Animation

Techniques and Styles in 2D Animation

PRE CAMERA

Animation techniques have been around long before the camera was invented. Pictures inside caves depict animals with multiple legs, showing a clear attempt of movement. However, it wasn’t until the 1800’s that animation truly came alive with moving images.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

The persistence of vision is the phenomenom that makes video and animation possible. It gives the illusion of movement when images are displayed rapidly one after another.

 

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THAUMATROPE

Invented by John Ayrton Paris in 1834, a thaumatrope is a toy that gives the illusion of animation. A disk with a picture on either side is attached to a piece of string, and when twirled, blends the two images together. This gives the impression of movement, but obviously only if the two images are related to each other.
eg. A bird on one side and a cage on the other.

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ZOETROPE

A zoetrope is another device that gives the illusion of movement, more sophisticated that the thaumatrope, a zoetrope consists of more images to make the animation more smooth and realistic. It was invented by William Horner in 1834 and was hugely successful.

The device consists of a cylinder with vertical frequent slits in the side. Beneath the slits on the inside is a sequence of images that show an action. When the cylinder is spun, looking through one of the slits gives a sense of movement, due to each image moving onto the next one too fast for the human eye to pick up on.

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FLIPBOOK

The first flip book was invented in 1868 by a John Barnes Linnet.
A flick book does exactly what it says on the tin, it’s a book that you flip. The book contains a frame for each page and shows a story when flipped. Due the persistence of vision that happens due to the pages changing rapidly, this creates an animation and is considered as a milestone in the birth of animation and film.

Here is a more modern flipbook you would see today, using a sequence taken from a raw video footage instead of hand drawn.

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MUYBRIDGE

Eadweard Muybridge, born April 9th 1830, was a famous photographer and is largely recognized for his work with animation movement. Being born in Kingston upon Thames in England, Muybridge often travelled to America due to his career as photographer.

Muybridge was fascinated with movement, often learning how various animals walk and ran. He conducted many experiments to learn these running techniques and specifically targeted how a house ran and jumped over a hedge. Taking images of this process gave him the idea to create an animation using a zoopraxiscope which is similar to a zoetrope, but is flat.

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CUT OUT

Cut out animation is a technique which involves flat images from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs being moved around frame by frame to create an animation. Nowadays, this is done by scanning images onto a computer rather than actually cutting out materials physically.
The South Park TV series is a notable example (though first episodes were indeed made with actual paper cut-outs). South Park is now made with advanced 3D software Maya 3.0 and Corel Draw.

In this age of technology, many “old-fashioned” animation techniques have been dumped for computer-generated imagery. However, a new trend is emerging, one which uses the computer as a tool to achieve the look of old-fashioned techniques while taking advantage of the ease of production that technology offers.

Working example is South Park and Blue’s Clues. “What could these two completely different shows–one for adults and one for pre-schoolers–have in common?” you may ask. The answer is that they both use computer animation software to create a look that many uninformed viewers assume is the product of painstaking cut-out animation. What most people don’t know is that quite a bit of technology is at work to achieve that “home-grown” look, shadows, textures and all.

Blue’s Clues
At Nickelodeon’s digital studio in New York, animators on Blue’s Clues are using Macintosh computers running Photoshop and Adobe After Effects software to combine animated sets and characters with a live-action host. Even storyboards are created in Quark, While live-action is being shot on video (against a green-screen, color-key background), artists create props and characters out of clay and simple materials, then photograph them with a digital camera. The images are then cleaned-up and dressed-up, a process series co-creator and designer Traci Paige-Johnson calls making the images “yummy,” then imported to After Effects where they are animated and composited with the live-action footage.

 

South Park
At a production studio in Marina Del Rey, California, animators and technical directors on the South Park TV show and feature film use high-end equipment: Silicon Graphics workstations running Alias|Wavefront’s Power Animator software to create a virtual plane–in 3D space–on which “flat” computer-generated characters are animated. Even the texture of construction paper is applied in the computer, and that “no-platen” shadow look is achieved by separating the character’s parts with a small layer of space as would occur in real cut-out animation.

Both Blue’s Clues and South Park creators use the computer as a very sophisticated camera which enables the production process to be broken down into stages that can be handled by different teams of people: storyboards, design and layout, lip-sync, and animation. Both shows use relatively small production teams–ranging from 15 to 30 people per episode, compared to the huge staffs, both in-house and overseas, needed to produce a typical 2D or cell-animated series.

HAHA here’s my watered down version

🙂 As you can see I have a long way to go!