KHODA

Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.

This is freaking incredible

An animated film made using 6000 paintings.

Instructions (in progress)

All that's here is 100% flash. Cells haven't been put in, yet. Use the play controls in the top right (but for the love of god don't press pause after playing, it breaks it). The last frame is another scene in progress.

EDIT: Soooooo I need to adjust the colors on my monitor; they're completely off. Imagine the same video but with a much darker pallet.

Michael's Cel Work-in-progress

Hi everyone. Here are the parts of my cel assignment I've managed to assemble. They are to go along with the poem "RSVP" by Terrance Hayes, in which a narrator pretends to be a white female fan in order to attract the attention of Michael Jackson.

First, my cels:



And the rest will be cut-outs like these:

SSSR Animations

Hello all,

I've been really getting into some music videos by the Norwegian/Japanese animation collective that calls themselves "SSSR." It's really hard to find out much information on them, other than the fact that they're contemporary and that they're making music videos. A little late to apply them to the music video assignment, but I think there's a lot of cool stuff they do with different media and techniques that's inspiring to us beginners now trying to mix our animation forms. Here are my two favorites:

Billy Bitzer's The Sculptor's Nightmare

Here's link to watch Billy Bitzer's The Sculptor's Nightmare (an early example of clay animation) on the Library of Congress' website. (American Memory, for anyone still working on animation history papers, is a great place to find examples of the old American-made films you might not be able to find otherwise!)

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/trmp.4144

Apples

The whole thing actually loops so I hacked together my own (ugly) basic player (pause/play/fullscreen <- be sure to do this last one). The YouTube link should be up and running by the time you read this.



the apple looks slightly less like a butt this time, too!

EDIT: looks like somewhere in the mix something went wrong. The youtube video is appearing, but it's covered in artifacts.

YUM Alex Irwin

Animation History Student Papers

Aaron Mayper's Animation Paper

Animation From 1798-1892

            Though today animation has a rather defined place in the art world, in its earlier days the lines between animation, scientific pursuit, and still painting and photography were less distinct.  From Etienne Gaspard Robertson’s Phantasmagoria to Eadweard Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs, animation has held a place in both the scientific and artistic realms, relying on continuous advances in technology as well as creative spirit to bring still pictures to life in new, exciting ways.  The story of early animation is one of art and technology being brought together by great minds, advancing both in the process.  The Magic Lantern, the Zoetrope, the Praxinoscope, and the Zoogyroscope act as excellent points of interest in the timeline of early animation. 

            The Magic Lantern, developed by Dutch scientist Christaen Huygens in the mid 1600s, was one of the earliest predecessors of today’s animation (Barber 73).  The ancestor of today’s slide projector, the Magic Lantern used glass slides painted with transparent oil paint and held together by bulky wood or metal frames to project images onto curtains and stages (Hayes; Barber 76).  Seven basic parts comprised the Magic Lantern.  The first was the Lamp, the light source of the projector, originally an oil lamp or candle.  This resulted in dim but sufficient light.  The second piece, the Reflector, was a mirror which redirected the light produced by the lamp into the third piece, the Condensing Lens.  The Condensing Lens focused the light onto the glass slide, much as a magnifying glass focuses the sun’s rays into a more localized point.  Finally, the Lens Tube magnified the light focused through the slide, making the image on the projected on the surface appear larger.  The remaining basic pieces included the Body, a metal casing, the Base, legs which could readjust the Magic Lantern’s height, and the Smokestack, which released smoke from the Lamp (Hayes).  The end result was a projected image, something unusual and exciting for its time.

            The Magic Lantern, while rather simple by today’s standards, was hugely popular, and was put to good use by Etienne Gaspard Robertson in his Magic Lantern show, Phantasmagoria.  Phantasmagoria consisted of Robertson using his Fantascope, an altered Magic Lantern, to project ghosts and demons in front of his audience’s eyes (Barber 74-75).  Using a powerful Argand oil lamp with a tubular wick allowed Robertson’s Fantascope to throw a brighter, more powerful projection onto the screen, meaning a larger audience could see it (Barber 75).  A rolling platform gave Robertson the ability to move his Fantascope closer or further away from the screen, making the images of ghosts and skeletons appear to advance and recede (Barber 75).  To the audience, the effect was a harrowing illusion of life beyond the grave. 

