-mail. and so on
Before the artforms of animation came along, "animation" meant a very different thing. Before electronic computers came along, a computer was a person who calculated figures; but, if I were to refer to a kid scribbling out his math homework as a "computer," it would just be confusing.
1
First of all, giving a performance is a very different thing from 'moving'. It's an art. Animation the art, is distinct from animation in the biological sense which basically means life, lively, alive. Secondly, an animator can be an actor, can act through an animated character, but he is an animator first. Similarly, a puppeteer can animate his puppet, but he is a puppeteer first.
2
In my initial post, I said that it is best to avoid calling puppetry animation, since it just causes too much confusion. This is exactly what I had in mind. Before the age of computer animation, stop-motion was sometimes referred to as 3d animation. It's rarely called that anymore. But it's still considered animation(well, except by Sajdera).
At this point, I'd really like to see what your revised definition of animation looks like, Ant-eater: [i]the one that includes puppetry.
[/i]
Again, you have to be careful since "illusion of life" can refer to painting, sculpture, live-action movies, novels, puppets, comic books, dolls, paper flowers, and audio recordings.
"Liveliness" is similar to "motion," but can also refer to music and all other sound waves.
I've revised my own definition to "the creation of the illusion of motion using the consecutive display of images of static elements." This definition seems to include 2D, 3D, stop-motion, flipbooks, and video games while excluding live-action video and puppetry.
Thi reminds me of a module I once had at uni, it was on sound and sound theory. The Lecturer talked about what might be defined as music, is it to do with rythem and pleasing sound -but that might include waves on a beech, and some might not classify heavy metal as music rather then noise.
We were asked to come up with our own definitions of what music was, what we included and what we didn't include.
The main point of the exercise was that the term music was just subjective opinion, as long as we thought about it and could be able to give logical reasoning for why we defined it as we did.
Clearly from this thread, animation means different things to different people. As long as your happy with your own definition, no one is really right or wrong.
I think puppets are hard to define because they have their foot in many different camps that they could fit different art categories depending on how you looked at them.
With all due respect, Sajdera, these monster posts are just too much for me to adequately respond to on a regular basis.
The existing encyclopedic definitions of animation classify it accurately, with minor adjustments here and there.
I still see no error in my latest definition of animation.
A stop-motion or CGI puppet is never actually in motion, as a "muppet" is. Both of them mimic motion.
With 'go-motion', the stop-motion puppet was in motion in every exposure. It was moved by computer-controlled rods. This was the process developed by Phil Tippett on Dragonslayer.
It is also possible to have animatronic puppets that are driven by computer animation. In other words the animation is not just limited to being played out on any kind of screen, it can be played through a real world puppet.
A stop-motion or CGI puppet is never actually in motion, as a "muppet" is.
That's not actually 100% true. ILM, for instance, at the peak of their stop motion days had built armatures with motors on them that would vibrate and give additional motion blur while filming a stop motion scene.
But, I agree, in the definition that you are asking about, as pertaining to animated films, puppetry is not animation.
However, there are, as has been pointed out, a number of definitions to animation or the act of animating. One being, the act of animating something loosely meaning to bring life to something that previously did not have life. Therefore, puppetry as well as robotry, and bringing the dead back to life, would be considered animation, although again, not in the sense of the media classification of the word. So, not fitting one definition of it does not preclude it from fitting others.
And just to throw some further confusion into it, what will 3D animation be called when it does work in real time with devices that allow for animators to interact with those objects if the term animation depends on working in slower than real time conditions? Portions of the jet bike chase scene were animated in real time with a joystick input device at ILM (or at least they were playing with it at last I heard), the rendering was of course done later. But real time rendering is really not too far off either.
That's not actually 100% true. ILM, for instance, at the peak of their stop motion days had built armatures with motors on them that would vibrate and give additional motion blur while filming a stop motion scene.
Then that's not merely a stop-motion puppet. It's more of a start-motion puppet. :rolleyes: Stop-motion means the thing is stopped, not moving.
In order to include puppetry, you can define professional animation as "the practice of making things move so that they mimic real-life counterparts; or making things appear to move so that they mimic real-life movement," but all you're really doing is stuffing the definition of puppetry (real movement) into the definition of animation (fake movement).
