Types of animation

Computer generated imagery (CGI) is a fairly new development in the history of animation. One of the first computer generated films I remember was Toy story that was released November 22^nd 1995. Ever since the art of 3D animation has grown considerably and now a lot of blockbuster films use it for dramatic action shots in movies or to create realistic looking objects or people. It I used to replace actors or stunt men and women when the stunt would be too dangerous or impossible to film.

The amount of detail they manage to get in the animation these days is spectacular, such as fur effects and skin textures etc. All of these making the whole film much more believable and appealing to watch.

A recent example of a 3D animated film that has specifically impressed me was Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. The animation in this film was fantastic every individual feather on the birds was considered and the visual affects and backgrounds were spellbinding. One of my favorite scenes was when they are flying through a storm; they use slow motion in this scene to show off the animation. You can see every droplet of water running off the owl’s feathers while the sky light up with flashes of lightning.

2D animation

2D animation is typically what we describe as drawn animation; this technique however can involve a variety of different methods and media. Some of which include: drawing on paper with a pencil and other things including ink and paint, things such as oil on glass can be used to make a moving image.

Cell animation is when the drawing is transferred to acetate with ink; then the colour is added after the line ink is dry. The picture is flipped over so the line art is on the front; the artist has the task of carefully painting the cell. It took many hours sometimes days to complete one cell depending on the detail of the animation, it was a very long, time consuming process but I think that some of the best animation was done in this way. Large groups of artist would be hired to paint the cells so that more would be done in the same amount of time. This is how early hand drawn animation were given colour, these days it has been over taken by digital colouring which is cheaper and quicker than hand painting every frame, programs that are generally used are programs like Animo. Companies hire a lot fewer people than cell animation as computers cut the time it takes to complete one frame drastically quicker.

Stop motion

When on the topic of stop motion animation the first thing that jumps into your head is plasticine, like Wallace and Gromit, though this is stop motion it is also referred to as claymation because of the media used to create it. In fact stop motion can be done using anything, as long as the basic structure of what you are animating can still be moved.

Stop motion is quite simple to understand but is not easy to do. Every time the character is moved the tiniest amount a still shot must be taken with the camera. This process takes a very long time and it takes many hours just to shoot a few seconds on film. One downfall with this type of animation is that you cant go back and alter things, if you have mess up one shot in a sequence the whole thing has to be shot again.

Animators often use frames or skeletons to keep models in shape and make them easier to move. Depending on what material you are using, studio lights can cause a problem. Take plasticine for an example, when the lights get hot the plasticine will also heat up making it go really soft, this can deform the model. That is where the skeletons come in, they also use them to stabilise models that could be quite hard to balance, this can depend on what you are using to animate.