            Phantasmagoria premiered in 1798, directly after the French Revolution and in the middle of the Romantic period in France.  The public’s uncertainty with the state of their post-revolution country, as well as Romanticism’s focus on the strange and dramatic, made Phantasmagoria an instant hit (Barber 74-75).  Held in a dimly lit abandoned chapel, even the atmosphere and setting of Phantasmagoria conjured superstition in the audience’s mind (Barber 73).  By projecting the images from behind a screen, Robertson hid the image’s source, making the skeletons and ghosts appear to come to life of their own accord.  Sometimes Robertson would project onto smoke so that the figures appeared to float in mid-air (Barber 74-75).  Phantasmagoria was in many ways the first large-scale animated production, using projections, music, and even silhouetted dancers to create multi-media entertainment (Barber 77).

            Though Phantasmagoria was animation in the sense of paintings brought to life, the movement of the figures was basic and based more on moving a stationary image across the stage than having the figure itself move.  This limitation in animation began to disappear in 1825 with Michael Faraday’s discovery of the Persistence of Vision principle (Hayes).

            The Persistence of Vision principle states that the eye will retain an image for 1/20^th of a second after the image is gone, and led to a wealth of early animation toys (Hayes).  Using this principle, John Ayrton Paris created the Thaumatrope, a disk of paper with different images on either side.  Two strings attached to the disk were wound, and when the disk was spun the images on either side of the disk merged in the viewer’s eye into a single picture (Hayes).  The average Thaumatrope  showed a bird on one side and a cage on the other, or a tree with bare limbs on one side and its leaves on the opposite (Hayes).  It was this merging of two separate images into one which would lead to animation as we know it today.

            William Horner created the Zoetrope in 1834, also based on the Persistence of Vision principle (Hayes).  The Zoetrope was a hollow metal drum with sequential images placed around the inside edge and viewing slots above each image.  When a viewer spun the device and looked through the slots the images on the opposite side of the drum would merge into a continuous and repeating moving picture (Hayes).   

            In 1877, Charles Reynaud created the Praxinoscope, based largely on the Zoetrope (Hayes).  The difference between the two was that the Praxinoscope had upright mirrors inside the drum, which allowed for a clearer, brighter image than the Zoetrope produced (Myrent 193).  Reynaud’s invention became a huge success, and the public’s demand for new animations was enormous (Myrent 193).  Between 1877 and 1879 Reynaud painted thirty different filmstrips for the Praxinoscope, selling them in sets of ten each (Myrent 193).  In 1879 Reynaud created the “Praxinoscope Theatre,” a box with a hinged top and the Praxinoscope housed within, simulating a staged performance (Myrent 193).  But even with the many filmstrips Reynaud produced viewers grew weary of watching short, repetitive loops of animation.  In response Reynaud began to work on what would eventually become the Theatre Optique (Myrent 193).

            In the mid 1880s Reynaud developed a longer stretch of film that would be run in front of a magic lantern, creating the first projected animation (Myrent 194).  Reynaud did this by painting transparent frames strung together by a leather belt (Hayes).  When run in front of the Magic Lantern the belt of frames acted as an early predecessor of today’s film reel, resulting in animated films of up to fifteen minutes in length (Myrent 195).  The Theatre Optique gave its first show on October 28, 1892, marking a new age in animation in which lengthy stories could be told (Myrent 195).  The first show consisted of three segments of about seven hundred frames each with a separate slide and projector for the continuous background (Myrent 194-195).  Reynaud, then, was one of the early heralds of animation as a storytelling art form, combining Robertson’s flair for entertaining large audiences with Horner’s moving image.

            During Reynaud’s history-making career, however, advances in the science and art of photography were made, as well.  In the 1870s, Governor of California Leland Stanford hired nature photographer Eadweard Muybridge to find out whether all of a horse’s legs leave the ground simultaneously when it runs (Dougan 280).  After five years Muybridge finally came upon a camera design that had a fast enough shutter speed and film with a short enough exposure time to clearly record a horse in motion.  Muybridge set up twelve instantaneous-exposure cameras in a row along a horse track and took pictures as the horse raced past (Dougan 280).  When the photos were developed they revealed that all of a horse’s legs do leave the ground simultaneously, but more importantly it sparked new insight into the way movement was perceived, paving the way for more accurate animation, as well as the motion picture.

