P1/2 and M1:
In this written report I will be answering the questions about the many different types of animation, where they are primarily used, and what people use to make them, there are many different types of animation some far more difficult than others, also some are used for certain style of film or video, and some are used as a specific tool to represent a genre. Another thing I will be discussing is what persistence of vision is, and how animators use it to affect what we see, so that separate still pictures look like one fluid motion and how they achieve this.
Different Types Of Animation and Their Uses:
Firstly I will be discussing four major animation techniques used largely in the media industries: CGI, Rotoscoping, Stop Motion and Cel Animation. All of these take varied amount of time, and vary in difficulty and cost, for example CGI takes 100's of animators animating very small segments to extreme detail, and because of this costs lots of money. While on the other end of the animation spectrum you have stop motion which can be achieved by one person, a camera and some clay. Secondly I will be describing the uses of these types of animations, for example CGI is used to create realistic monsters and make explosions, without actually having something explode, while something like rotoscoping is used because it gives off a creative and pencil drawing vibe.
CGI:
The first type of animation I will be talking about is CGI, this is primarily used in large blockbuster movies that have a expendable budget to create extremely realistic effects, or entire people and monsters, it's most common uses is to create something that would be too expensive, or too difficult, to make out of real life materials, such as a dragon, or a massive explosion, which making in real life would be more expensive than animating it. Originally when CGI was first used it was used to create small effects rather than actual creatures, CGI has developed vastly in the last 20 years as there is almost no films that come out in the last 2 years that will not contain some style of CGI. The example in this picture is from the film "Pirates Of The Caribbean", which shows the stages of transformation between actor, and Davy Jones, as you can see the way they achieve this is by him wearing a suit with balls on it, so that the camera's can follow his movements precisely, and also project a animated suit on him. CGI is the most commonly used animation technique in films, and requires 100's of animators to each do small sections of the film, because as CGI is incredibly detailed, they have to first make a undetailed shape and mould as you can see in the middle image, and then they add the texture and detail to the CGI the second time they animate it.
Rotoscoping:
The second type of animation I will be talking about is rotoscoping, which is used to draw effects over live action, it is used in two ways firstly and more commonly it is used to add small effects over the filming, such as the glow added on the lightsabers in star wars, but rotoscoping is sometimes used where frame by frame someone hand draws over the top of a film shot recreating each shot but with drawing, this kind of rotoscoping is largely used to firstly show someone drawing in a diary, or secondly to show a style of dream, as drawing over the entirety of each shot, makes them seem up beat and also portray a childish feel to them, which is why it is used, as shown in the picture above, in "Juno", it is used to open the film, which shows that is usually used to show a certain scene in the movie, i.e. Dream sequence, Opening etc. rather than animating the whole movie using rotoscoping.Stop Motion:
The third type of animation I will be showing is the least expensive of the four as it requires very little animating techniques, and doesn't require highly artistic drawing skills, nor does it require expensive animation software. For the most part stop motion only requires play-doh and a camera that takes pictures, to achieve smooth stop motion you take a picture of the clay models, then move there arms/legs etc. a very small amount in a direction, you then take another picture and repeat. Usually the amount of small movements and pictures taken required, is 24 frames per second, or in the case of stop motion, 24 pictures a second. Most famous examples come from Aardman Animations, who created "Wallace and Gromit", and "Chicken Run". It is extremely time consuming and in the example of "Wallace and Gromit: Curse Of The Were Rabbit", they took a full day to animate only 36 frames, and in total took them over a year and a half. The main uses for using stop motion animation is because very amateur animators can make smooth and good looking animations easily and cheaply. Another use is that stop animation can give off a cartoony vibe, which means it is used a lot when showing ideas to children, as it has a friendly look.
Cel animation:
Cel animation, also known as traditional or hand drawn animation, is one of the first styles of animation, it is popular with early Disney films such as 'Snow White', it is one of the earliest forms of animation and is achieved relatively easily, by doing frame by frame hand drawing, although achieved without lots of software, and instead done by doing each individual image by hand, therefore meaning it takes an excessive amount of time, although the animation gives of a cartoony vibe that other styles of animation cannot recreate. This came before computer animation software came about, which meant animators could produce CGI, hand drawing frame by frame was almost exclusively used when making animation. This means it's main uses are for making cartoons for children, although done lots more in the past than now a days, it was the main way anyone would do an animation, so it's main uses were to make films that are cartoony, and because everything is hand drawn is makes it look good for children.Uses of Animations Outside Films/TV:
I have explained the different purposes of animations within the media industries, but I have yet to talk about how they can be used to help educate people, or to demonstrate ideas clearer, or to show prototypes etc.
Education:
Animation can be used in education to teach ideas to students easier, such as in science when they use animations to show how particles move, or how scientific ideas work, it can also be used in other subjects such as geography to show how land masses move, or how water is evaporated and then turned into rain etc.
Advertisement:
Animations can also be used in the business world to show off, and advertise products, generally animation is used in children adverts, as smooth soft animation showing something is more accessible to a child, than a adult trying to advertise a kids product, they can also be used when trying to teach kids what not to do within adverts, such as not to smoke and to eat 5 a day, in the example of the advert change for life.
