Introduction to animation
Animation is the illusion of movement created by a series of rapidly changing images, blended together.
These images or frames may be generated by computers (tweening) using a start and end frame, or by
photographing an object or image whilst repeatedly making small changes (stop motion).
The illusion of movement is known as the persistence of vision. When an image is seen by the eye, it is
chemically mapped on the eye’s retina for a brief moment. When the brain sees the object now moved or
changed slightly, the new image is mapped on the retina. The brain’s natural tendency is to interpret this as
movement.
A well-produced animation can be a very powerful medium for expression.
An animator is one who is involved in the process of animation. Some fields in which an animator may work:
 Film – blockbusters, television – story-telling, TV commercials
 Computer games – e.g. FPS (First Person Shooter)
 Web design - advertising and marketing – banner advertisements
 Simulation: flight simulators, medical research and development, education/learning, museums
Animators include:
 Character animators (artists who specialize in character movement, dialogue, acting, etc.)
 Special Effects animators (who animate anything that is not a character; most commonly vehicles,
machinery, and natural phenomena such as rain, snow, and water).
 Layout artists design backgrounds, specify lighting, and camera angles
 Storyboard artists draw panels of the action from the script
 Background artists paint the "scenery".
Types
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of animation include:
stop motion animation
cel animation (traditional animation)
computer animation
clay animation (also called “claymation”)
Stop motion animation
Traditional animation began with each frame being painted and then filmed. Cel animation, developed by
Bray and Hurd in the early 1900s, sped up the process by using transparent overlays so that characters
could be moved without the need to repaint the background for every frame. More recently, styles of
animation based on painting and drawing have evolved, such as the minimalist Simpsons cartoons, or the
roughly sketched The Snowman.
Traditional animation (cel animation or hand-drawn animation)
In traditional animation, the oldest and form of animation, each frame is drawn by hand.
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Cel animation: developed in the early 1900s to speed up the process by using transparent overlays
so that characters could be moved without the need to repaint the background for every frame.
Character animation: life is breathed into an artificial character to create the nuances, gestures,
distinct movements, and patterns of speech that will make an audience believe that the character is
actually alive. This can require a high level of skill.
Felix the Cat (Otto Messmer) - an instantly recognizable personality during the 1920s.
Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Dumbo – Walt Disney in the 1930s
Limited animation - cartoons that have an artistic style, are much lower cost, and avoid a
"realistic" approach. This technique relies on the viewer’s imagination, rather than making each
frame as realistic as possible; it uses a lot more abstract art, symbolism, and limited movement.
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Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968). The use of limited animation deliberately defies reality
and paints a landscape that could never exist in the real world; something that appealed to many in
the 1960s.
Cel Animation
A cel, or celluloid, is a transparent sheet of cellulose acetate onto which characters can be drawn, animated,
and laid over a static background drawing. The technique was invented by Earl Hurd in 1914; he created the
silent Bobby Bumps animations and obtained patents for the technique in 1914.
Due to the availability of more commercially viable and efficient/quicker computer animation software, such
as Flash, the use of Cel animation is normally not used due to the demands, but may have uses where low
overheads are needed or traditional hands on techniques are preferred, e.g. in schools, colleges and
museums.
Computer animation
Software such as Adobe Flash, available for home use, and free distribution channels such as Newgrounds
(www.newgrounds.com ), makes it much easier for animation to be produced by independent individuals
and studios. However, animation can be very time-consuming and expensive, and the majority of animation
for film is created in professional animation studios.
In 3D computer animation, scenes or characters are 'lit' and 'shot' from chosen angles, just as in real life,
before being 'rendered' to a 2D bitmapped frame. The difficulties lie in loss of control of the animator
because the computer now does most of the work.
Surfaces can be programmed to stretch and bend automatically in response to movements of a wire frame
model. Recent developments in rendering complex surfaces have enabled stunningly life-like environments
and character models, including surfaces that even ripple, fold and blow in the wind, with every fibre or hair
individually calculated for rendering.
