Flip book

I made a flip book to help show the way that the eye process images. Using a flip book helps show this because the way the eye process it is as an moving image going across the paper and untill the flip book starts to slow down then the eye will see it as different drawings. (A video will be posted with this soon)

The Affordances of animation

The meaning of the affordances of animation is that you can draw whatever you want with animation because unlike cinematography you can draw it so get all the effects you want.

A good example is that in the film Xmen it uses a lot of CGI to make the film look really good and that costs a lot of money but in a game like Tomb Raider the animation is cheap to use and it makes the game look good.

Bouncing Ball

For this animation I used shape tween to give the effect of the ball falling and bouncing back up again. I also gave off the effect that the ball was getting squashed when it hit the bottom of the screen and this follows one of the 12 principles of animation. 

Car animation

I made another flash animation but with this one  I used motion tween and what this does is that you draw your shape and move it along the screen and flash makes the animation for you so that you do not have to do it frame by frame. The reason that this is good to use for animation is that you can make quick and easy animations that look pretty cool.  The bad thing about it is that you can not use it to make someone walk because if you try moving someone across it makes it look like the person is flying over the screen when they should be walking

Flash animation

To make my animation I used Flash. In flash I used frame by frame to make it and used the onion layer to help draw each frame, what the onion layer effect does is that when you start your next frame it has an outline of the frame before so that you can draw the next one and keep it the same. I added another layer on my animation to make the background.

Persistence of vision

This is the phenomenon of the eye by which as afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina.

A good way to show the persistence of vision is with a thaumatrope:

What a thaumatrope is a scientific toy which was created in the 19^th century, which consisted of two disc with different images on each disc and the way that it works is when the discs are spun, you let it unwind and you see the two images on one disc.

First I mounted the images on to cardboard and after I did that I cut out around the two images.

After I cut out the two images I stuck them together and cut out the holes and put string through them so that I could wind up and see the two images together.

The way that it works it is an optical allusion and because the eye cant process the two images and two different ones when it is moving quickly so that is why you can see the two images as one and only when it starts to slow down you see the two images separately.

The 12 principles of animation

The 12 principles of animation.

1. Squash and Stretch

This gives the illusion that the character has weight and volume as it is moving, this principle is also useful when it comes to the character talking and also with different facial expressions. Whatever is being animated has an effect on how extreme the squash and stretch is used in the scene. Squash and stretch is used in all forms of animation from bouncing a ball or the body weight of a person who is walking. This is the most important principles of animation because it is used the most.

2.  Anticipation

With this it prepares the audience for something that will happen for the major character for example running, jumping or changing facial expression. It is mainly used to develop a characters personality.

 3. Staging

This is a action or pose that should communicate to the audience the mood, attitude, idea or reaction or the idea of the character and it continuity of the story line.   The effectiveness of using long, medium or close up shots helps tell the story in a better way, also there is a limited amount of time in a film so each scene of a film must relate to the overall story. You must make sure that confuse the audience with too many actions at once. You have to use one  action clearly stated to get the idea across the only time you will not have to do this is when animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audience's attention to the story or idea being told.  When designing the background so it does not obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation.

4. Straight ahead and pose to pose animation

The straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works, drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. The down side of this is that you can lose size, proportions and volume but it does give the animation freshness and spontaneity. fast, the wild action scenes are done like this, pose to pose is a more planned out and carted with certain drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. The size and volumes and the proportions are controlled  better this way, as is the action.

5. Follow through and overlapping animation

When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, coat tails, clothing, dress, long tail or floppy ears. Nothing stops all at once this is the follow through. The overlapping action is when the character changes direction while their hair and clothes carry on going in the other direction. When a character moves in a new direction and after a number of frames later his clothes are following him in the new direction. 'DRAG' is used in animation and a example of this would be when Goofy starts to run, but his ears, head, clothes and upper body do not keep up with his legs. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

6. Slow-out and Slow-in

As action starts, there are more drawings near the starting pose, there is one or two in the middle and more drawing near the next pose. Having fewer drawings makes the action faster and having more drawings makes the action a lot slower. The slow-ins and the slow-outs soften the action making it more life-like. Making a gag action you may omit some slow-ins or slow-outs for the shock appeal or the surprise element, this will give more snap to the scene.

