What is Animation?
In the Oxford dictionary the word Animation means ‘ Being alive’. Animation is the technique of producing a moving picture from a sequence of drawings or simply put Animation is change over time.
Let’s take the example of the flipper book which is the most basic and easily achievable form of Animation. It is just a pad of drawings bound like a book at one end. Hold it at the bound end with one hand and flip the pages with the other end.
Consider that every leaf of the book has a printed image of a character in the same position, with a slightly changing dance pose. When flipped, these series of images move one after another. As the pages flip our eyes move from one pose to the other in a continuous and rhythmic pattern at a certain speed which in turn looks as if the character is dancing. This is the change or action happening over a certain amount of time which brings about a sense of motion which we know as Animation. This is the same as kids making small drawing in the corner of their exercise books and flipping the pages. This also holds true to the media of film, television and video also, if you stop or freeze frames of a video you can see a still picture. The moving pictures that we see in cinema are not a moving picture but in fact are basically made up of a series of still images moving at the rate of 24 frames (images) per seconds (fps), our brains stop seeing these images as separate and static, but instead we observe constant movement.
This is because of a phenomenon known as Persistence of Vision (POV) which has been known to man from centuries but was first properly identified in 1825, shortly before the invention of photography. POV means that when an image in a sequence passes in front of our sight, our brain holds back the image for about one-tenth of a second after the image has moved ahead from our sight. This visual delay helps us see the moving images in a continuous manner as one image gets merged into the other, which in turn creates the illusion of movement.
One of the major differences between the making of a live action film and an animated film is that the live action camera captures a scene moving in real-time, freezing the movements into separate still pictures, which can then be projected onto the screen .In the case of an animator, the whole world has to be created by him as there exists nothing to be filmed. He uses drawings, puppets, models or a computer program to create the animation from zero.
He designs the sets and every character along with their environments; he tells the story with these elements and films it as it slowly progresses from one stage to another. There are different mediums of making animation; all these mediums have been the result of man’s fascination with all things that move. Over the centuries man has tried to understand motion and how things move. There is an evidence of how over 35,000 years ago, the ice age man was drawing pictures of animals on cave wall, and some of these drawings had four pair of legs to show the running motion.
In Egypt around 1600 BC the Pharaoh Rameses III built a temple to the goddess Isis which had 110 columns, with each column painted with the figure of the goddess in progressively changing poses. The horsemen or chariot-driver racing by felt that Isis moved.
The Ancient Greeks decorated pots with figures in successive stages of actions. Spinning the pot would create a sense of motion.
In India, we have the traditional art of puppetry (Kathputli),where the puppeteer with the aid of the strings attached to the legs and arms of the puppets tend to make them move and dance and act out various dramatic stories . In China there still exists the ancient art of shadow play Drama, where the characters are cut-outs with a stick at one end. The shadows are projected on a white screen with a help of colored lanterns by the artists who handle the cut-out characters with the help of the stick.
In the present times we have seen lots of 2d animation also called classical animation made famous by the great characters like Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Donald duck, Tom & Jerry, Roger Rabbit & Daffy Duck and in the Indian context we have seen Tenali Raman, Birbal, Hanuman come to life on the big and small screen.
Recently, there has been a big craze for 3d Animation also called Computer Generated (CG) animation .In a very short span of time 3d animation has become very popular and has become a very powerful medium to tell great stories. Memorable like the Star Wars, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Stuart Little, have used 3d animation for creating the central Characters and their Environments. like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Shrek were fully 3d animated . These films and its characters have become world famous and have shown that computer can be used to create more than DTP and Graphic Design. Another genre of animation though lesser know and used but equal in all respects to 2d and CG is Clay Animation, also called Clamation.
Difference between 2d and 3d Animation
2d means two dimensions, e.g. Drawings made on paper, Paper has 2 dimensions the x-axis (Width) and y-axis (Height) but there is negligible amount of Depth (z axis). The drawings look flat, and one can understand depth only because the perspective or depth is drawn. Essentially most forms of animated film-making were produced through flat images usually drawn on cels (Transparent sheets which can be overlaid on background paintings and then photographed), but occasionally painted on glass or even directly onto the film itself. This is also called 2d Animation or Classical animation.
When drawings are created and animated in computer animation programs like Flash, US Animation, Animo is also called 2d animation. These Drawings are flat and have no depth, the depth is drawn but it does not really exist. Examples of 2d animation are the famous cartoons of Mickey and Donald, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, The Adventure of Tenali Raman Johnny Bravo, The Power Puff Girls, and like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Hanuman. A 3d animator works with any media with three dimensions, they could be objects made of clay, or models built on a metal frame also called Armature, from clay, fabric or rubber , they could be puppets with movable joints for movement. But it doesn’t stops there; a 3d animator can use any inanimate object from a rack of drawers to any movable object available in home or workplace to create movement, thus animation. Whereas, animation done on the computers with the use of 3d softwares like Maya, 3d Studio Max, Softimage XSI, are called 3d animation as all of these mediums create Animation from subjects which have three dimensions (x,y,z). For e.g. Pingu, Wallace and Grommit, Chicken Run, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, etc.
Harold Raichur
Director
Seamedu Animation & Art
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