            On May 4, 1880 in San Francisco, Muybridge used the Zoogyroscope (later to be renamed the Zoopraxinoscope) to project the first motion picture (Bell 125).  The Zoogyroscope did not, however, use film reels as we do today.  Instead, it featured sequential transparent photos on a rotating glass disk through which light was projected (Bell 125).  While it was not an animation in the sense of being drawn, it was in the sense that it created a compelling illusion of movement, one that would lead to more complex films and animations in the future.

            From Robertson’s Phantasmagoria to Reynaud’s Theatre Optique to Muybridge’s instantaneous-exposure cameras, the late 18^th to early 19^th century was a stunningly vibrant and exciting time for animation and the illusion of moving pictures.  Predicting the huge popularity of animated film and television today, these inventors merged scientific understanding of movement with artistic flair and storytelling to create a compelling art form which has lasted and continued to evolve to this day.

               

A Magic Lantern

(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Magic_Lantern.jpg)

An illustration of Reynaud's Theatre Optique.

(http://www.victorian-cinema.net/theatreoptique.jpg)

Eadweard Muybridge's instantaneous-exposure photographs 

of a racing horse.

(http://www.gregeans.com/greenvillesky/images/Muybridge_race_horse_gallop.jpg)

             

Works Cited

 

Barber, X. Theodore. "Phantasmogorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Ghost Show in

Nineteenth-Century America." Film History 3.2 (1989): 73-86. JSTOR. Web. 18 Oct. 2009. .

 

Bell, Geoffrey. "The First Picture Show." California Historical Quarterly 54.2 (1975):

125-38. JSTOR. Web. 18 Oct. 2009. .

 

Dougan, Robert O. "Review: [untitled]." The Pennsylvania magazine of History and

Biography 97.2 (1973): 279-81. JSTOR. Web. 18 Oct. 2009.

.

 

Eastman House. "Animation--Kit Overview/Eastmanhouse Education." George Eastman

House International Museum of Photography and Film. 2009. Web. 18 Oct. 2009. .

 

Hayes, Laura, and John H. Wileman.  "Exhibit of Optical Toys." Exhibit of Optical Toys.

Web. 18 Oct. 2009.

 

Lawrence, Amy. "Counterfeit Motion: The Animated Films of Eadweard Muybridge."

Film Quarterly 57.2 (2003-2004): 15-25. JSTOR. Web. 18 Oct. 2009. .

 

Myrent, Glenn. "Emile Reynaud: First Motion Picture Cartoonist." Film History 3.3

(1989): 191-202. JSTOR. Web. 18 Oct. 2009. .

Walters, Jonathan (March 2002). Earlycinema.com—Technology.

http://www.earlycinema.com/technology/index.html. 10/18/09.

 

Student Cinema History Papers

Micah Levin
Robin Starbuck
September 13, 2009

The Importance of Winsor McCay’s
Animation and Animated Film

“I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures that will love and live in life-like manner and be far more interesting and wonderful than pictures you now see on canvas. I think if Michelangelo was alive today he would immediately see the wonders… The artist can make his scenes and characters live instead of stand still on canvas in art museums.”(Pg 1, Ledbetter-Winsor McCay 1927)
Imagine this: a little boy goes to sleep after eating too much rarebit and finds himself exposed to a dreamlike scenario that revolutionized the American industry of cartoons and pioneered a completely new take on how we viewed the Sunday Funnies. Winsor McCay was an American artist, journalist and creator of such memorable comic classics like Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, Little Nemo in Slumberland and Little Sammy Sneeze. Aside from working heavily from 1905-1913 for the New York Herald(Pg 1, Ledbetter), McCay was also an key frame animator. Remembering that the difference between an animator and a cartoonist is that use of real-time movement for one medium, and still art for another, Winsor McCay was seen as a visionary for his time, when stop-motion was relatively new to the States in the early 20th century.