Prototypes/Visualisation:
Animations are used to construct prototypes for such jobs as an architect, or produce visual representations of scientific ideas when you are a chemist/biologist, this means animations are extremely helpful in the real world when you want to explain an idea to someone, with pictures rather than words.
Simulations:
Using animation to make simulations can be very helpful for someone who wants to practise driving or doing an activity without having bad consequences if you fail. Simulations come in many shapes and sizes, from using them to practise flying or driving skills before a test, to practising a guitar through animation simulations.
M1: Explaining What Persistence Of Vision Is:
Persistence of vision is the most important thing about animation, without it animation would not be able to exist, as our eye would read every image individually rather than a fluid motion.
In short persistence of vision is the illusion your mind creates for your eyes, making them believe that the images you see in front of you are actually moving in a fluid motion, rather than being a series of still images, the general amount of frames per second to fool the eye into seeing a smooth animation is 24, the reason it requires 24 is because according to the theory of persistence of vision an 'afterimage' stays on the retina for approximately 25th of a second. Essentially what your eyes do is they save the last image they have seen in short term memory, and then save the next one and the one after that, then your eyes imagine a unseen movement between the two images and see's the animation moving, by filling in the link between each frame.
Persistence of vision is only a theory, and many believe it not to be true. In 1912 the theory was disproved and many scientists believe the reason eyes see motion perception is due to other things, such as beta movement, or phi phenomenon.
P3/M2: Advantages and Limitations of GIFs and Flash Animation
Previously I have talked about different types of animation, and their uses, and also how animations use persistence of vision to influence their audience, and make them see something that doesn't actually exist. One of the animation types I have yet to talk about is a GIF, and the advantages and limitations of using a GIF, also Flash animation and the advantageous and limitations of Flash animation, and the benefits of using Flash over GIFs, and vice-versa.
Firstly before you consider what the advantages and disadvantages are of GIFs you should know exactly what they are, GIFs are simple, usually short animations, that don't take long to make, the reason for this is because instead of being a long video it is instead a small number of images ( normally anything from about to 10) which is looped, so it usually gives of the look of continues motion.
Advantages:
There are many advantages to using GIFs:
-Firstly they are easier to make than any other animation, they don't require lots of animation knowledge and can be achieved with just two images, for example having the words 'click here' on a loop of two different font colours. This can be useful if you want something that looks appealing, they can't show as much emotion as other types of animation, although they can show more than a still image.
-Secondly they are very small file sizes, much smaller than other animations, this is very useful if you want a few animations on your website but your worried about slowing your website down with many moving animations, with GIFs this is not a problem as they load as quickly as some still pictures.
-Lastly they look more appealing than having an entire website without a single moving picture when used correctly, also they can attract attention to a certain part of the website, and are generally appealing to younger children which can work in your favour.
Limitations/Disadvantages:
Although GIFs can be useful they also have many features which make them worse than other types of animation:
-Firstly when used in overabundance they look tacky and unprofessional, also having two many is extremely confusing and makes it hard to focus on one thing, as there are many things moving at the same time, also because fast flashy GIFs are associated with viruses, and pop ups it gives your website the wrong vibe.
-Secondly GIFs while being able to be uploaded to website quickly, they have generally a much poorer quality than other animations, because of the limited colour pallet many GIFs ending up looking similar, also in comparison to other animations the images look pixelated.
-Lastly GIFs can't really be used for animating anything large, as if you increase the size it becomes more obvious about the poor quality of the animation. Therefore this means that GIFs have limited uses, and are mainly used to highlight an area of a website, and that is about it.
In conclusion I personally would not recommend a GIF, although they can be used successfully if used once or twice, to simply attract the eye to a button on the page, most of the time they're used they come across as tacky and don't look attractive to the eye, I believe putting GIFs on a website would do more harm than good, as in modern society they're associated with viruses, advertisements and generally amateur web design.
M2-Comparing Two Animation Formats:
Flash animations is any type of animation created in flash, this means that it is not a type of animation , like cel or CGI, but rather a animation created in Adobe Flash, many sections of well known movies have been created in flash, such as The Incredibles, and WALL-E.
There are many reasons that Flash animation is a superior animation type to GIFs, and there are drawbacks to it, meaning a GIF can be greater for certain needs.
-For any animation requiring sound Flash is the obvious choice, as GIFs do not allow sound input.
-However GIFs are more accessible by all, as you do not need a flash player to run any GIF animations, while Flash animations do.
-Due to compression and colour palette choice with GIFs, you can create a much higher quality animation with Flash
-However GIFs are generally easier to create, and are less complicated and more useful than Flash animations when you want small recurring cycle animation.
-You have a much larger choice of possible interactions and options within a flash animation, then you would with a GIF, this due to the possibility of adding multiple user interactions onto a single animation, therefore meaning Flash animation can be used to create simple games. While GIFs on the other hand are difficult to program more than a single click of interaction, i.e: the GIF taking you to a webpage.
