Assessment 2 & 3 – Animation

Stuart Matthews
Assessment 2 & 3 – Animation
Animation can be used for giving instructions, catching attention and can be 2d and 3d. As with graphics and images animation can be used to convey information without language barriers. Animation is the display of a sequence of images with small changes which creates the illusion of movement. The most common animation media is motion picture and video. Software can be used to create animation using key frames, score and cast and is created by playing a series of still images in sequence. There are several types of animation, the first animations were flip books which is a book with a series of pictures with slight changes drawn on each page and when the pages are turned quickly it creates the illusion of motion. Frame-by-frame animation or stop motion is the process of making a manually moved object to appear as if it moving on its own by moving an object small amounts and photographing each frame. Tweening, or in-betweening, is the process animation software uses to key motion frames between key-frames. This process allows helps the user to create motion animation. In the past this process would have required a team of animators to manually draw the frames between the keyframes.
Animation is often also used other mediums like films, TV and all cartoons where it is also referred to as CGI (Computer-generated-imagery). To create these complex animations there is often many animations within the main animation. This allows more life-like movements for example in a walking motion the legs and arms need to be animated while the animation move across the stage. 3d rendering is the final process in creating complex and realistic animations. 3d rendering is the process of adding photo realistic graphics to a model, this can take many computers a long time to complete.
Animation software includes Flash, Pencil and 3d Blender and can be used to automate to process of creating animations. These programs have many tools and features to help the user create animations. Tools available include 3d transformation which allows 2d images to be moved through 3d space, motion tweening to allow the automation of creating frames between keyframes and frame-by-frame animation. Many of these programs allow the user to export the movie as many different file types meaning the final animation can be used on many types of media.