Animation does not count as an arts credit in Wylie High School, one of the few credits you need to graduate from high school. In my sophomore year at Wylie High School in Wylie, Texas, I participated in a course for animation. In this course, students interested in the subject learn about the history of animation, timing with the use of key frames, and practicing modeling, materializing, and rigging characters and objects. While learning this, you will find that it takes skill and creativity to produce a work in computer graphics. Therefore, animation should most definitely be considered an art. First, however, we need to have an understanding of what animation is as well as art. Animation is an art that extends all the back to cave drawings in B.C and hieroglyphics in Egypt ("Meep! Meep!" A History of Animation). As the vivid form of art developed, people from all over the world experimented with animation and developed it, such as the Italian painters and artists from the Italian Renaissance who started to apply a three dimensional perspective to drawings and paintings ("Meep! Meep!" A History of Animation). Animation manipulates a series of drawings or photos to create the illusion of movement. This is done by hand drawn pictures, computer graphics, or even stop-motion. Inventors and artists such as Atrhanasius, Dutchman Musschengroak, and Roget developed inventions that perhaps created this technique and idea of animation using sequential images that were either painted/drawn or photographed. In the 1600's, a man by the name of Athanasius Kircher developed an invention called the Magic Lantern. This invention was "a box with a light source and a curved mirror that projected sequential images" ("Meep! Meep!" A History of Animation). Dutchman Peter Van Musschengroak invented a disc with the name of Fantasmoriga "with painted sequential images" that when rotated it would "create the illusion of movement" ("Meep! Meep!" A History of Animation).
