The Uses of Animation 1

The Uses of Animation 1 1 The Uses of Animation ANIMATION Animation is the process of making the illusion of motion and change by means of the rapid display of a sequence of static images that minimally differ from each other. The illusion—as in motion pictures in general—is thought to rely on the phi phenomenon. Animators are artists who specialize in the creation of animation. Animation can be recorded with either analogue media, a flip book, motion picture film, video tape,digital media, including formats with animated GIF, Flash animation and digital video. To display animation, a digital camera, computer, or projector are used along with new technologies that are produced. Animation creation methods include the traditional animation creation method and those involving stop motion animation of two and three-dimensional objects, paper cutouts, puppets and clay figures. Images are displayed in a rapid succession, usually 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second. THE MOST COMMON USES OF ANIMATION Cartoons The most common use of animation, and perhaps the origin of it, is cartoons. Cartoons appear all the time on television and the cinema and can be used for entertainment, advertising, 2 Aspects of Animation: Steps to Learn Animated Cartoons presentations and many more applications that are only limited by the imagination of the designer. The most important factor about making cartoons on a computer is reusability and flexibility. The system that will actually do the animation needs to be such that all the actions that are going to be performed can be repeated easily, without much fuss from the side of the animator. Speed here is not of real importance, as once the sequence is complete, it can be recorded on film or video, frame by frame and played back at an acceptable speed. Simulations Many times it is much cheaper to train people to use certain machines on a virtual environment (i.e., on a computer simulation), than to actually train them on the machines themselves. Simulations of all types that use animation are supposed to respond to real- time stimuli, and hence the events that will take place are non— deterministic. The response to real-time stimuli requires a fast response and the non—determinism, requires a fast system to deal with it. This means that speed is the most important factor in simulation systems. Scientific Visualisation Graphical visualisation is very common in all areas of science. The usual form that is takes is x-y plots and when things get more complicated three dimensional graphs are used. However there are many cases that something is more complex to be visualised in a three dimensional plot, even if that has been enhanced with some other effect (e.g., colour). Here is where animation comes in. Data is represented in multiple images (frames) which differ a little from each other, and displayed one after the other to give the illusion of motion. This adds a fourth dimension and increases the information conveyed. Speed here is again the most important factor, as huge sets of data might have to be displayed in real-time. Someone might argue, that results maybe filmed and played back, but that depends on how often the sequence has to be recalculated. For example it might take a few days or weeks to generate an The Uses of Animation 3 animation of a fractal, which zooms in slowly, and it might be distressing to realise that it has zoomed in at the wrong place. The uses of scientific visualisation can be classified into two main categories: analysis and teaching. Analysis and Understanding Very frequently, scientists have large sets of data (often in the form of lists of numbers) that need to be understood and often a theory needs to be formulated that explains their relationship. It would be very difficult to go through these lists manually or otherwise and make any sense out of them, unless some graphical technique is used for the initial approach. If the data set is massive, a short (or long) animation of the data can give the scientists a first idea of how to approach the situation. Examples of the different uses of animation: • Astronomers use computers to do animations if high speed jets penetrating different gases, to determine why a few galaxies flare dramatically. (This research has given out valuable information about why some galaxies flare into broad plumes and why others remain extremely straight and narrow). • British Telecom uses sophisticated Programmes that plot on a map of the UK, the density of telephone fault reports using different colours. When a storm was plotted on top of this map and the whole system was animated it could be seen that the density of faults increased significantly at areas from which the storm had just passed. • Animation can be used in software engineering, where an algorithm can be animated, in order to understand how it works or to debug it. Spotting errors using animation, becomes much easier. Teaching and Communicating One of the most difficult aspects of teaching is communicating ideas effectively. When this becomes too difficult using the classical teaching tools (speech, blackboard etc.) animation can be used to 4 Aspects of Animation: Steps to Learn Animated Cartoons convey information. From its nature, an animation sequence contains much more information than a single image or page of text. This, and the fact that an animation can be very “pleasing to the eye”, makes animation the perfect tool for learning. Two examples of the use of animation for learning are: • Programmes that show the planetary system in action in three dimensions make it very easy for kids to understand rather than using tables of sizes, periods and diameters. • Astrophysicists at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, work with artists, in order to explain some phenomena which cannot be seen such as the visualisation of the gravitational field of a Schwarzchild black hole. The latter is not visible as it absorbs all light that falls onto it. The only way of experimenting with it is to animate it on a computer. History Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion into a still drawing can be found in paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are often depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion. An earthen goblet discovered at the site of the 5,200-year-old Burnt City in southeastern Iran, depicts what could possibly be the world’s oldest example of animation. The artifact bears five sequential images depicting a Persian Desert Ibex jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree. Ancient Chinese records contain several mentions of devices that were said to “give an impression of movement” to human or animal figures, these accounts are unclear and may only refer to the actual movement of the figures through space. In the 19th century, the phenakistoscope (1832), zoetrope (1834) and praxinoscope (1877) were introduced. A thaumatrope (1824) is a simple toy with a small disk with different pictures on each side; a bird in a cage, and is attached to two pieces of strings. The The Uses of Animation 5 common flip book were early animation devices that produced an illusion of movement from a series of sequential drawings, animation did not develop further until the advent of motion picture film and cinematography in the 1890s. The cinématographe was a projector, printer, and camera in one machine that allowed moving pictures to be shown successfully on a screen which was invented by history’s earliest film makers,Auguste and Louis Lumière, in 1894. The first animated projection (screening) was created in France, by Charles-Émile Reynaud, who was a French science teacher. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877 and the Théâtre Optique in December 1888. On 28 October 1892, he projected the first animation in public, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris. This film is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used. His films were not photographed, they were drawn directly onto the transparent strip. In 1900, more than 500,000 people had attended these screenings. The first film that was recorded on standard picture film and included animated sequences was the 1900 Enchanted Drawing, which was followed by the first entirely animated film - the 1906Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton, who, because of that, is considered the father of American animation. The first animated film created by using what came to be known astraditional (hand-drawn) animation - the 1908 Fantasmagorie by Émile Cohl 6 Aspects of Animation: Steps to Learn Animated Cartoons Charlie in Turkey (1916), an animated film by Pat Sullivan for Keen Cartoon Corporation. In Europe, the French artist, Émile Cohl, created the first animated film using what came to be known as traditional animation creation methods - the 1908 Fantasmagorie. The film largely consisted of a stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action in which the animator’s hands would enter the scene. The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look. The author of the first puppet-animated film (The Beautiful Lukanida (1912)) was the Russian-born (ethnically Polish) director Wladyslaw Starewicz, known as Ladislas Starevich. More detailed hand-drawn animation, requiring a team of animators drawing each frame manually with detailed backgrounds and characters, were those directed by Winsor McCay, a successful newspaper cartoonist, including the 1911 Little Nemo, the 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur, and the 1918 The Sinking of the Lusitania.

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