Digital animation: types and techniques

Different types of animation:

- Anime - Dragon ballz

- Stop motion - south park 

- Clay motion - Wallace and grommet 

- Line Drawing 

- CGI 

- 2D/3D 

- Cel animation 

- Hand-drawn 

Line Drawing:

 A hand drawn sketch that moves frame by frame so that the shape evolves and moves, it is commonly used in contemporary advertising - Line drawings are generally created using adobe illustrator, adobe flash and Lightbox- Scalable vectors graphics (SVGs) are animated by code - Fantasmagorie - Line boils - Drawing/tracing over a character to appear animated - More drawings - less animated - Less drawings nervous/ cold- Line drawings example - Aha take on me music video. 

Cel Animation:

Short for celluloid animation - Many disney films, especially the early ones, were created in this way

A cel is a celluloid sheet- a transparent sheet onto which characters and scenery are drawn or painted. This is traditionally done by hand. 

Snow white - The film took roughly three years to produce, from 1934to 1937 

First disney feature length animated film 

 Over 750 artists completed more than 2 million sketches. The film included 250,000 drawings.

Hand-drawn:

Not common today because it is time consuming, However hayao Miyazaki,s film spirited away was entirely hand drawn 

Spirited away - Miyazaki wrote, directed, and drew the story boards for the movie; essentially writing the movie with drawings. When you watch the films, your seeing one mans work and vision. The filmmaker is so influential and involved in production. 

In term of frames, if you are producing a three minute animation, with a standard 24fps, it would take 4,320 separate drawings or movements 

for a 90 minute feature this would be 129,600 drawings 

Rotoscoping: 

Traditional rotoscoping involved a stand called a rotoscope - this was used to project sequences of moving images against a surface so that a set of animation frames could be traced over them. The 'roto' prefix refers to the rotation of the image. 

rotoscoping is used in the credits to create a youthful feel to the film and the character seem innocent and young 

Contemporary rotoscoping 

silhouette, adobe premiere or final cut pro can be used to do the same work digitally. 

Digital rotoscoping is used to create a matte or mask for an element do that it can be extracted to be placed on a a different background, or masked out so that the colours can be changed 

The artist will trace an object using a set of tools within the composting software 

Live action animation:

In which non-animated characters interact with animated characters 

Famously used in who framed roger rabbit and space jam 

can also be seen in Mary Poppins

Stop motion and claymation:  

Bringing inanimate objects to life 

This is achieved meticulously, by moving the objects incrementally and photographing it. In this way, it seems as if the object itself is moving when the frames are playing sequentially. 

CGI:

When digital technology and software is used to generate animated images and graphics 

CGI refers to static scenes and moving characters, while computers animation refers only to moving characters/ scenes 

3D animation is used in a lot of blockbusters to make characters seem more rounded (pixar and toy story)

Rendering:

The process of generating an image from a 2D or 3D model via the use of computer programmes  

Tweening:

When frames between two key movements are generated in digital animation to give a smooth appearance 

Chroma Key:

a special effects technique for layering two images or video streams together. the subject is filmed on the blue or green screen. During post-production, the background is removed and replaced with CGI