The mutoscope was the first ever device built specifically for the purpose of utilizing multiple frames of pictures taken over a short span of time (1-2 minutes). By applying the concepts of the mutoscope developed in America in 1894(based off the British invention of the flipbook), the first silent shorts were produced(non-animated) for viewing entertainment. At this time of the invention of the mutoscope, Winsor McCay was employed as a freelance journalist and political cartoonist for the Cincinnati Inquirer, and hadn’t found cartooning at that time, dabbling in experimental sketches on newspaper and eventually making his first major cartoon series, Tales of the Jungle Imps in 1903 (Pg 2, Ledbetter).
After his initial success with cartooning in the New York Herald, being among the first men to use color in their Sunday comics, Winsor McCay became interested in certain “trick films” by early film directors such as Stuart Blackton and French animator Emile Cohl. Their use of simple animation mixed with real-life acting resulted in a time for Winsor McCay where most of his efforts were concentrated on making an animated feature short for himself. Released September 15, 1914(Pg 1, Ledbetter), Gertie the Dinosaur was released to the general public as one of the first animated films that took advantage of the “thousands-of-frames-per-second” technique which must have taken a lot of effort and patience, being of the first animated shorts of its time. Clocking in at around 12 minutes and only opening up in two theaters in America, Winsor McCay single handedly brought about a new meaning for animated feature, introducing his own unique artistic talents and writing to the production in a resulting performance that would later be deemed the sixth most important animated feature of all time by the National Film Registry in 1994.

After watching the film in class, I was completely blown away by the detail and complexity of the movie. Not only were such crucial elements of nature implemented in the film, such as shadows, blowing of the wind and anatomically correct dinosaur features, but the short also proved to the film industry at the time that animation was not just a gimmick, but a full fledged movement, and one that would later influence mid-twentieth century animators such as Walt Disney and Max Fleischer. I remember thinking to myself after viewing the cartoon, what was the importance of this film? What was so special about a 12 minute little short without any dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, I personally enjoyed the piece, but was initially hesitant to label it as an automatic classic in my book; classics in my mind were Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Koko the Clown. And although these three animated creations were similar in their classical stylings of big eyed, long limbed and cutesy cut-out look, they are separated by their times. Gertie the Dinosaur was important because of the time in which it was produced. Imagine the circumstances involved in making a 12 minutes short, only half of which was animated, and the funds that must have been used to make it! Apparently the project was partially self funded by Winsor McCay himself(Pg 2, Ledbetter).
For the time it was made, Gertie was revolutionary in her actions. Standing on two legs and dancing, drinking all the water in a lake and tossing a woolly mammoth far back into the distance, all on top of being within the confines of a fully drawn environment, McCay took the best of his talents and literally brought to life an extinct dinosaur. Another important aspect of Gertie the Dinosaur, was that it was not a linear story like his newspaper comics. Gertie was more of a vaudevillian act of sorts then a simple twelve panel laugh-in-a-half. For instance, Little Nemo in Slumberland, was a cartoon about a little boy and his adventures in Slumberland, a fictional place where up is down and where the princess only wants to be playmates with Nemo whilst trying to avoid the crude and childish character “Flip.” These stories every Sunday would chronicle the continuing adventures of Nemo as he tried desperately not to wake up and spoil the fun of Slumberland. These stories were unique in the sense that they drew interest from the journey, not so much the end of the adventure. Gertie the Dinosaur could be watched over and over because of the authentic use of the character Gertie. Get a dinosaur to dance and that was all you needed to get people excited, because how else would one get to see a dancing dinosaur in their lifetime? Little Sammy Sneeze, another interesting comic serialized in 1904-06, more closely resembled Gertie in the sense that it was not about a continuing adventure or enchanted setting, but merely the amusing fixture on a particular action, an action which happened to be about a little boy’s tremendous sneeze and what it did to those around him!(Pg 3, Ledbetter)
By drawing all those frames for Gertie the Dinosaur McCay did a wonderful thing, he defined what it was to be an animator and at the same time, raised the bar for other artists who aspired to enter the field.

The reason I chose to cover the importance of Winsor McCay’s film and it’s background was due to the fact that I had always had a strong interest in Little Nemo in Slumberland. A lot the reason for my strong interest in his art style was the realism mixed with imaginative abstraction. Everything about Little Nemo, I felt, translated perfectly into Gertie, and his art style still remained almost untouched when crossing the boundaries of still cartoons to moving pictures. Looking at the cartoons now in my lap, and looking back on Gertie the Dinosaur, it becomes much easier to appreciate the importance of McCay’s creation. Every frame must be relatively equal in proportion and shape, every detail must be replicated thousands of times, and if one mistake is made, it would have been almost impossible to go back and find where the splotch or hiccup was in the collection. Chuck Jones, the animator for Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes once said this much about Winsor McCay’s contribution to animation:
“It is as thought the first creature to emerge from the primeval slime was Albert Einstein; and the second was an amoeba, because after McCay's animation, it took his followers nearly twenty years to find out how he did it.” He was a true pioneer and a man with dreams truly much bigger then life. To say Winsor McCay contributed to art would be a gross understatement; Winsor McCay defined what it was to make art when it came to the medium of abstract animation, and if Gertie the Dinosaur wasn’t enough to convince you otherwise, then perhaps you are just having a nightmare of a rarebit fiend.






