What is Animation?
In the Oxford dictionary the word Animation
means ' Being alive' . Animation is the technique
of producing a moving picture from a sequence of drawings or simply
put Animation is change over time.
Let's take the example of the flipper book which is
the most basic and easily achievable form of Animation. It is
just a pad of drawings bound like a book at one end. Hold it at
the bound end with one hand and flip the pages with the other
end.
Consider
that every leaf of the book has a printed image of a character
in the same position, with a slightly changing dance pose. When
flipped, these series of images moves one after another. As
the pages flip our eyes move from one pose to the other in a
continuous and rhythmic pattern at a certain speed which in
turn looks as if the character is dancing. This is the change
or action happening over a certain amount of time which brings
about a sense of motion which we know as Animation.
This is the same as kids making small drawing in the corner
of their exercise books and flipping the pages. This also holds
true to the media of film, television and video also, if u stop
or freeze frames of a video you can see a still picture. The
moving pictures that we see in cinema are not a moving picture
but in fact are basically made up of a series of still images
moving at the rate of 24 frames (images) per seconds (fps),
our brains stop seeing these images as separate and static,
but instead we observe constant movement.
This is because of a phenomenon known as Persistence
of Vision (POV) which has been known
to man from centuries but was first properly identified in 1825,
shortly before the invention of photography. POV
means that when an image in a sequence passes in front of our
sight, our brain holds back the image for about one-tenth of
a second after the image has moved ahead from our sight. This
visual delay helps us see the moving images in a continuous
manner as one image gets merged into the other, which in turn
creates the illusion of movement. One of the major differences
between the making of a live action film and an animated film
is that the live action camera captures a scene moving in real-time,
freezing the movements into separate still pictures, which can
then be projected onto the screen .In the case of an animator,
the whole world has to be created by him as there exists nothing
to be filmed. He uses drawings, puppets, models or a computer
program to create the animation from zero.
He designs the sets and every character along with their environments,
he tells the story with these elements and films it as it slowly
progresses from one stage to another. There are different mediums
of making animation; all these mediums have been the result
of man' s fascination with all things that move. Over the centuries
man has tried to understand motion and how things move. There
is evidence of how Over 35,000 years ago, the ice age man was
drawing pictures of animals on cave wall, and some of these
drawings had four pair of legs to show the running motion.
In
Egypt around 1600 BC the Pharaoh Rameses III built a temple
to the goddess Isis which had 110 columns, with each column
painted with the figure of the goddess in progressively changing
poses. The horsemen or chariot-driver racing by felt that Isis
moved.
The Ancient Greeks decorated pots with figures in successive
stages of actions. Spinning the pot would create a sense of
motion. In India we have the traditional art of puppetry (Kathputli),where
the puppeteer with the aid of the strings attached to the legs
and arms of the puppets tends to make them move and dance and
act out various dramatic stories . In China there still exists
the ancient art of shadow play Drama, where the characters are
cutouts with a stick at one end. The shadows are projected on
a white screen with a help of colored lanterns by the artists
who handle the cutout characters with the help of the stick.
In the present times we have seen lots of 2d animation also
called classical animation, made famous by the great characters
like Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Donald duck, Tom & Jerry, Roger
Rabbit & Daffy Duck and in the Indian context we have seen
Tenali Raman, Birbal, Hanuman come to life on the big and small
screen.
In the present there has been a big craze for 3d
Animation also called Computer Generated (CG)
animation .In a very short span of time 3d animation
has become very popular and has become a very powerful medium
to tell great stories. Memorable movies like the Star
Wars,Terminator, Jurassic Park, Stuart Little, used
3d animation for creating the central Characters and their Environments.
Movies like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Shrek were
fully 3d animated movies. These films and its characters have
become world famous and shown that the computer can be used
to create more than DTP and Graphic Design. Another genre of
animation thou lesser know and used but equal in all respects
to 2d and CG is Clay Animation, also called Clamation.
Difference between 2d and 3d Animation
2d means two dimensions, e.g. Drawings made on paper, Paper
has 2 dimensions the x-axis (Width) and y-axis
(Height) but there is negligible amount of
Depth (z axis). The drawings look flat, and one can understand
depth only because the perspective or depth is drawn. Essentially
most forms of animated film-making were produced through flat
images usually drawn on cels (Transparent sheets which can be
overlaid on background paintings and then photographed), but
occasionally painted on glass or even directly onto the film
itself. This is also called 2d Animation or
Classical animation.
When drawings are created and animated in an computer animation
program like Flash, US Animation, Animo, is also called 2d animation.
These Drawings are flat and have no depth, the depth is drawn
but it does not really exist. Examples of 2d animation are the
famous cartoons of Mickey and Donald, Bugs Bunny, Tom &
Jerry, The Adventure of Tenali Raman Johnny Bravo, The Power
Puff Girls, and movies like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast
and Hanuman. A 3d animator works with any media with three dimensions,
they could be objects made of clay, or models built on a metal
frame also called Armature, from clay, fabric or rubber , they
could be puppets with movable joints for movement. But it doesn'
t stop there; a 3d animator can use any inanimate object from
a rack of drawers to any movable object available in home or
workplace to create movement, thus animation. Where as animation
done on the computers with the use of 3d software' s like Maya,
3d Studio Max, Softimage XSI, are called 3d animation
as all of these mediums create Animation from subjects which
have three dimensions (x,y,z). e.g. Pingu, Wallace and Grommit,
Chicken Run, Toy Story, Finding Nemo,The Incredibles etc
Harold Raichur
Creative Head, Id Animation & Art