Digital Animation: Types and Techniques

Digital Animation:  Types and Techniques 

Types of animations... 

• anima 
• 2D animation 
• 3D animation 
• Stop motion 
• CGI
• Motion graphics 
• Traditional animation
• Line drawing 
• Cel animation 
• Hand-drawn 
• Rotoscoping 
• Live-action 
• Clay Motion 

Line Drawn:

-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, today are generally created using Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Flash, and Lightbox 

-Scalable Vector Graphics are animated by code 

-First Cartoon (Emile Cohl, 1908)

-Line Boil- drawing and tracing over a character to appear animated 

-More Tracings- less animated 

-Less Tracings-nervous/cold

-Example- A-Ha =Take on Me (groundbreaking, unique bridges reality vs fantasy)

-Example- RedBull (Whitty/humourous/simplicity) (allows you to create an unrealistic scenario)

Cel Animation:

-Celluloid animation 

-Many Disney films, especially the early ones were created this way

-A cell is a transparent sheet onto which character and scenery are drawn and painted, done by hand 

-Example- took 3 years to produce from 1934-1937, over 750 artists complete more than 2 million sketches and included 250,000 drawings 

Hand Drawing:

-Non-common practice as its time consuming and be achieved more easily through computer

-However, Hayao Miyazaki's film Spirited Away was entirely hand-drawn

-Miyazaki wrote, directed, and drew the storyboards for the movie, essentially writing the movie with drawings.  When you watch the film you seeing one man's work and vision.  The filmmaker is so influential and involved in the production

Rotoscoping:

-A traditional rotoscoping involved a strand 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 to the rotation of images

-Taces live-action footage

-Example- Juno Opening Credit is, this crates innocence and youth, and the way the town has been drawn creates a simplistic and childlike scene 

Contemporary Rotoscoping:

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

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

Live-Action Animation:

-In which non-animated characters interact with animated characters 

-Famopiusly used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

-Can also be seen in Mary Poppins (1964)

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 objects itself is moving when the frames are played sequentially 

Computer Generated Imagery CGI:

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

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

-3D animation is used ina lot of blockbusters to make characters seem more rounded (Toy story, Pixar)

-Rendering-the process of generating an image from a 2D or 3D model via the use of computer programs 

-Tweening-when frames between two key movements are herniated in digital animation to give a smooth appearance 

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