Bibliography/ References Page
1. Ledbetter, Cammie. Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. New York: Checker, 2004

2. Smith, Samuel, “About the Mutoscope” Mutoscope Manufacturers- History 2000. U.K. . http://mutoscope-manufacturers.co.uk/history/index.asp?adapt

3. Pearson, David, “BIOGRAPH The oldest movie company in America History” History. 2009. http://www.biographcompany.com/history_home.html

4. http://www.listsofbests.com/list/42337

5. http://springlakemccay.blogspot.com/2007/11/chuck-jones-quote.html

Micah's Egg Hand Drawn Animation Color Corrected

Animation History Student Papers

Billy Bitzer’s 1908 Film The Sculptor’s Nightmare
Lauren Schott

Billy Bitzer began his career in filmmaking in 1894, when he began working for The Magic Introduction Company. This was a period before the movie theatre was in popular use, and the peep-show was the only way to see the thirteen second films. Billy Bitzer, also known as G.W. Bitzer, was in film in its very earliest stages, and indeed, film may never have developed as it has were it not for his influential career.


Courtesy of Billy Bitzer - His Story: Billy Bitzer with Camera 1898

Billy Bitzer is known popularly as a cameraman, although titles such as this were not as strictly applied as they are at present. Reportedly, Bitzer did a little of everything on a set, with exception to acting. In his autobiography, Bitzer admits, “In those days, lots of people acted in films who had other jobs around the studio. Don’t laugh, but I was too nervous and full of stage fright before a camera. I never would take a chance on acting.” This limitation did not stop him, however. Bitzer, more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, pioneered effects in lighting and camerawork essential to the fundamentals of modern day film.


Courtesy of Billy Bitzer - His Story: Billy Bitzer Reassembling Camera for the MoMA 1940

The bulk of Bitzer’s early work was released under the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. Here he created such films as Little Egypt, The Birth of the Pearl (both early pornographic films) and Two Brothers (a Mexican romance). In this period he also met one of the strongest influences in his career in 1908, D.W. Griffith. The two became fast friends after Griffith made the jump from acting (where he, in Bitzer’s opinion, floundered) to directing (where Bitzer admired his genius) successfully; Bitzer and Griffith trusted each other to the extent that, “In all the years we worked together, even after I finally left Biograph with Mr. Griffith, there was never a written contract, only a handshake and our trust in each other.”
The friendship and collaboration between the two was fortuitous for both film in general and the Biograph Company itself (as well as subsequent companies for whom they worked). Griffith’s artistic visions and Bitzer’s unceasing ability to bring these visions to fruition turned popular and profitable. Griffith, unsatisfied with mediocrity in his films, refused to settle the same tricks other filmmakers and companies were pulling, and so, despite constant discouraging from the penny pinching board of Biograph, Bitzer, “encouraged by Mr. Griffith, …went ahead with…experiments anyway.”
To simply list some of these innovations, one might name the fuzzy-cornered cutoffs on prints; wash-drawing; certain shields for lenses, and certain lenses themselves; and cutting within a scene; not to mention his hand in creating a 1915 feature-length film entitled The Birth of a Nation, which grossed $20,000,000 in its first few years of showing, skyrocketing the world of lengthy movies into popularity. (Although Billy Bitzer is often attributed with inventing the close-up as well, he emphasizes in his autobiography that Edison’s Frank Ott’s Sneeze from 1894 is, in fact, an earlier example. )
Many of these innovations and creations were the result of necessity in Bitzer’s mind. For example, noticing the way light glanced off white pebbles to highlight a talking couple’s faces, Bitzer applied this to film and created a reverse-lighting effect. Where he had been unhappy with, “…the ugly shadows that usually made hollow masks of faces on the screen,” Bitzer now had a way of eradicating that effect. This new concept in turn created a, “…misty rainbow effect,” leading him to invent a shade for the camera lens which then led to the slightly fuzzy-edged cutoff on prints. Bitzer became known as a master of lighting; film was golden in the hands of Billy Bitzer, and audiences cued around the block to see the films in which his innovations resided.
Interestingly, one leap Bitzer made into the world of film is rarely discussed. This, of course, would be his brief foray into the world of animation with his 1908 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company film The Sculptor’s Nightmare.
The film begins with a group of gentleman arguing around a table. The argument is heated and leads the audience to understand that the group is fighting over which political figure should be sculpted to replace the bust behind them. No conclusion is drawn within this argument, and the group of gentlemen tussles and leave the room.
They rejoin in the studio of a sculptor and each faction scrambles to bribe him into sculpting their personal choices (all the while the model that he had been sculpting is hiding behind a screen, leading to a comical exchange between herself and a gentleman who notices her). Each group having bribed the sculptor, they leave him to work; he instead celebrates his good fortune with his model, only to discover and momentarily lament the fact that the gentlemen have practically destroyed his studio in their enthusiasm.


