Animation is the event of an image moving or doing an action through multiple techniques, creating a visual effect on the eye that gives the impression of movement. A picture is a still image, animation takes this still image and gives it a more 3D movement effect and brings the pictures to life. There are many examples of how pioneers developed these ideals in making a picture seem more life-like, for example:
One of these techniques that are non-computer based is a zoetrope. Created by William Horner this is the event of looking through a slit on a round object that would rotate so that the images on the inside of the round object would pass by the slit. As such one image could be a man lying down and the next image could be a man standing up, the way you would see it through the slit would the man getting up from the floor as the moving of the image from one to the other would transition due to the rotation of the round object.
Another of these techniques is Disney animation, Disney widely used cell animation. Cell animation is where each character within the animation is hand drawn on a separate piece of paper which are then overlaid over a background while filming to give the effect that the picture is moving from one image to the next slightly different image, for example the old mickey mouse in black and white was often seen stutter as it used this form of animation. Now a day though, Disney is popular for using different kinds of animation, mostly computer animation although cartoon like animation is among what they develop. Computer animation is created on a computer through drawing images which differ from frame to frame so that they can be played back as a smooth animation. Other kinds of computer animation they use is where a piece of kit is attached to a human being then applied to a mesh on the computer, this maps the persons movements then details can be applied to the mesh.
Computer animation is a very widely used type of animation, for its usability and its great finished looks. The following of this computer animation have led to a wide variety of programs that have been made for it, as such Adobe Flash which contains a very easy to understand GUI and many techniques within it that allow the user to make their own animations.
Such techniques include frame by frame, in which you can edit 'frames' within the animation you are creating to contain different images. Usually these images are consistent and often copy the last frame before them but edited slightly whether that be different colour or moved ever so slightly so that when playing back the two frames it simulates the character moving. The user can set the speed that the frames cycle through so that certain scenes play out quicker and these animations often contain millions of frames for a feature length movie, or for a short cartoon even as much as tens of thousands. Simple animations such as a box spinning can be created in as much as one hundred frames.
Another technique is tweening; tweening is where frames are generated between two predetermined frames which contain images. These generated frames contain the resources to convert the first image to the second, so say if your first image was a cup and the second was a guitar, the pixels of the image would break apart and convert in to the second image, all in the space of a few set generated frames. This is often used in transformations within an animation. like a dampened down transformers. Certain settings can be put in place on this so that you can choose how the pixels convert between images, and how the tween runs such as how smooth.
Yet another technique is morphing, much like tweening it is the conversion of one image into another through a more than seamless animation. Morphing instead of breaking up the frames entirely, rather converts the image into the other, so the first image remain while converting into the second compared to tweening where the first image gets broken up before converting. For example, an image of a celebrity morphing into another, in between the transformation the image of both faces would remain and create a combination of the two.
My last example of a technique is masking, masking is where you take your image or video and stick a virtual ‘mask’ over it so that only part of the image/video is visible. This is helpful if you only want to see part of an image or if you want a pictures textures on a mask of your choice. For example, if you had an image of space and wanted it as the background of text you are writing out instead of a base colour, you could apply a mask to the image. A mask applies over the image, potentially blocking out what it lies in front of, the picture then applies to the mask and gives it a depth feel.
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