Unit 33-LO1

History of animation and different techniques 

here are many techniques of animation and these are: drawn animation, cutout animation, model animation/stop motion animation, computer animation/ computer generated imagery (CGI), rotoscope, flipbook, clay or plastecine (Claymation), puppet animation etc. I am going to expand on some understanding of these techniques.

Firstly, I am going to explain what a drawn animation is. Drawn animation is a drawing of a character. For each frame the drawer draws the character slightly different and changes the posture of the body to show the movement of the character. This is very time consuming because you have to draw each frame, as like any other animation technique, it starts out as a storyboard with a rough sketch of the characters (hand-drawn). This helps the drawer to develop the little details a long the way to portray the characters personalities in every drawing of the animation. One example of a famous hand-drawn animation from the 1930’s is ‘Felix the cat’. It was created in the silent era of the 1960’s. This animation shows the simplicity of hand-drawn animations before compared to today’s hand-drawn animation, which is cleaner and not pixilated. One good example of a production that will be brought back is 'The Snow Queen' from 2002. It is scheduled for November 27^th 2013 will be released as a 3D production.

Another animation technique is cut out animation, which is a technique that uses materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs to create characters, props and backgrounds. One example of a cutout animation is South Park. South Park had first used actual paper cutouts in their first ever episode, but now that technology has been more advanced over the years it is done digitally with computers. What the computer does is scan the images or vector graphics instead of cutting out physically.

The flipbook and stop motion animation techniques are very interesting and take a matter of days/months to complete the desired look and motion. This is simply because in a stop motion scenario, you will have to take pictures for every movement, and for every movement it is required that you have 24 frames per second.

That is where persistence of vision from the human eye comes in. The human eye retains an image for a fraction of a second, meaning that everything we see is a subtle blend of what is happening now and what happened a fraction of a second ago. The stop motion animation technique very much is suitable for human eyes as we see a sequence of frames its as if it is a continuous moving picture. 

Flipbook:

Stop motion: