Before There Were Keyframes

[Rasputin]

As I watched the goat leap gracelessly into the air, I thought to myself, “What an amateurish attempt at animation!” Where’s the anticipation, when the goat rears back before its jump? Where’s the squash and stretch? Where’s the follow through? Why was this done at such a low frame rate?

But then again, what more can you expect from an animation that was created over five thousand years ago?

Yes, you heard me correctly! The animation of the leaping goat was found on a bowl in an ancient burial site in Iran, and it dates back about 5,200 years. Around the circumference of the bowl is a series of images, and it wasn’t until recently that researchers realized that these images, when thrown together in the fashion of a flipbook, could be made into an animation.

The animation, which seems to be about 8 frames long, tells the abbreviated story of a goat who wasn’t satisfied with the leaves on the bottom of the tree, so he leaped and leaped in order to snag one from the top. Sure, it seems like a boring story on the surface, but you have to ask yourself why he wasn’t satisfied with the lower leaves. Perhaps they were dry and wilted. Or maybe the goat didn’t care about the leaves. Maybe he was just leaping around, trying to impress the lady goats. Or maybe… You know what? Never mind.

Anyways, perhaps seeing an animation like this will help us all to appreciate just how good we Flash nuts have it.

Hooray for Movie Clips! Yeehaw for Graphic Symbols! Long live the Motion Tween!

[DokhtarIrooni]

che jaleb..

[indian_blues]

World's first animation made in Iran

Film showing images from a 5,200-year old bowl from an ancient burial site in Iran.

An Italian team of archaeologists unearthed the bowl goblet in the 1970s from a burial site in Iran’s Burnt City, but it was only recently that researchers noticed the images on the bowl tell an animated visual story.

The oldest cartoon character in the world is a goat leaping to get the leaves on a tree.

According to an article in the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies:

The artefact bears five images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree, which the members of the team at that time had not recognised the relationship between the pictures.

Several years later,Iranian archaeologist Dr Mansur Sadjadi, who became later appointed as the new director of the archaeological team working at the Burnt City discovered that the pictures formed a related series.

The bowl has some controversy associated with it. Some researchers claimed the tree on the bowl to be the Assyrian Tree of Life, but the bowl dates to a period before the Assyrian civilization.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Kris’s Archaeological Blog at About.com:

Now this is deeply cool. The Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO) in Iran has made a short film using the images on a bowl from the Burnt City. The Burnt City (Shar-i Sokhta) is a site in Iran that dates to about 2600 BC, and has seen some decades of investigation. The bowl shows five images of a wild goat leaping, and if you put them in a sequence (like a flip book), the wild goat leaps to nip leaves off a tree.