Animation Concepts

Learning Outcomes

In this session, you will learn to-

• Define animation and discuss the various types
• Discuss the importance of animation in media industry
• Discuss the various terms related to animation
• List the various phases of making an animation film
• Describe the various stages of an animation film production.

The word “animation” is derived from the Latin word “anima” which means soul. It breathes life into imaginary characters. It is gaining popularity in the world of entertainment and multimedia.

Animation is an optical illusion created by a continuous display of static images in a sequence. Apart from being a source of entertainment animation is also an educational tool. It is a from of art that is celebrated in the world wide film festivals.

Animation is a costly and time-consuming affair that is why mostly large professional studios produce animation movies. However, now some low budget alternatives have made life easier for independent animators.

In animation movies every single frame is produced individually by using computer generated images or photographs of hand drawn or edited images. Whatever be the method the end product always baffles our eyes. Persistent vision makes animation movies appear smooth and continuous to the human eyes as the minor breaks are overlooked by the already stored images in the human brain.

However this theory persistent vision is till a myth and not a proven fact

Though creating animation movies is a laborious task, the advent of computers has made it much faster and less tedious. Whatever be the technological advancement, skilled animators are still required to generate the life-like images.

Animation Concepts

Animation is an optical illusion created by presenting a sequence of 2D images.

Animation movies conjures up an image of funny and cute characters moving around the screen and evoke a sense of feel good for the regular viewers, though there is much more to it than mere goodwill creation. It has some serious contribution in the media and expresses much more than what static images could do.

Information can be presented in a much more interesting way through animations. You can show animated texts, charts and even the movement of electrons, which cannot be recorded by video.

A) Frame-based Animation.

The concept of key frame animation is similar to that of the age old flip book animation in which a series of images in different sequences create the illusion of a moving image. For example, if you want to show a person riding a bike and moving from one end of the road to the other end. Draw a series of images starting with the first page that will show the person on the starting point of the road. In the corresponding pages show the gradual movements of the person until the end of the road. When you flip through the pages of the book, it creates the illusion of a person on a bike traveling from on end of the road to the other.

 

Computer generated animation follows the same traditional principles. The only difference is that the features of cut, copy and paste, has made editing faster and easier.

 

B) Traditional animation

Tradional animation or cel animation is the most popular form of animation that involves had drawn images.

The word ‘cel’ came from the concept of celluloid layers wherein the active elements of the background are created by the animators once and the subjects are moved in the foreground instead of redrawing all the elements for each frame. Celluloid is highly flammable and also easily decomposes, and is no longer widely used. Instead, paper is used to draw images.

Tradional animation requires lot of effort as it involves breaking each gesture into its constituent parts and then drawing them carefully. Though, the use of a static background makes the process easier.

Tradional animations is using computers, makes it easier as incremental changes can be done by use of a copying and pasting them into the subsequent frames. The in-between movements also can be done by use of a technique called tweening. You can also specify the path along which you want your object to move on the screen and the rest of the entire movement happens automatically.

 

C) Flip Book Animation

Animation is a process in which a series of static images are presented in such a sequence that they appear to be moving. In this process both hand drawn images known as cells as well as photographs known as frames are used.

The smoothness of an animation movie depends on the number of images used. The more the number of images used smoother is the movement in an animation film. For example, in animation films a rate of 24 frames per second is used while, most cartoons used about 12 frames per second.

Flip book animation is the most popular and the easiest. Even your friends can create it by drawing different sequences of the same image across the subsequent pages so that when you thumb through the pages it creates an animation base on the principle of persistence of vision.

 

D) Tweening

Tweening (short form of in-betweening) refers to the in-between sketches that create the illusion of movement. In sophisticated animation software you can see each sequence of the in-between sketches and can edit anyone of those sequences at will and as per requirement.

Software enables you to manually adjust the transitional frames or automatically render transitional frames using interpolation of graphic parameters.

 

 

 

E) Static Animation

The term static-animation may sound like an oxymoron but by static it means a unmovable hand drawn image and by animation it means that the image is drawn in such a manner so as to create an illusion that it is coming out of the page and jumping at you.

Everything in this world is moving creating a visual communication between our eyes and the objects around. Static images drawn on still papers with pen and pencil can also create an illusion of movement.

 

 

F) Anime

Anime (short form of animation) has its origin in Japan and is considered as a subset of animation by the western world. It generally consists of hand-drawn images but presently mostly computer generated images are used. The story line consists of major fictions of the current genre.

Anime is broadcasted on television, distributed as DVDs, included into video games, and also produced as full length motion pictures. Anime is influenced by Manga (the Japanese word for comics and print cartoons), light novels, and other cultures. Some anime storylines have been adapted into live action films and television series.