A set of patents by John Randolph Bray and Earl Hurd in the period 1914-1916 gave the Bray Studios a process for creating animated films that turned animation from a novelty into an industry capable of producing a film a week.
The four patents were:
- 1,107,193 Process and Articles for Producing Moving Pictures: 11 August 1914
- 1,143,542 Process of and Apparatus for Producing Moving Pictures: 15 June 1915
- 1,159,740 Method of and Articles for Producing Moving Pictures: 9 November 1915
- 1,179,068 Process of and Articles for Producing Moving Pictures: 11 April 1916
As with all patent documents there is an awful lot of waffle to ensure that the patent covers as much ground as possible. Essentially the four patents were:
- Produce the constant background for a scene, duplicate it and add object movements to the background sheets to create the animation
- Use painted celluloid sheets (cels) for the individual object movements in a scene as overlays to a single copy of the background
- Provide independent shading of the object movements via separate layers of tracing paper
- Adding the ability to mask out parts of the background but primarily a consolidation of the earlier patents