History & Process for Animation

There are various useful tips and techniques that may help you in creating world class animations with the effective tools and creative imagination. Some of the tips mentioned below are intended for the artists that create the drawings and others are aimed at the programmers that develop the code around it.

(1) Using shadows for making the characters appear on the ground – A character without shadows tends to float above the ground level. Thus, it is recommended to use the shadows as they offer a visual clue of when a character or object touches the ground. Moreover, by using shadows, you can add more depth to perspective drawings.

(2) Use15 frames per second for computer animation – A normal film reel makes use of 24 frames per second (fps). In order to reduce the number of drawings, conventional cartoon animators often uses the effective rate of 12 fps. There is no limit of a hardware based frame rate on computer and you can select any frame rate. Using the 15 fps offers a good balance between fluency and the number of images you need to draw or render.

(3) Drawing facial expressions on a separate layer – For creating the animation, there is requirement of large number of drawings.  Traditional animators draw on cel (acetate foil) for reducing the number of drawings required. While drawing a cartoon character on a PC, you should draw the facial expression including the eyes, mouth, nose and etc, on a separate layer. Therefore you have one layer of cartoon character with an empty face and another separate layer fills in the face. It helps you in changing the facial expression quickly of the character without the need of drawing the entire corps again.

(4)Using the motion blur – The “motion blur” which is inherent to photo and video cameras provides a clue about the speed as well as the direction of the motion. The human eye possesses a latency that causes moving objects to blur. This property of the human eye along with the camera blur, suggests that movie shot at 20 fps produces fluid motion. The images generated on computer does not have any exposure limit, thus moving objects appear too crisp when generated on computers. For this, you need higher frame rate, say 30 fps, for keeping the animation fluid. By using the Motion blur, you can perceive the sharpness of a moving object along with reducing the minimum frame rate for keeping the motion fluid.

(5) Lip synchronization – It takes a lot of effort to synchronize lips movement with words. In case of high quality animation, the character’s mouth is drawn with accuracy in the correct shape, for every phoneme for handling the proper lip synchronization. If your 2d Character does not display much detail, then you can apply this trick. You can draw only a few basic mouth shapes: “A”, “E”, “I”, “O”, “U”, and so on. It should be just enough for covering the major mouth forms. You require a matrix of frames for transitions from one form to any other form. Thus, using these you can fix the Lip Synchronization issue.

(6) Make ‘moving holds’   -  In case of a hand drawn animation, it happens quite often that you need to animate an action, then slow into a pose by holding the drawing of specific pose for many frames, and then again move into action. The animation keeps alive with the held drawings also. However, in case of computer animation, your animation will die, the moment you hold the pose. In order to overcome this, you need to use a “moving hold” that allows you to continuous move some part slightly instead of stopping the every part of the character.  By making even the slightest movement, your character will remain alive.

(7) Using anti-aliased sprites for fluent animations – In case of sprite animation, the usage of Motion blur is very costly. You can use a mask with softened edges and use alpha-blending for combining the sprite along with the background. Apart from reducing the roughness of the edges of a sprite, this trick also blurs the motion around the edges. AniSprite refers to a library for Microsoft Windows which supports alpha-blending. A paper on algorithms is also available for feathering a mask for anti-aliased sprites.

(8) Loops and transitions – An animated character shows a few repeatable movements like walking. Once a complete step is drawn using the set of frames, you can repeat those frames again for the next step. In some cases the character also has non-repeatable movements like standing up from a seating position. You need to draw a few frames for this non-repeatable movement and also add few more frames to show transition from standing position to a walking. The repeatable movements are termed as “loops” and non-repeatable movements are “transitions”.  If you have cautiously made out at what frame a loop end, you can easily link poses and loops to one another through transitions. After drawing a complete loop, you can select any frame as the start point and end point. It is better to draw the loops first and later on checking what transitions would be required.

The ending frame for a loop should be selected as it also makes up for the starting frame of a transition from that loop to others. Thus, you can make it a key-frame and using it proves to be advantageous.

(9) Improving the illusion of depth by changing the sharpness and the saturation of colours. By using perspective drawing, you can create an illusion of depth in the image. In order to improve the illusion of depth, you should paint objects on the foreground in complete and strong (saturated) colours and background objects should be painted in pastel (or unsaturated) colours. Also, the photographic and video cameras usually focus on a particular distance. Thus, the object that stays in focus is pictured sharply, while others object are blurred.  You can depict the same effect in your drawings by blurring the background objects.

(9) Using a single timer for all animations and timed events – You can use a single timer as the time base for animations and other time-related events. When you are using the two timers then you need to keep the timers synchronized. For that, you must use one of the timers as the master and add code to the other timer for monitoring the master constantly. It is called as the “chasing” of a timer.

Animation is an art form which has its traces in the history in the form of drawings which were only experimental. The oldest evidence includes still drawings of Palaeolithic cave paintings that depict the artistic interest in showing figures in motion. It showed the animals with multiple sets of legs in the superimposed positions that clearly attempt to convey the perception of motion. A 5,200-year old earthen bowl in Shahr-i Sokhta and an ancient Egyptian mural are few other examples.  The animation is also reflected in the Seven drawings by Leonardo da Vinci that extends over two folios in the Windsor Collection and the anatomical Studies of the body Muscles with detailed drawings of the upper body showing the changes as the body moves. They merely reflect the intentions and interests of artists in depicting motion in earlier days.

Victorian parlor toys – A majority of the early inventions which are designed for creating animated  images were intended for private amusement. There are various types of the Animation devices that come into this category such as the zoetrope, praxinoscope, thaumatrope, magic lantern, phenakistoscope, and flip book

Zoetrope – It is a device for creating the images of a moving picture. The earliest zoetrope was created in China around 180 AD by Ting Huan.  It was constructed from translucent paper or mica panels. The modern zoetrope was invented in 1834 by William George Horner that looks like a cylinder with vertical slits around the sides. It is used in animation courses for illustrating early concepts of animation.

The magic lantern – The magic lantern is the precursor of the projector of modern day. It consisted of a translucent oil painting along with a simple lamp. When it is put together in a darkened room, the image would show bigger on a flat surface.

Thaumatrope -  It was a simple toy that comprise of a small circular disk or card along with two different pictures on each side which was attached to a pair of strings running along the centre. By twirling the string quickly, the two pictures combine to show a single image.

Phenakistoscope  ,flip book and Praxinoscope are other examples of the earlier animation devices.

You can easily follow the below mentioned steps for putting a Flash movie in the PowerPoint presentation for remarkable animation.

To begin with, you need to write down the location of the SWF file which you would like to use. You can also follow this path View>Toolbars>Control Toolbox. You should now click the Hammer button for more controls. Next you need to select Shockwave Flash Object from the menu. You should also drag a box across the screen for getting the required size and location. You should also Right click the box and choose Properties and in the Properties window, you are required to click the top line, Custom and then click the ellipsis at the right.

You should type the location of the SWF file that you have written down earlier in the Property Pages dialog box. You may use the full path and set the other parameters such as Window: window, quality: best; and Scale: show all. You can also click on Embed movie in case you would like to ensure that it is included always with the power point presentation. Now, you should clock on OK and close the Properties window by using its close box. You can also select Slide Show view for watching the movie. If case your movie didn’t show in Normal view, it will appear in case you return to Normal view after completion of the slide show.

You can also match the movie background as per the background of the PowerPoint presentation. In case, a Flash movie is not playing then you can open the Properties window again and check the Playing property. If it is False then you should click Playing and the down arrow. Now you should change it to True. The files which are placed on master will continue to play from slide to slide for creating an animated background.