Courtesy of the Library of Congress: Screen Captures from The Sculptor's Nightmare

The sculptor and his model leave with their bribes and eat a meal, in which the sculptor becomes inebriated. He causes an uproar after having offended a woman who came to talk with the model, and the restaurant is thrown into chaos as the customers subdue the sculptor, the police arrive and the sculptor is taken away to jail.
Shouting after his jailors, the sculptor finally gives up and stumbles drunkenly to his bed, where he falls asleep. While his body remains prone on his bed, his dreams act themselves out on the foreground; first one pedestal, then a second, then a third appear. Through stop film animation, lumps of clay assemble themselves atop the pedestals and sculpt themselves into Democrat William Jennings Bryan, Republican Charles W. Fairbanks and William Howard Taft.
The sculptor stands and marvels at them (as does the audience, as one of the busts smokes his pipe), and they suddenly disappear. The sculptor returns to his bed and another pedestal appears. Clay this time forms itself into a small bear, which animates itself and waves, looking about. The bear dissolves and its clay forms itself this time into Theodore Roosevelt. The sculptor stands and marvels at the bust, which then disappears. The sculptor returns to his bed, shaking his drunken head.
Here we see some of the first steps into the world of animation in filmmaking. While some other films at the time were being made with clay animation (for example, Edison’s A Sculptor’s Welsh Rarebit Nightmare of 1908 ), they have been swallowed into obscurity. Possibly due in part to Billy Bitzer’s overall success in the world of innovative filmmaking, and otherwise due to its charm, The Sculptor’s Nightmare has survived and is available for viewing even today.
In Bitzer’s film, we are able to see the political machinations that drove not only the country, but his personal interests throughout much of his filmmaking. One of Bitzer’s earliest films was, in fact, the first presidential film to be made: that of William McKinley receiving notification of his nomination to the presidency. In this later political work of The Sculptor’s Nightmare, we see the theme which drove both Bitzer and Griffith to work in film—a purpose to the art (a theme which resurfaces yet again in their collaborative work The Birth of a Nation).
Outside of this political theme, however, the work presents the dynamic, aesthetically pleasing visuals for which Bitzer was known. There is almost constantly some small movement which draws the eye across the screen in some way or another, and in no place is this truer than in the portions of clay animation.
The statues form themselves in thick, fluid motions, building up and reforming slowly but progressively until finally the true bust surfaces. The four busts move lips and cheeks in speech, and, as mentioned earlier, one bust truly jumps into reality as he smokes his pipe. Perhaps most delightful of all is Theodore Roosevelt’s symbol, the little bear. It appeals to the audience in its motions, more complex than those of the heads as it moves nearly the entirety of its body. The cub charms in its appearance and enchants in its liveliness.
While Bitzer never returned to clay animation in any dedicated sort of way, the success of the effect is evident even today, as the art of clay animation is still prolific. Billy Bitzer, the man well known as a pioneer in the world of light and filming, took some of the first steps into that potential world of clay animation within this short picture and proved its potential.

Bitzer, G.W. Billy Bitzer: His Story. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, Ltd., 1973. Print. xi.
ibid, 82.
ibid, 247.
ibid, 67.
ibid, 85.
ibid, 10
ibid, 84.
ibid, 84.
The Sculptor's Nightmare / American Mutoscope and Biograph Company; Director, Wallace McCutcheon; Camera, G.W. Bitzer. 1908. 18 Sept 2009. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/trmp.4144.>
Lemay, Brian. "History of Animation 1900-1910." The Animated Cartoon Factory. 30 Jul 2009. Web. 18 Sept 2009. .
The Sculptor’s Nightmare.
Bitzer, G.W., 11.
ibid, 106.