Unit 11: Animation for digital media

Unit 11 - Animation

Animation
Animation is a series/sequence of images either drawn, painted or produced by other artistic methods. Animation gives "life" to a series of artistic images in fast succession to give these images movement.
For the illusion of animation to work, it had to be moving.

Early Animation

Thurmatrope
The first and earliest animation came before film in 1824 as a Thaumatrope. A Thurmatrope is a simple toy that has two static images on either side of a disk, E.g a bird and cage, with two pieces of string on either side. When the strings are twirled quickly between the users fingers, the picture appears to be a single image of the bird in a cage. This was a demonstration of "Persistence of vision" where the image on the eye and brain stays for a fraction of a second longer, after the image had disappeared or removed from view. As the image stays on your brain for a fraction more, it appears that the image on the Thurmatrope is whole when in fact its two separate images. John Ayrton Paris popularized this is 1824 when he shown it to the Royal College Of Physicians.

Phenakistoscope
The first early animation device was the Phenakistoscope that was invented in 1831 by a Belgian Joseph Plateau and Austrian Simon von Stampfer. It is a disk with a series of images, drawn on and evenly spaced around the center of the disk. Slots were then cut out of the disk at the spacing as the images but at a different distance from its center. It was then placed in front of a mirror and spun. When the user looked through the slots in the disk to the reflected image, the images would appear to move as the slots passed the viewers eye. This created the illusion of animation.

Zoetrope
The Zoetrope is one of the most recognizable early animation device created in 1834 by William George Horner. It operated on the same principle as a Phenakistoscope but it was a cylinder device that spun as the user looked through the slots of the at a series of images placed around the interior circumference. As the user looked through these slots to the image on the other side, it would give the illusion of movement in the images. The Zoetrope had several advantages over the Phenakistoscope as it didn't needed a mirror to view the animation, and several people could use it at once.

Other animation techniques before film were the flip book patented by John Barnes Linnett in 1868 which contained a series of images on different pages, when "flipped" would create the sense of movement. Also the Praxinoscope, which was the first known animated projection on a screen created by Charles-Emile Raynaud in 1877.

Animation Techniques 

Stop Motion

Stop motion animation is the animation of "puppets" through physical manipulation and photographing them one frame at a time to create an illusion of movement when they are stitched together. There are many different types of stop motion animation including puppet animation, clay animation, cutout animation, model animation, object animation and pixilation. The stop motion animation techniques are normally named after the medium used to create it. Computer software are now widely available and used to create stop motion animation but traditional stop motion is still used by the Walt Disney company and other big animation companies because it is cheaper than the computer software.

Rotoscoping
Rotoscoping is a technique where animators trace live-action movements, frame by frame. Patented by Max Fleischer in 1917, some films that used this animation techniques are the lord of the rings where they directly copied from actors outlines into animated drawings also, they can be used in a expressive manner like they did in Waking Life. There are plenty of examples where this technique is used.

Live-action/animation
This is a technique that combines hand-drawn characters into live action or live action into animation. Some of these include Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Space Jam.

2D Animation

Created using a computer, these are where figures are created using 2D graphics, bitmap or vector, to be used in animation. 2D animation has applications including flash animation and PowerPoint animation. Final line advection is a techniques used in 2D animation to give animators more influence and control over the animation.

3D Animation

A digitally modeled animation used by first creating 3D poly meshes to manipulate the model using a computer. the mesh includes vertices that are connected by edges and faces to give a 3D object a visual appearance or environment. Animators sometimes give the mesh a skeletal structure called an armature to be able to control the mesh by weighting the vertices. A process called rigging and can be used with key frames to create movement. Some other 3D animation techniques include, Cel-shaded, Machinima, Motion capture and photo-realistic.

There are other animation techniques like Paint-on-glass animation and sand animation but these are rarely used as they can be more expensive to produces than the computerized animation we have today.

Animation terms 

Frame Rate
Frame rate is the speed of a certain amount of frames per second. In animation it is preferred that you have a frame rate of 24FPS as this eradicates any distracting flickers and runs smoother however, the higher the frame rate, the smoother the animation will run. Images seen faster than 10 FPS, if they are similar to each other can seem to move. This is also referred to as persistence of vision.

Persistence of vision

Was thought to be a phenomenon of the eye, persistence of vision is where an after image of an object is taken from view but stays on the retina approximately of one twenty-fifth of a second. An outdated explanation of animation because is discounts the brains role entirely. 

Beta movement

The beta movement is how the brain processes movement and less to do with the eye's remembering the images. Referred to as "Phi Phenomena" it combines two or more still images where the brain surmises motion.

Suspension of disbelief 

A term suggested by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, he thought that is a writer could infuse human interest and truth into a fantastic tale then the reader would suspend judgement concerning the narrative. Often applies to work of action, comedy, fantasy and horror genres. The phrase is used more loosely in modern times as is often used to imply the burden was on the reader instead of the writer to achieve this. More used in elements of magic or similar sideshows act.

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