Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay was an american animator that became one of the pioneers in animation history, this was because of his new approach to it and he started to develop characters. He thought of his idea after being inspired by his son's flipbooks and this gave him the idea of executing this on different film frames. McCay also came up with the idea of repeated cycles of animation loops to cut down the time it took to create an animation, which is still used today. As McCay developed some very important techniques such as key framing, he really helped to move animation forward as it allowed for animators to plan easier and cut corners in some places. Without his development of the practice and famous Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), animation may not have developed so quickly after this point. What I particularly like about Winsor McCay is that his animations were made for the masses instead of being very out there and strange, this meant that more people started to like the idea and thought it was quite entertaining. What I have noticed about many of the pioneers of animation in history is that a lot start out as cartoonists and working for newspapers and I think this is where the ideas developed to creating such creative characters.