7. Arcs

Most action follow an arc or a slightly circular path, this is especially true for the human figure and the actions of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Thinking of natural movements in the terms or a pendulum swinging. All head turns, eye movement and arm movements are executed on an arcs.

8. Secondary action

With this action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. A good example of this is that when a character walks angrily to another character. Their walk is forceful, forward leaning and aggressive. The secondary action is some strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also there is a possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time.Think of the walk as the other primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all the other action of the body.

9. Timing

Timing in animation comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trail and error method in refining technique. The basics for this are; more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action, but having fewer drawings means that the action will be faster and crisper. Having a variety of fast and slow timing within a scene means that it adds to the texture and interest to the movement.

10. Exaggeration

It is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. It is like a caricature of facial features, poses,expressions, actions and attitudes. Action traced from live action film could be accurate but stiff and mechanical.  In animation a character must move more broadly to look natural

11. Solid Drawing

The basic principles of drawing from, volume, weight, solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to the animation as it does to academic drawing. . The way in which you draw cartoons is that you start off with the classic sense by using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life. Then you transforms these drawings by adding colour and movement giving the character the illuion of a three dimensional life.

12. Appeal

With animated character has appeal, and with appealing animations they do not have to  be cute and happy. All the characters have to be appealing in their own way even if they are a villain. Appeal includes an easy to read design, clear drawing and personality development that will capture the audience's interest. With the early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme.

i got my information from: http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/anim_principles.html

Matt Groening

Matt groening from MeganWJ

Pioneers and developers of animation

There have been many developers and pioneers for animation but these people have had the most influence with it.

Joseph Plateau 
 He started out as a Belgian physicist. He started out by studying at the University of Liege where he became a doctor and a mathematical scientist in 1829. His research was about the human eye and the way it work, he mainly focused on the rentia because it would let the eye see colour.
  Along with his sons Plateau introduced the Phenakistoscope in 1832, it was a spindle viewer. Being a famous pioneer he was inspired by Michael Faraday and Peter Mark Roget. The way that his invention worked was that it had two disks that spun in opposite directions and it was used to give the illusion of motion. The way that the two disks moved was that they were mounted on the same axis, the first disk had slots on it where as the seconds disk had images on it which had different actions on it. The way that the images were viewed was by spinning them and looked through the slots and it made it look like the images were moving.
  He was considered an influence because of him he started the whole moving animation.
  The places I got my information was from

http://animationgeek.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/early-pioneer-joseph-plateau.html and also here http://prezi.com/ofinsitqhklg/animation-history/ 

William Horner

  Horner was a pioneer who started out as a British Mathematician who also published a mode of solving a numerical equation to any degree and this became known as the Horner degree. 

  He is another animation pioneer who is known for inventing the Zoetrope he called it the Deadalum which means the wheel of the Devil, he created it in 1834 and this device was just a mere improvement of Plateau's Pkenakistoscope but Horner's invention was forgotten about for around 30 years until the year 1867 when it was patented by M. Bradley in England also it was patented by an American who was called William F. Lincoln who renamed it as the Zoetrope. The way that it works was by having a large drum which had slots at the top and pictures around the base of it and when it was spun people looked through the slots and could see the images, it was just like Plateau's invention but with Plateau only one person could use it at a time where as Horner's invention menant that more than one person could use it. Also with Horner's invention the faster the drum was spun the clearer the images came out. 

   He was an influence because his invention it helped influence animators like Tim Burton and Aardman. 

   The place I got my information from was http://tomtyldesleyanimation1.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/animation-pioneers-william-horner.html

  and also from http://prezi.com/ofinsitqhklg/animation-history/

Emile Reynaud

   Reynaud was born 1844 in France, Reynaud went into an apprenticeship in 1858 where his work was repairing, assembling and developing optical and physics instruments after this he went to Artige & Co., to learn industrial drawing, after this he went on to working as an operator at the portraitist Adam-Salomon where the work he did was photographic retouching.   

