The History of Motion Graphics and Definition of Terms

The History of Motion Graphics: From Avante-Garde To Industry in the United States
author: Michael Betancourt

page 11

"Contemporary 'motion graphics' first emerged from experiments with kinetic abstraction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nexus of abstract film's synchronized geometries with live action outside the framework of narrative, the conventions of sychronized sound and image, and finally the development of kinetic typography shows that motion graphics are more than animated graphic designs."

Some of the first motion graphics consisted of abstract films created in 1909 by Futurist painters, these experiments were unfortunately lost, however they did not simply appear they were established from a larger context that produced abstract art generally. The core of the development of motion graphics was and is synaesthesia which is a term used to describe the visualisation of music and is most obviously demonstrarted in commercials, animated logos, and title sequences. "The aesthetic principles that organize and structure the relationship of image to soundtrack, originates with the earliest abstract films, and before them, with color music."

Page 12

"Prior to the 1980s, motion graphics were almost entirely limited to media made by artists. 'Synaesthesia,' as a term for connections between sound and image, is used in both psychology and art history:

   In psychology, where it identifies a specific perceptual phenomena where one sense simultaneously produces two sensations, most famous as seeing colors when one hears sound.

   In art criticism and art history, to define art works where (most often) visual forms are produced as an analogue to music: in synaesthetic abstraction, these connections are explicitly made by the artists in their work."

Page 40

The origins of motion graphics lie within abstract film which provided a foundation for the conventions of how images should interact with sound. By tracing developments of abstract motion pictures during the twentieth century three distinct phases can be identified that mark its place as a genre of animation. The first phase starts with the creation of motion pictures and "ends with Art in Cinema exhibitions organized by Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1946." This marked the beginning of the second phase characterised by the development and consolidation of organisations that are dedicated to presenting films as an art form, unrelated to Hollywood and commercial cinema. The third phase began in the 1970s with a historical focus, "the abstract film and video were institutionalized by the art world that selected canons of major artists in avant-garde film generally; abstraction based on synaesthetic concerns was relegated to a minor position within this history."

Page 79-82

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) is one of the artists most closely associated with motion graphic production, often taking a very direct approach of synchronizing note to form. Fischinger established a connection between sound and abstraction-in-motion after most of a decade spent experimenting with "automating and reducing the labor required to produce animations." One of the pieces that best demonstrates Fischinger's ability to create engaging and communicative pieces with basic shapes and the synchronization of note to form is An Optical Poem (1938), to create this complex series of shapes flying through space he constructed a scaffold and manipulated the shapes with wire. The piece is shown below.

Page 90

Len Lye and a collaborator Laura Riding wrote a paper "Film-making" in 1935 in which "Lye proposes a tentative framework to think about motion as form:

1. Form in movement-compositions is the total effect of accidental design created by cross-movements, perspective movements, timing, accenting - all the varieties of action whether in natural juxtaposition or not.

2. There is a possibility of isolating a movement-consciousness by reverting to such reflex-spontaneities as hereditary instincts are composed of. It might even be said, perhaps, that this gift of physical immediacy, which is the gift of a consciousness of movement, is discoverable through the brain in blood, organs, tissues, nerves: that a physical time-sense can be physiologically cultivated.

3. Consciousness of movement may be purely receptive, as a passive sensing of the vibration-pattern: so we might speak of a sense of movement just as we speak of a sense of telepathy, meaning a receptive intuition of other people's thoughts, or a theosophic sense, meaning a receptive intuition of things unknown."

Defining terms

Experimental Animation

Is typically non character based and does not include narrative but instead creates meaning through visuals and the movement of them, to truly experiment though requires the animator explores the unknown to attempt to create something that has not been done before. Experimental animation also often uses synaethesia in order to give music form.

Non-Objective Animation

Non-objective animation differs from traditional animation because it does not attempt to be representational of life and is more expressive creating forms and the movement associated with them that are purely imaginative.

“Non-objective animation is without a doubt the purest and most difficult form of animation. Anyone can learn to 'muybridge' the illusion of representational life, but inventing interesting forms, shapes and colors, creating new, imaginative and expressive motions — 'the absolute creation: the true creation,' (1) as Fischinger termed it — requires the highest mental and spiritual faculties, as well as the most sensitive talents of hand.” William Moritz 1988