In the early years after the October Revolution, Russian animation remained undeveloped compared to cinema or theatre. Starevich left Russia after the October Revolution, and for many years, the animation industry was paralyzed. He produced a number of other popular animated films with insects at the Aleksandr Khanzhonkov's studio where he also worked as a cinematographer and a director of live-action films, sometimes combining live action with stop motion animation, as in The Night Before Christmas and A Terrible Vengeance (both from 1913). His first few films, made in 1910, were dark comedies on the family lives of cockroaches, and were so revolutionary that they earned him a decoration from Nicholas II of Russia.
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Being a trained biologist, he started to make animation with embalmed insects for educational purposes, but soon realized the possibilities of this medium to become one of the undisputed masters of stop motion later in his life. The second person to independently discover animation was Vladislav Starevich.
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All of them were later restored and digitized with the help from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and Aardman Animations. In 1995, they were re-discovered by a ballet historian Viktor Bocharov who got hold of Shiryayev's archives and released A Belated Premiere documentary in 2003 with fragments of various films. They were mostly forgotten during the Soviet period, mentioned only in the memoirs of his students.
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Shiryaev didn't hold much interest in animation as an art form, but rather saw it as an instrument in studying human plastics. He built an improvised studio at his apartment where he carefully recreated various ballets - first by making thousands of sketches and then by staging them using hand-made puppets he shot them using the 17.5 mm Biokam camera, frame by frame. The first Russian animator was Alexander Shiryaev, a principal ballet dancer and choreographer at the Mariinsky Theatre who made a number of pioneering stop motion and traditionally animated films between 19. Scene from Ladislas Starevich's The Cameraman's Revenge (1911).