   Reynaud was a photographer, teacher and artist but he is known for inventing the Praxinoscope in 1876, also known for being the creator of the firsts animated cartoon, he was one of the pioneers of the cinema. As he continued with his development on the Praxinoscope to become the Praxinoscope-theatre and then carried on developing it so it became projection-Praxinoscope, the problem with these machines was that they could only reproduce a cyclical movement which had a limit of 12 frames. Then in 1888 he developed the Optical Theatre which was used to project short cartoons from October 1892- march 1900 and this was when animated cartoons were founded. The way his work was better than the first two pioneers was that he had lot of experience that he could transfer over to creating animation like his photography.

   Reynaud is considered influential because without him there would not be animated cartoons.

   I got my information from:

http://prezi.com/ofinsitqhklg/animation-history/

And

http://www.emilereynaud.fr/en/index.php/post/Biography

Eadweard Muybridge 

  He was an inventor, filmaker and a photographer from 1830-1904, he was from Kingston upon Thames. 

  What he was famous for was proving that when a horses run all four hooves were off the ground. The way that he got the photos of the horse running was by having a line of cameras and when the horse ran it triggered some shutters of the camera. From doing this experiment he invented the Zoopraxiscope which projected animated versions of his work in a short moving sequence which helped with the developments in the history of the cinema. In the 1850’s he was known as one of the most influential photographers of all time because of how he pushed the limits of the camera’s possibilities and by pushing the limits he created world famous images of animals and humans in motion. Muybridge made his own high speed electrical shutters and timer which would be used alongside a battery of twenty-four cameras.

He is considered an influence because with his photos our understanding and interpretation of the world has changed forever and because of how his photos should how detailed movement was it meant that in today’s world when companies makes animation it means that they can make the movement of the animated character even more detailed.

I got my information from:  

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/eadweard-muybridge

http://prezi.com/ofinsitqhklg/animation-history/  

http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/muybridge_image_and_context/introducing_muybridge/

Thomas Edison
    He was born in 1847, he was as an inventor of major technology and he did this by setting up a lab in Menlo Par, in this lab some of the things that he invented was the electric light bulb, alkaline storage batteries, telegraph, phonograph and Kinetograph.
    Edison made the Kinetograph which was a box that a film could be seen through a peep hole at the top of the box and using a lens that can display pictures that would run at 46 frame per second because of this invention motion pictures started to become a successful entertainment industry in less than a decade.
  Edison is considered an influence because without him the modern day cinema would not be around and he helped the entertainment industry become a lot bigger than it was.
  His work was a bigger improvement than the others because his invention had more parts to it and also because he had already invented other things it meant that this could be more improved and more advanced.
  The places that I found my information was

http://prezi.com/ofinsitqhklg/animation-history/

http://www.biography.com/people/thomas-edison-9284349#synopsis

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhm.html

Lumiere Brothers
 Louis and Auguste Lumiere were two French inventors and pioneer manufactures of photographic equipment.  They devised an early motion picture camera and projector which is called the Cinematographe, this is where the word cinema came from.
   When they saw Edison's invention they wanted to improve it, in 1895 the two brothers had made their own device which combined a camera with a printer and a projector which they called the Cinematographe, with their device it projected 16 frames per second which was a lot less than Edison's but because of this the clattering and grinding noise that was made by Edison's machine wasn't there. Their first screening happened in 1895 at an industrial meeting, the 'film' that was shown was workers leaving the Lumiere factory.
  The reason that they are an influence is that without them there would not be a modern day cinema and they helped improve the ideas of other peoples inventions to make one good invention.
   where I got my information from was:

http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/lumiere.html

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1403398/Lumiere-brothers

http://www.earlycinema.com/pioneers/lumiere_bio.html 

The way that these 6 people had an big influence on animation was that it started out with one simple invention made by Plateu which was the Phenakistoscope and from then on they have been other people who have been developing it in their own way.  So between 1829 to 1895 a lot of things happened to go from the Phenakistoscope to the Cinematographe.