Topic 17- Animation

Animation progress:

• The persistence of vision- the human eye sees an object for a short time after it has disappeared 
• This used in animation so that objects appear to move
• It means that separate diagrams with slight changes in motion do not appear jerky

Flip books:

• A slightly different diagram showing motion is put on each page
• When the book is flipped animation appears smooth

Stop motion:

• A model is photographed
• Then slightly moved
• And photographed again
• Steps are repeated

• Frames are joined with a short delay between them

Flash/key frame animation:

• Flash is a piece of software used to create interactive and animation websites
• Key frames are the starting frame and the finishing frame in an animation
• The software fills in the frames between the two key frames
• This is called tweening

3D animation:

• This is the most complex of all types of animation
• Software is complex
• Software can be expensive

Use of animation in commercial and learning environments:

• Film making and speacial effects industries
• Huge films industry based around animation

• Special effects in nearly every film that is made
• Development have made adding effects much easier and cheaper

Use of animation in VLE's and educational webistes:

• Use from early stage teaching to A-Level to make material more stimulating and easier to learn
• It is important to remember to use animation appropriately otherwise they will cause annoyance and frustration to the user

Advantages and disadvatanges of animation in commercial and educational environments:

Advantages of animation

• It can help explain in a different concept
• It can bw used to entertain young children
• It can attract users to a website
• It can make learning fun for young children

Disadvantages of animation:

• Good animation can be expensive to produce
• It can distract users away from the content or the message being given
• On a website, it can take a while to load,which can put off some visitors to the website

Tools and techniques for creating animated images- planning:

• Story boards- explaining how an animation wil work is quite difficult. 
• Story boards provide a wojay of communication visual ideas. It is a series of sketches showing the layout of animations in multimedia website or presentation.
• Story boards are used to show the sequence and layout od ideas

Planning animations- story boards:

• Typically a story board will contain: 
• Rough designs showing what the menus will look like
• What pictures are included

• In an animation it can show some of the frames
• What video is used
• What sound is inculded
• Some detail of the text to be included

Awareness of audience: 

• An animation should always be chosen or designed witha particular audience in mind

Mood boarding:

• A mood board is a compilation of elements that will give the look and feel of the animation, website or multimedia product.
• It can include such things as examples of proposed types of animastions, colour palettees, font styles for text.
• The main purpose of creating a mood board is to prevent the designer putting lots of work into a design that the client does not like

Frame rates: 

• In an animation each unique image used in an animation is called a frame. The frame rate is a frequency or rate appear on the screen.
• The greater the frame rate the better the quality of the movement of the items in the animation

Looping:

• Looping is used when you want a motion to be repeatewd over and over

Vector and Bitmap animation: 

• Vector animation the motion is controlled by vector rather than pixels. Adobe Flsh produces vector based animations
• Bitmap animations- the arrangement of bits on the screen changes in some way and a new bitmap is produces
• The advantages of vector over bitmap here is that the animation are much smoother and the animation is clearer

Claymation techniques:

• Claymation is a form of stop motion animation using materials such as clay or plasticine. Models are created and photographed after slight movements have been made. Thousands of frames are created. 

Pixilation techniques:

• Pixilation- when you enlarge a bitmap image you start to see the individual pixels. This is sometimes done deliberatle for example in police programmes when the maker doesn't want you to see a crimanals face for legal reasons

Rotoscoping:

• A piece of film with movement of live actors drawn over to get an animation effect with realisitic movement

Tweening:

• This is where you creare a start frame and an end frame and the computer generates all the in-between frames so that the start image changes into the final image

Onion Skinning:

• A technique used in animation where several frames in an animation are superimposed over each other. This allows the animator to keep track of the motion so tey have a better idea where to create the next frame

Grouping:

• Grouping- grouping images is often done so that they are treated as a single image rather than sepreate ones. This makes it easier to move and size them

Cloning:

• Cloning-often in animations you need several items of the same thing . Rather than create each one from scratch, it is easier to create one and then copy it. The copies are identical and are called clones

Backdrops:

• Backdrops- this is the scenery against which the character in the animation appear. For example, an animation of a talking cat might have the contents of a room as the backdrop