-While for very small animations Flash files are smaller, in general GIFs have a smaller file size, therefore making it easy to have multiple GIFs on a single page, and for them to load quickly. While to have multiple large animations running on the same page at the same time would be difficult for slower computers.
In conclusion, and after comparison, flash is a greater format, due to it's ability to be used for a multitude of tasks, as well as that the animation it produces has all round better quality.
P4: Software Tools Used For Animation:
There are a multitude of software tools that can be used for animation, they all have good and bad points, generally the better the animation software is, the more it costs, meaning you have to balance quality against cost.
There are many tools in the form of software available to the creator of an animation. A prime example of this is a tool in Adobe CS6, otherwise known as Flash. This with the addition of other software in the adobe packages such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver and fireworks allow people to create animation at amateur and professional level. There are also less complicated forms of software such as paint or pencil that can be useful in tweaking things that can be later imported into Flash. Software with little complexity includes examples such as PowerPoint and Prezi and online sites such as PowToon that provide great assistance when creating the animation. Flash can be very expensive (around £600-700) and recommended for advanced animation production.
Other less sophisticated software tools for animation include Scratch, which is useful if you do not have a lot of animating experience, as many of the functions are put onto templates, this is useful as not only does Scratch cost less than Flash but also is much easier, a likely negative for many animators is that many of the animations on Scratch are not high quality, and it is difficult to make something professional.
In conclusion I believe the best animating software is Flash, and that it is well worth the price if you want to become a professional animator.
If you decide to use Flash there are many tools within it that can be extremely useful:
-The selection and sub-selection are useful for selecting multiple objects in the foreground and background respectively.
-The magic wand and lasso tool are both useful for removing the background and unwanted parts in each image within your animation, as they both can select ares and cut them out, the magic wand is better for selecting one whole area, while the lasso tool is better for more refined editing.
-The free transform tool can be useful for two reasons, firstly as the name implies you can transform the edges of the images in the animation and dragging them to edit them. It can be also used to flip images, so that they are facing the opposite way, and rotate images, both of which are very useful.
-Flash also has various tools that make colouring in animations much easier, such as the paint bucket tool which can be used for filling in large areas with one colour. Also the eyedropper tool which tells you the exact colour the object your highlighting is, so that you can continue to use the paintbrush tool without having two different colours.
-There are also many tools that can be used to help you construct basic shapes, like the rectangle and oval tools, both of which save you time if you are just trying to create basic images. Along side them is also the straight line tool, which is mainly useful if you are using a mouse and not drawing, as it can be difficult to get a perfectly straight line.
P5
Rollover
A
rollover animation is where the user can put their mouse cursor over an image
on a webpage to make it change image when the cursor is over the image, but
this would revert back to the original image once the mouse
cursor completely off the image, this is referred to as a mouse rollover.
This
provides an simpler, easy to make and integrate animation on any web page,
this does not slow down the web page that much whatsoever as it is only loading
a second image once the mouse cursor is over the image
Advantages
- Easy to make
- Doesn’t slow down web page
- Good animation for examples
Disadvantages
- Only two images, the one
displayed and the other one after mouse rollover
- Not an animation as such
Email
attachments
Animations
can be inserted into email attachments in the form of e-cards. E-cards are
emails that are used to represent cards, for example, like a birthday card
because of the animation attached. These can be effective as detailed
animations can be inserted, unlike mouse rollovers which are only two images,
sound can be used and full animations from animation software can be integrated
into emails in the form of attachments.
Advantages
- Can be full featured
animations, such as Flash animations complete with sound and interactivity
- Easy to attach to emails and
send them as e-cards
- Much better than mouse
rollovers
Disadvantages
- If embedded into email, it
may take time to load for the receiver
Processor
speed
Full
featured Flash animations that are high quality can take some time to load and
to play smoothly, unless the person loading it has a computer with a
powerful processor, otherwise the animation may not work at all. This can be an
issue, so for a Flash animation that should be widely viewed, it needs to
be lower in quality and have a generally lower resolution and file size in order
for the animation to be loaded and viewed properly on most computer systems.
Formats
If the
animations going to be saved in a format rather obscure, then it is difficult
to expect smartphones, tablets or other computer systems being able to load and
view the animation correctly.
File size and type
One of the most important things you have to consider to upload a animation to the web is the file size and type, the most common way to upload an animation to the web is by making it a Gif file, the reason for this is because for short animations Gif's can keep the quality while also being only a couple of MB's large meaning they can be processed quickly.
Other factors you need to consider are how many animations are on the page, as the more there are the slower your animation will load, also will your animation automatically play or will it be clicked on to play, an advantage of an auto-play animation is that it immediately attracts the audiences attention, unfortunately many people may dismiss your animation as a popup and delete it before it plays, because generally most pop-ups are bright and automatically play. On the other hand the advantage of having an animation that either: -Doesn't play until clicked on -Plays without music or -Plays when you roll-over it, is that many people will pay attention to it because they know its likely not some scam. A disadvantage is that the audience might not pay attention to it in the first place.
File size and type