In a broad sense, anything that moves is animation. As I type, I am animating my fingers and the keys beneath them.
In a narrow industrial sense, only illusions of movement are animation (like photographs of illustrations that are strung together on a reel). By this definition, puppetry and live-action are not animation, since they are things and people that are actually moving, rather than pretending to move. If a guy moving a puppet is animation, then a guy driving a car is animation.
Some will say, "Well, animation [in the industrial sense] is not just the illusion of movement. It is also the illusion of life, therefore puppetry is animation! Weeee!" which is romantic nonsense. By this definition, wind blowing tree branches is animation.
"Illusion of life" is fine as the broad definition, but it is not an accurate industrial definition.
There's a flaw in your logic Harvey, since a tree is a living organism and it's movement in a wind is part of it's biological presence in life, this can't be defined as animation.
This is worse than some of my philosophy classes! :D
The definition of "Animation", like many definitions, contains fuzzy areas that are hard to define. It's such a broad category that definitives are hard, if not impossible, to arrive at. "Is puppetry animation?" reminds me of the now ancient argument "Is rap music?" Some people argued that rap is merely "sound manipulation" to which some people responded "well, isn't playing a piano 'sound manipulation'"? The term "Animation", like "music", is so broad in scope as to defy any final definite definition. One could argue that a motion picture is animation - just look at the frames. Nonetheless, one of the reasons animation and music are so much fun is that they're extensible in this way. To narrow the definition would very likely remove some of the fun.
Here's how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (as in the Academy Awards or Oscars) defines animated film. Keep in mind this isn't a definition they invented over a weekend. They've been working on it for 75 years. :D
An animated film is created by using a frame-by-frame technique, and usually falls into one of the two general fields of animation: character or abstract. Some of the techniques of animating films include cel animation, computer animation, stop-motion, clay animation, pixilation, cutouts, pins, camera multiple pass imagery, kaleidoscopic effects and drawing on the film frame itself.
Forgive me if someone has already suggested this (it's quite a long thread and I only skimmed it) but I write a couple of blogs on puppetry and this question comes up a lot. My personal distinction between the two artforms is that animation creates the illusion of life/movement/insert-your-own-term-here by animating or moving an object frame by frame whereas in puppetry the same illusion is created by manipulating an object (or possibly an image) in real-time.
I think there's confusion because both "puppet" and "animation" can be used in a variety of different contexts. For example, stop-motion is sort of the bastard child of the two because it uses puppets or dolls but the illusion of life/movement is created on a frame by frame basis (because of that I've always maintained that stop motion is animation, not puppetry).
It's also worth noting that there is an enormous amount of crossover in the principles and techniques used in both artforms. I've heard of animation instructors who have their students study footage of Jim Henson performing Kermit the Frog, for example.
Hi... Recently I joined AWN in hopes of finding a freelance CGI animator to bring my vent puppet to animated 'life'...thought this was a good subject thread to do this ;) ...My puppet's copyrighted story is (I'm guessing) about 8 minutes long.
I am an individual with a website (under construction) and the link to it is: www.xnods-turf.com
Did any one manage to see the gigantic elephant and young girl puppets that were walking through london. Oh my god! It was amazing, i managed to capture it on BBC 4, it was called "The Elephant and the Sultan" Without a doubt the best piece of animation you will ever see.
There are a couple of problems with that notion.
1. You're also going to find old texts that refer to any type of movement as "animation." Does that mean everyone in the world is a professional animator, since all work involves movement? However, we've already been down that road. :rolleyes:
What you'd need to find are eras where people who used puppets were commonly called "animators" instead of "puppeteers." "Call in the animator to perform the Punch and Judy act!"
2. Calling puppetry "animation" makes it difficult to distinguish from "puppet animation," a form of stop-motion.
Even if it was once called "animation," it can't anymore in order to distinguish it from the "illusion of motion" industry. Sometimes the definitions of terms or the terms themselves need to change to make room for newer terms. For example, we now have "2D animation" or "traditional animation" to distinguish it from 3D animation. We now have "snail mail" or "postal mail" to distinguish it from e-mail. and so on
Before the artforms of animation came along, "animation" meant a very different thing. Before electronic computers came along, a computer was a person who calculated figures; but, if I were to refer to a kid scribbling out his math homework as a "computer," it would just be confusing.
