Dos Santos_Project 1_MAA1133

Was a Russian and French stop-motion animator notable as the author of the first puppet-animated film (i.e. The Beautiful Lukanida (1912)). He also used insects and other animals as protagonists of his films. (His name can also be spelled Starevitch, Starewich and Starewitch.)

Fleischer was notable during the brothers' early days as the rotoscope model for their first character, Koko the Clown. He went on to become director and later producer of the studio's output. Although he is credited as "director" of every film released by the Fleischer studio from 1921 to 1942, the lead animators actually performed directorial duties, and Fleischer mainly served as producer. Among the cartoon series Fleischer supervised during this period were Talkartoons, Betty Boop Cartoons, Popeye the Sailor, Color Classics and several others; Popeye would go on to be the top rival of Mickey Mouse. He also supervised two animated features released through Paramount Pictures, Gulliver's Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). The debt Fleischer Studios owed to Paramount for the budgets of those features, worsened by the lack of success that came from the studio's non-Popeye cartoons, was called in by Paramount; this forced the brothers to give the studio to Paramount on May 24, 1941. However, both were still able to remain in charge of Fleischer Studios for a time.

Was a two-time Academy Award winning American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, who co-created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse with Walt Disney. He was responsible for the distinctive style of the earliest Disney animated cartoons, and was also responsible for creating Mickey Mouse. In 1922, when Walt began his Laugh-O-Gram cartoon series, Iwerks joined him as chief animator. The studio went bankrupt, however, and in 1923 Iwerks followed Disney's move to Los Angeles to work on a new series of cartoons known as “the Alice Comedies” which had live action mixed with animation. After the end of this series, Disney asked Iwerks to come up with a new character. The first Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was animated entirely by Ub Iwerks. Following the first cartoon, Oswald was redesigned on the insistence of Universal, who agreed to distribute the new series of cartoons in 1927.

The corporate name honors the four founding Warner brothers (born Wonskolaser) —Harry (born Hirsz), Albert (born Aaron), Sam (born Szmul), and Jack (Itzhak or to some sources Jacob). The three elder brothers began in the movie theatre business, having acquired a movie projector with which they showed films in the mining towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. They opened their first theater, the Cascade, in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1903. In 1904, the Warners founded the Pittsburgh-based Duquesne Amusement & Supply Company, to distribute films. In 1912, Harry Warner hired an auditor named Paul Ashley Chase. By the time of World War I they had begun producing films, and in 1918 the brothers opened the Warner Bros. studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Sam and Jack Warner produced the pictures, while Harry and Albert Warner and their auditor and now controller Chase handled finance and distribution in New York City. It was during World War I and their first nationally syndicated film was My Four Years in Germany based on a popular book by former American Ambassador James W. Gerard. On April 4, 1923, with help from a loan given to Harry Warner by his banker Motley Flint, they formally incorporated as Warner Brothers Pictures, Incorporated. However, as late as the 1960s, Warner Bros. claimed 1905 as its founding date.

Was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. Whitney was born in Pasadena, California and attended Pomona College. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under Rene Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films. Their work, Five Film Exercises (1940–45) was awarded a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
During the 1950s Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. In 1952 he directed engineering films on guided missile projects. One of his most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass.
In 1960, he founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, which used a mechanical analogue computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, titled simply Catalog. In 1966, IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its first artist-in-residence position.
By the 1970s, Whitney had abandoned his analogue computer in favour of faster, digital processes. He taught the first computer graphics class at UCLA in 1972. The pinnacle of his digital films is his 1975 work Arabesque, characterized by psychedelic, blooming colour-forms. His work during the 1980s and 1990s, benefited from faster computers and his invention of an audio-visual composition program called the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential). Works from this period such as Moondrum (1989–1995) used self-composed music and often explored mystical or Native-American themes.
All of John Whitney's sons (Michael, Mark and John Jr.) are also film-makers.

Hary Smith Smith developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and, more uniquely, hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor. While a few other filmmakers had employed similar frame-by-frame processes, few matched the complexity of composition, movement, and integration in Smith's work. Smith's films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of sixties psychedelia. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement. 


Was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world.

Is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards. In 2012 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces".