Digital animation: types and techniques

Types of animation:

• Stop motion
• Cartoon
• Claymation
• 2D animation
• 3D animation (CGI)
• Line drawing
• Cel animation
• Hand drawn
• Rotoscoping
• Live action

Line drawing

• A hand-drawn sketch which moves frame by frame so the shape evolves and moves.
• It is commonly used in contemporary advertising.
• Line drawings, today, are generally created using Adobe Illustrator, Adobe flash and lightbox.
• Scalable vector graphics (SVGs) are animated by code.

Cel animation

• Short for celluloid animation
• Many Disney films were created in this way.
• A cel is a celluloid sheet- a transparent sheet onto which characters and scenery are drawn or painted. This is traditionally done by hand.

Hand drawing

• Not common today due to time-consuming and can be better achieved digitally.
• The film spirited away was entirely hand drawn.
• Miyazaki wrote, directed and drew the storyboards for the movie; essentially writing the movie with drawings. When you watch the film, you’re seeing one man’s work and vision.

Live action animation

• In which non-animated characters interact with animated characters.
• Famously used in who framed roger Rabbit and space jam.

Stop motion and Claymation

• Bringing inanimate objects to life.
• This is achieved meticulously, by moving the object incrementally and photographing it. In this way, it seems as if the object itself is moving when the frames are played sequentially. LIGHTING MUST BE CONSISTENT.

Development vs run time.

• Ideally 1 min for my animation

Computer generated imagery (CGI)

• When the digital technology and software is used to generate animated images and graphics.
• CGI refers to static scenes and moving characters, while computer animation refers only to moving characters/ scenes.
• 3D animation is used in a lot of blockbusters to make characters seem more rounded (Pixar and toy story, for example)

Rendering: the process of generating an image from a 2D or 3D model via the use of computer programs.

Tweening: when frames between two key movements are generated in digital animation 

Chroma key: a special effects technique for layering two images or video streams together. The subject is filmed on blue or green screen. During post-production, the background is removed and replaced with CGI.