1
First of all, giving a performance is a very different thing from 'moving'. It's an art. Animation the art, is distinct from animation in the biological sense which basically means life, lively, alive. Secondly, an animator can be an actor, can act through an animated character, but he is an animator first. Similarly, a puppeteer can animate his puppet, but he is a puppeteer first.
2
In my initial post, I said that it is best to avoid calling puppetry animation, since it just causes too much confusion. This is exactly what I had in mind. Before the age of computer animation, stop-motion was sometimes referred to as 3d animation. It's rarely called that anymore. But it's still considered animation(well, except by Sajdera).
At this point, I'd really like to see what your revised definition of animation looks like, Ant-eater: [i]the one that includes puppetry.
[/i]
Again, you have to be careful since "illusion of life" can refer to painting, sculpture, live-action movies, novels, puppets, comic books, dolls, paper flowers, and audio recordings.
"Liveliness" is similar to "motion," but can also refer to music and all other sound waves.
I've revised my own definition to "the creation of the illusion of motion using the consecutive display of images of static elements." This definition seems to include 2D, 3D, stop-motion, flipbooks, and video games while excluding live-action video and puppetry.
Thi reminds me of a module I once had at uni, it was on sound and sound theory. The Lecturer talked about what might be defined as music, is it to do with rythem and pleasing sound -but that might include waves on a beech, and some might not classify heavy metal as music rather then noise.
We were asked to come up with our own definitions of what music was, what we included and what we didn't include.
The main point of the exercise was that the term music was just subjective opinion, as long as we thought about it and could be able to give logical reasoning for why we defined it as we did.
Clearly from this thread, animation means different things to different people. As long as your happy with your own definition, no one is really right or wrong.
I think puppets are hard to define because they have their foot in many different camps that they could fit different art categories depending on how you looked at them.
.
With all due respect, Sajdera, these monster posts are just too much for me to adequately respond to on a regular basis.
The existing encyclopedic definitions of animation classify it accurately, with minor adjustments here and there.
I still see no error in my latest definition of animation.
By the way, is puppetry a form of animation? :o
.
With 'go-motion', the stop-motion puppet was in motion in every exposure. It was moved by computer-controlled rods. This was the process developed by Phil Tippett on Dragonslayer.
It is also possible to have animatronic puppets that are driven by computer animation. In other words the animation is not just limited to being played out on any kind of screen, it can be played through a real world puppet.
That's not actually 100% true. ILM, for instance, at the peak of their stop motion days had built armatures with motors on them that would vibrate and give additional motion blur while filming a stop motion scene.
But, I agree, in the definition that you are asking about, as pertaining to animated films, puppetry is not animation.
However, there are, as has been pointed out, a number of definitions to animation or the act of animating. One being, the act of animating something loosely meaning to bring life to something that previously did not have life. Therefore, puppetry as well as robotry, and bringing the dead back to life, would be considered animation, although again, not in the sense of the media classification of the word. So, not fitting one definition of it does not preclude it from fitting others.
And just to throw some further confusion into it, what will 3D animation be called when it does work in real time with devices that allow for animators to interact with those objects if the term animation depends on working in slower than real time conditions? Portions of the jet bike chase scene were animated in real time with a joystick input device at ILM (or at least they were playing with it at last I heard), the rendering was of course done later. But real time rendering is really not too far off either.
Producing solidily ok animation since 2001.
www.galaxy12.com
Now with more doodling!
www.galaxy12.com/latenight
Then that's not merely a stop-motion puppet. It's more of a start-motion puppet. :rolleyes: Stop-motion means the thing is stopped, not moving.
Actually, this debate happened within the industry last year acording to this article. (Scroll down a bit to eminovitz's post)
Order my book Jesus Needs Help on Amazon or download on Kindle.
You can also read the first 18 pages of my next book for free at this link: The Hap Hap Happy Happenstance of Fanny Punongtiti
:) But the artist had stopped working on it...
Semantics. This board is crazy with it these days.
