Animation Unit 31

What is animation?

Animation is a collection of still images played at 50 frames per second; your eyes see it as moving because it is so fast. So animation is really an illusion. Examples of animation companies are Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks. Disney are the biggest animation company, animation is it’s used in cartoons like the Simpsons and family guy. Animation has been round for a long time the first animation device was the ‘Zoetrope’ created by William Horner, It was a circle of paper with drawings next to each other, it would be placed inside of a wooden circle that had small gaps where you would look through then you would spin it round and it would create the effect of the pictures moving. The use of animation today is usually in anime’s and in cartoons, popular anime’s are cowboy bebop and bleach, anime’s are usually more 2D than 3D, although some popular animations, use clay models, like Wallace and Gromit, this uses clay models that they will move slightly and then take a picture and repeat, then put the pictures in order and play them at a high frame rate so it creates a full animation. Many people have been trying to make motion picture for a long time, although most of the early efforts either didn’t work and when they got more advanced they didn’t have sound , only fairly recently has sound been incorporated into animations.

Animations are used in many different places, most of the basic animation will be used on websites and advertisement targeting potential customers on the internet or using advertisements on TV for people at home. You can also see cartoons and anime’s on the internet and the TV they’re very popular and can create a lot of revenue and have a huge fan base if they’re advertised well, the Simpsons has been on air for over 20 years and still has a large fan base. Anime’s fan bases are usually a lot smaller as they have a very different style of animation to the Simpsons or a regular cartoon, anime’s are usually quite graphic and look more hand drawn and a lot less polished than a popular cartoon.

The biggest pioneers of animation are Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, William Horner and the Lumière brothers. Walt Disney was born in 1901, and created one of the biggest animation company’s in the world, Disney is probably most famous for creating Mickey Mouse who he did the original voice for, up until 1947. The Disney Corporation created films like, The Lion King and Aladdin these were animated films that were extremely popular when they were released. Thomas Edison is famous in animation because of his phonograph and kinetoscope, the phonograph was a device used to record and reproduce sound and is now a turntable and record, the kinetoscope was a device that was used to watch films, through a peephole, it created a film by many pictures being on a strip of perforated film with a high speed shutter. William Horner created the zoetrope in 1834, the zoetrope is an invention that was a circular disc with pictures on and small slits that you would look through, when span it would create an illusion that looks like the pictures were moving. The Lumiere brothers are famous for creating the film camera, which they called the cinematograph this was a wooden box with a hand crank on the side, the way it worked was they would have a reel of film they would shine a light out of the hole on the box and hand crank the film through the box, when it passed through the light it projected it onto the wall, allowing large groups of people to watch it at the same time which was a step up from Edison’s kinetoscope. Eadweard Muybridge also invented the zoopraxiscope which was pretty much an early version of a projector, the images which were on glass would be projected using the light from a lantern, this produced a continuous moving images. He visited Edison to try and use his phonograph in conjunction with the zoopraxiscope, but Edison declined as he thought it was inefficient.

When making an animation I achieved motion by first, using a text tool to add the number one, then I made it the size and font I wanted then aligned it to the middle of the stage, I broke the number apart, then I added a new key frame at frame 20, deleted the number one and replaced it with number two, which was the same font and size and then broke the number two apart, I then created a shape tween between the two key frames which made the one morph into a two, this means there is 20 still images in this animation, which are all used to make the 1 morph into a 2 smoothly. This is quite a simple animation.

 

Frame by frame is what is making the animation, if you have a key frame at 0 and a key frame at 20, then there is 20 frames in the animation, every frame will have something on it unless it is a break in the animation, you will just have a blank page, the more frames there are the smoother the animation is, but also, slow motion is hundreds to thousands of frames, as there is not much change between each frame. Also old fashioned film reels, if you look at the film reels they were many frames on special film that when a light was shone on and it was moved at the right speed created a movie. There are different types of frames, key frames which on programs are black circles and are mainly used for changing the contents of a frame and there is a blank key frame which is represented with a white circle.

Tweening is used to change the motion of an object over different frames; the things it changes are usually shapes, text and editable objects. Tweening in flash is used to morph one object into another, a square into a circle, or a number one into a number two. When you are making a frame by frame animation, if you had to do every single frame it would take very long and would be very tedious, if you want to make a smooth animation shape tweening is what you should use as it takes much less time.

Masking is used in animation when you want something to go over a word, like the word water could have a water reflection style animation on it. You need a word and a bitmap picture of water and you would set it to a continuous loop. This makes it more appealing to the people viewing it.it is done by creating a shape that you will overlay onto the picture you have chosen, then you will create different key frames where you want the mask to move to then you can put more frames in between these key frames to make the animation more smooth.