Animation

As children we were fascinated by the colorful, fantasy world of moving images. As we grow up, we still enjoy watching the innocence of the cartoon characters.

Many times it so happens that you have a fight with your younger brother or sister while watching television were your younger sibling is adamant about watching “cartoon network “ and you have a brought an animated movie home. …. We still enjoy animation movies.

We all talk about cartoons, watch animated movies. But what is animation?
Animation means “liveliness”. Animation is the process by which we see still pictures move. Each picture is shot on film one at a time and is shown at the rate of 24 pictures per second making the pictures appear to move.

How is it created??

There are three basic techniques used in animation. These are:
1.Traditional animation
2.Stop motion
3.Computer animation or computer generated imagery (CGI)

Traditional animation
Traditional animation, also referred to as classical animation, is the oldest and historically the most popular form of animation.
This includes cel animation, hand-drawn animation .Traditionally-animated productions, just like other forms of animation, usually begin life as a storyboard, which is a script of sorts written with images as well as words, similar to a giant comic strip

Hand - Drawn animation
This covers any form where one drawing is replaced by another in a sequence. Each drawing is slightly different from the one before. It works the way a flipbook does. A registration tool called a peg bar is used to keep all the sheets aligned and, by placing the drawings on to a light box to illuminate them, it makes it easier for the animator to trace the previous picture, adding slight changes to the image.

Cel Animation:

Cels are transparent celluloid acetate sheets that can be drawn and painted on. Because they are transparent, several cels can be placed on top of each other, enabling different parts of a character's body to be drawn on separate sheets and animated individually. Thus an animator might only need to draw the movement of an arm rather than the whole character each time it moves.

Stop motion
Stop-motion animation is used to describe animation created by physically manipulating real-world objects and photographing them one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement. There are many different types of stop-motion animation, usually named after the type of media used to create the animation. This includes Clay animation, Cutout animation, Puppet animation etc.

Clay animation :
Clay animation uses figures made of clay or a similar malleable material to create stop-motion animation. The figures may have an armature or wire frame inside of them, similar to the related puppet animation (below), that can be manipulated in order to pose the figures. Alternatively, the figures may be made entirely of clay, such as in the films of Bruce Bickford, where clay creatures morph into a variety of different shapes.

Cutout animation
This covers any form of animation where cut-out shapes are moved around or replaced by other cut-outs. Flat objects like buttons, matchsticks and string can also be used in this form of animation. Cut-outs can also be laid on top of drawings.

Puppet animation:
Puppet animation typically involves stop-motion puppet figures interacting with each other in a constructed environment, in contrast to the real-world interaction in model animation.

Computer animation
Many animators now use computers and software programs to create animated films. Three-dimensional or two-dimensional characters and objects can be built in the computer or images may be imported via a scanner. The computer enables animators to create virtual worlds for their characters to live in - these worlds may be very elaborate.Computer animation can be produced by using a rendering machine to produce successive frames wherein some aspect of the image is varied.