Multi-Sketch - a hand-drawn sketch created in a freestyle unscripted, improvised manner using a digitising
pen and tablet (e.g. Wacom) to create progressive line sketches, which are captured to video. The cartoon
does not need editing after it is completed.
Skeletal animation – is commonly used by computer games programmers and in the movie industry, and
can also be applied to objects with elements and joints. The animated character is represented in two parts:
a surface representation used to draw the character (the skin) and a hierarchical set of bones used for
animation only (the skeleton). The animation is constructed using a series of 'bones'. Each bone can move
its position, scale and orientation, relative to each other. So moving a thigh-bone will move the lower leg
too. In Adobe Flash this is achieved using the bone tool and armature layer.
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Each bone is associated with some portion of the character's visual representation. Portions of the
character's skin can be associated with multiple bones, each one having a scaling factors called
vertex weights, or blend weights.
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Skeletal animation is useful because it allows the animator to control just those characteristics of the
model that are independently moveable. Animation is much simpler: an animation can be defined by
simple movements of the bones, instead of vertex by vertex (in the case of a polygonal mesh).
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The weakness of the skeletal approach is that it doesn't by itself provide realistic muscle movement.
A character flexing an arm will have both large-scale bone movement and local skin motion caused
by the change in muscle shape.
Increasingly in computer games, it is common to have special muscle controllers attached to the bones that
mimic this effect.
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Morph target animation - 3D computer animation used as an alternative to skeletal animation, and can be
useful for animating clothes, skin, and facial expressions. In each keyframe of the animation, the vertices
are moved to a different position. Depending on the renderer, the vertices will move along paths to fill in
the blank time between the keyframes. The artist has control over the movements to define individual
positions of the vertices within a keyframe, rather than being constrained by skeletons. Vertex animation can
be time-consuming because every vertex position would have to be calculated.
Special effects (abbreviated SPFX or SFX) animation – are used to visualize “ hard to achieve“ scenes,
such as space travel, an enormous explosion, or architecture of a previous era. E.g.
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USS Enterprise flying through space - special optical effects are used and rely on manipulation of a
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Zero-gravity effects employed in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) - special mechanical
photographed image
effects implemented during the live-action shooting.
Compositing (Digital Compositing)
Combining, normally digitally using computers, different elements (from different sources), such as realworld film, artificial 3-D computer generated imagery, 2-D cartoon animations, painted backdrops, digital still
photographs, text, etc. is known as compositing.
Compositing can achieve effects impossible or too expensive to achieve by conventional methods. In the
past, compositing was often done using optical tricks - scenes were extended using Matte paintings created
by an artist and combined during post production with live-action footage.
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Blue Screen - a subject (foreground) is filmed in front of a solid colour screen (background), usually
blue or green, which does not appear in the subject (foreground). During compositing, providing the
subject does not include background colours, the blue screen background can be removed allowing
the subject to be placed in front of a new background. A classic example of blue screening is the
weather presented on TV.
In large-scale filmmaking, high capacity and powerful servers and workstations are used because processing
each frame digitally is intensive. However, similar effects using home computer software such as Adobe
Flash and Adobe After Effects can be achieved on a smaller scale.
Claymation (Clay Animation)
The term claymation was invented by Will Vinton as stop animation using clay or mouldable objects, and
replaying, in rapid succession, still pictures of the objects in different positions to create the illusion of
movement. Animators sculpt the characters in clay and support the sculpture with a flexible armature
(wireframe). The position of the sculpted characters is altered slightly in every still photo, or frame. The look
and feel of claymation is unique and animations tend to be restricted in length due to the time it takes.
Examples of clay animation (claymation) include Wallace and Gromit, Morph (Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton,
1976), and Chicken Run (Aardman Studio, Nick Park & crew, 2000)
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