*NB This lecture relies heavily on material presented on video tape.
Most of the video material cannot be published on the WWW for copyright
and practical reasons. It makes little sense to publish the comments about
the videos without the source material itself so you'll have to
attend the lecture and take notes!
Animate - breathe life into, enliven through...
Movement
Character / Personality
Feeling / Emotion
Etc. etc. etc.
Movement is a powerful medium through which to convey a message.
(Go ask Charlie Chaplain!)
Gertie the Dinosaur was the first real animated character. Gertie was created
by cartoonist Winsor McCay in 1914. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions,
Gertie cannot appear in person on this site. But you
can read about
her and check out some
pictures elsewhere on the web.
Animation is the process of creating images one at a time to be
displayed rapidly in sequence giving the illusion of movement...
Persistence of vision is the blending together by the eye / brain of
rapidly displayed sequential images, giving the illusion of movement.
Individual images forming an animation are called frames (after
the frames on cinefilm).
Frames may be shot in 'realtime' using a cine or video camera to
make a film or video.
Animation or film frames must be stored for rapid, sequential retrieval and display
if persistance of vision is to be relied upon for creating the illusion of movement.
Some storage media include:
Cine frames / film
Video frames / tape
Flip-book pages
Zoetrope cylinders
Quicktime / MPEG movies
GIF89a files
Zoetrope
How can you create the images to be photographed, digitized or flipped through?
Multiple pictures are produced on paper, canvas,
acetate 'cels' or anything else. These are photgraphed one at a time onto film.
Eg. "Astro Boy" by Osamu Tezuka, "Mickey Mouse" by Disney
Directly marked onto film
A strip of cinefilm is scratched or drawn onto
directly with pens and other implements. The result is played 'as is' through
a cine-camera.
Glass sheet / sand
A sheet of glass is used as a board for depositing paint.
Each frame of the animation is painted, then photographed, then the next frame
is constructed by pushing the paint around on the glass, and so on. (Note that
each time the animator makes a new frame, the image/source for the previous frame
is destroyed!) The same process can be carried out by drawing images in a bed of sand.
Stop-motion animation
A figurine, ball of clay or other solid model is 'posed', photographed,
moved a little and rephotographed ad-infinitum.
Eg. "The Nightmare Before Christmas" by Tim Burton, "Wallace & Gromit" by Nick Park
(If clay models are used, the process may also be called 'claymation' If models resting
on a table are used, the process may be called table-top animation. [Nothing to do with
table-top dancing])
Computer animation
The computer is used to model objects and manipulate them
in a 'virtual' space, producing images of the objects as they are manipulated.
These images are deposited onto film. Eg. "Toy Story" & "A Bug's Life" by Pixar/Disney
If you can see it and change its appearance, you can animate or film it!
*NB The examples of animated films given above are not necessarily favourites of the lecturer. They have
been included as examples only!
Animation and / or film may be used for