What's wrong with this sentence:
Puppetry can be used in animations. :D
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Producing solidily ok animation since 2001.
www.galaxy12.com
Now with more doodling!
www.galaxy12.com/latenight
In order to include puppetry, you can define professional animation as "the practice of making things move so that they mimic real-life counterparts; or making things appear to move so that they mimic real-life movement," but all you're really doing is stuffing the definition of puppetry (real movement) into the definition of animation (fake movement).
There's a flaw in your logic Harvey, since a tree is a living organism and it's movement in a wind is part of it's biological presence in life, this can't be defined as animation.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
This is worse than some of my philosophy classes! :D
The definition of "Animation", like many definitions, contains fuzzy areas that are hard to define. It's such a broad category that definitives are hard, if not impossible, to arrive at. "Is puppetry animation?" reminds me of the now ancient argument "Is rap music?" Some people argued that rap is merely "sound manipulation" to which some people responded "well, isn't playing a piano 'sound manipulation'"? The term "Animation", like "music", is so broad in scope as to defy any final definite definition. One could argue that a motion picture is animation - just look at the frames. Nonetheless, one of the reasons animation and music are so much fun is that they're extensible in this way. To narrow the definition would very likely remove some of the fun.
Here's how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (as in the Academy Awards or Oscars) defines animated film. Keep in mind this isn't a definition they invented over a weekend. They've been working on it for 75 years. :D
So there ya go: from the "horse's mouth." :D
P.S. Anyone in L.A. might want to check this out on December 6th (Tuesday):
http://oscars.org/events/animation_invades_liveaction/index.html
Fair enough, but bear in mind that this is the same acadamy that finds Titanic to be one of the greatest movies ever, at least for the year 1997.
What we really need to know is, are puppies a form of animation: those cutesy wutesy snuggle-buns.
Yes. I find that any organism which falls under the classification ani-mals, is a form of animated life.
Forgive me if someone has already suggested this (it's quite a long thread and I only skimmed it) but I write a couple of blogs on puppetry and this question comes up a lot. My personal distinction between the two artforms is that animation creates the illusion of life/movement/insert-your-own-term-here by animating or moving an object frame by frame whereas in puppetry the same illusion is created by manipulating an object (or possibly an image) in real-time.
I think there's confusion because both "puppet" and "animation" can be used in a variety of different contexts. For example, stop-motion is sort of the bastard child of the two because it uses puppets or dolls but the illusion of life/movement is created on a frame by frame basis (because of that I've always maintained that stop motion is animation, not puppetry).
It's also worth noting that there is an enormous amount of crossover in the principles and techniques used in both artforms. I've heard of animation instructors who have their students study footage of Jim Henson performing Kermit the Frog, for example.
The PuppetVision Blog - All about puppetry in film, video and digital media
Machin-X - Where pixels meet puppetry
Hi... Recently I joined AWN in hopes of finding a freelance CGI animator to bring my vent puppet to animated 'life'...thought this was a good subject thread to do this ;) ...My puppet's copyrighted story is (I'm guessing) about 8 minutes long.
I am an individual with a website (under construction) and the link to it is: www.xnods-turf.com
Will appreciate your replies.
Krlina
I love puppys
Goo done Harv. Probably the first time I have everyt agreed with you, and possibly the only one, but good one this time.
"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon
Visit Myriad of Marionettes at
http://myriadofmarionettes.bravehost.com
for the following puppetry resources:
* U.S. Puppet Theaters
* Cool Puppetry Sites
* International Puppetry Sites
* Puppet Museums
* Puppet Dealers
* Puppet Making
* Stories For Puppetry
* Puppetry Schools
* Puppetry Scholarships
* Puppetry Workshops
* Puppetry Internships
* Puppetry Videos
* Puppeteers
* Puppetry Forums
* Indonesian Puppets
* Puppet Making Materials
* Puppetry Festivals
* Puppetry Organizations
* Puppet Clock Towers
* Operating Marionettes
* Christian Puppetry
Did any one manage to see the gigantic elephant and young girl puppets that were walking through london. Oh my god! It was amazing, i managed to capture it on BBC 4, it was called "The Elephant and the Sultan" Without a doubt the best piece of animation you will ever see.
Pages