J. Stuart Blackton
James Stuart Blackton ( J. Stuart Blackton often; born January 5, 1875 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, † August 13 1941 in Hollywood, California ) was a British- American cartoonist, film producer, director and pioneer of animated film.
Life
Blackton was born in England and immigrated with his family to New York City when he was ten years old. From 1894 on, he came, with little success, together with Albert E. Smith and Ronald A. Reader on as a cartoonist and storyteller in vaudeville theaters. Blackton earned his living mainly as a reporter and illustrator for the New York Evening World newspaper. For a public presentation by Thomas Edison film projector Vita Scope in 1896, he was the inventor interview and make drawings. Edison showed him his film production facility Black Maria and produced for showing a short film, which he sold to Blackton same along with several other films.
The first own "trick films"
For demonstration before his vaudeville audience Blackton earned a Vita Scope apparatus. He founded in 1897 with Albert E. Smith, the Vitagraph Company of America to produce their own films. Quickly Vitagraph developed into a financially successful companies and Blackton could afford to try out spontaneous ideas. As already Georges Méliès in France, he began first with the stop motion experiment, in which stopped the camera, made a small change in the image and then the movie will continue. He combined for the first time in 1900 in The Enchanted Drawing this discovery with his own drawings. More movie trick elements that apply Blackton finished together with Smith, were transitions and multiple exposures.
The development of stop-motion technique was about 1905 during the filming of a series of stop-motion recordings. Blackton applied this principle to its ultimate consequences, by the illusion of movement is created by stringing together of individual images without actual movement was recorded with a constant number of frames per second. One of the oldest films based on this technique include Blacktons Humorous Phases of Funny Faces and The Haunted Hotel.
1908 Blackton created the first American screen adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and until 1912 produced numerous other Shakespeare adaptations under his direction and production. Other important works Blacktons were film adaptations of Uncle Tom 's Cabin and the Cartoon Little Nemo, together with Winsor McCay.
In 1915 he was co-founder of U.S. producers association AMPPA; 1917 Blackton left Vitagraph to become self-employed. In 1921 he traveled to England and made three costume dramas, but he returned in 1923 as a junior partner of Albert E. Smith returned to the United States. 1926 Smith sold the Vitagraph Company profitably to Warner Brothers. Blackton was up to the 1929 stock market crash, which destroyed his savings, good living from his share. The rest of his life he spent with the Demonstrate his old movies and worked for the Anglo American Film Company. He died in a car accident in Hollywood.