INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS

ANIMATION

• Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, The Simpsons - are just some cartoons that have captivated the minds of kids as well as adults. All these cartoon characters are the creation of the wonderful art of animation that captivates our eyes and makes our childhood days full of fun. So what is Animation and how can it be created?

ANIMATION

• Animation is possible because of a biological phenomenon called Persistence of Vision and a physiological phenomenon called phi.

• An object seen by the human eye remains chemically mapped on the eye’s retina for a brief time after viewing. Combined with the human minds need to conceptually complete a perceived action, this makes it possible for a series of images that are changed very slightly and very rapidly, one after the other, to seemingly blend together into a visual illusion of movement.

ANIMATION SPACE• 2-D Space:

– Very simple and straight forward.

• 2-1 / 2D Space:

– An illusion of depth is created through shadowing, highlighting and forced perspective; though in reality images rest in 2 dimensions.

• 3-D Space:

– Complicated and realistic animations are constructed and modeled.

ANIMATION TECHNIQUES

Traditional Animation

• Cel Animation

• Key Frames

• Rotascoping

• Live/Action Animation

Stop Motion Animation

• Model Animation

• Puppet Animation

• Clay Animation

CEL ANIMATION

• Cel animation or hand-drawn animation was the process used for most animated films of the 20th century. The individual frames of a traditionally animated film are photographs of drawings, which are first drawn on paper. To create the illusion of movement, each drawing differs slightly from the one before it.

• The animators' drawings are traced or photocopied onto transparent acetate sheets called cels, which are filled in with paints in assigned colors or tones on the side opposite the line drawings.

• Cel animation was a major technical breakthrough in figurative animation. A technique in which the figures to be animated are drawn and painted on cels, placed over a background, and photographed frame by frame. Cel animation has been the standard technique for studio animation since its invention in 1915.

CEL ANIMATION

• Works on basis of the first and last frame of an action.

• The frames in between the key frames are drawn in a Tweening process

• TWEENING:

– Depicts actions that take place between key frames.

KEY FRAMES

KEY FRAMES

• A key frame in animation and filmmaking is a drawing that defines the starting and ending points of any smooth transition. They are called "frames" because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film.

• A sequence of keyframes defines which movement the spectator will see, whereas the position of the keyframes on the film, video or animation defines the timing of the movement. Because only two or three keyframes over the span of a second do not create the illusion of movement, the remaining frames are filled with in-betweens.

KEY FRAME ANIMATION• Limited animation is a process of making

animated cartoons that does not redraw entire frames but variably reuses common parts between frames.

• The process of limited animation mainly aims at reducing the overall number of drawings. Film is projected at 24 frames per second.

• Some cartoons that still use these techniques are Powerpuff Girls, The Pink Panther and Samurai Jack.

KEY FRAME ANIMATION• "Limited" animation creates an image that uses

abstract art, symbolism, and fewer drawings to create the same effect, but at a much lower production cost. This style of animation depends upon animators' skill in emulating change without additional drawings; improper use of limited animation can be easily recognized as unnatural.

TASK:

• Create a hand drawn animation.

• Create an animation that depicts a particular story.

• Needs to be submitted along with practical journals on Tuesday; 7th Sept 2010.

ROTOSCOPING

• Rotoscoping is a technique, patented by Max Fleischer in 1917, where animators trace live-action movement, frame by frame.

• This is a technique in which images are copied from a moving video onto an animation. The animator draws the motion and shape of the object by referring to the video as opposed to imagining the whole thing in his head.

• With the help of rotoscoping complex sceens that are hard to visualize can be smoothly animated.

• The source film for animation is usually directly copied from actors' outlines into animated drawings, as in The Lord of the Rings (US, 1978), used as a basis and inspiration for character animation,used in a stylized and expressive manner.

• One major drawback of this technique:

– You need to hunt for videos of exact situations and scenes that you want to animate

ROTOSCOPING

LIVE ACTION

• A live-action/animation is usually viewed in films that features a combination of real actors or elements: live-action and animated elements, typically interacting.

• Combining hand-drawn characters into live action shots.

• Typical examples are “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “Space Jam”.

• The combination of live action and animation is becoming very common in TV commercials.

• Dragonheart: A New Beginning

• Fantasia 2000

• Stuart Little - Stuart Little 2

• Scooby Doo

• Looney Tunes: Back in Action

• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

• Garfield: The Movie

• Charlotte's Web

• Enchanted

• Alvin and the Chipmunks

• WALL-E (live-action sequences)

• G-Force

STOP MOTION ANIMATION• Stop-motion animation is used to describe

animation created by physically manipulating real-world objects and photographing them one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement.

• There are many different types of stop-motion animation, usually named after the type of media used to create the animation. Computer software is widely available to create this type of animation.

MODEL ANIMATION

• Model animation refers to stop-motion animation created to interact with and exist as a part of a live-action world.

• Intercutting, matte effects, and split screens are often employed to blend stop-motion characters or objects with live actors and settings.

CLAY ANIMATION

• Clay animation, or Plasticine animation often abbreviated as claymation, uses figures made of clay or a similar malleable material to create stop-motion animation.

• Each animated piece, either character or background, is “deformable”.

• As in other forms of object animation, the object is arranged on the set (background), a film frame is exposed, and the object or character is then moved slightly by hand. Another frame is taken, and the object is moved slightly again. This cycle is repeated until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film.

• Examples of clay-animated works include:

The Gumby Show Chicken Run Smurfs.

CLAY ANIMATION

COMPUTER ANIMATION• Quite similar to cel animation.

• The primary difference:

– How much is drawn by the animator and how much is automatically generated by the software.

• Computer animation has become very common. 

• Computer animation began about 40 years ago when the first computer drawing system was created by General Motors and IBM. It allowed the user to view a 3D model of a car and change the angles and rotation.

• Years later, more people helped make computer animation better.  Movies that used computer animation are: The Abyss, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, and more.

• A well-known computer animation company is Pixar.  They are responsible for making Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and more.

COMPUTER ANIMATION

• Kinematics:

– Study of movement of structures that have joints.

– Animating a walking step or movement is tricky

• One needs to calculate the position, rotation, velocity and acceleration of all the joints and articulated parts involved- Knees bend, shoulders swing, head bobs, fingers stretch etc.

COMPUTER ANIMATION

• Inverse kinematics

– the process of linking objects (such as hands to arms), and defining their relationship and limits.

COMPUTER ANIMATION

Making Successful Animations:

• High quality animations require superior display platforms and hardware, as well as raw computing horsepower.

• File compression is very important when preparing animation files for the Web.

PROCESS OF

ANIMATION• Story Board Layout

• Object Definitions

• Key Frame Specifications

• Generation of in-between frames

ANIMATION TERMINOLOGIES

• Looping

• Morphing

• Image Morphing

• 3-D Morphing

• Point Morphing

• Rendering

MORPHING:

• A still or moving image is transformed into another.

RENDERING

• Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model, by means of computer programs. The model is a description of three-dimensional objects in a strictly defined language or data structure. It would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting and shading information. The image is a digital image or raster graphics image. The term may be by analogy with an "artist's rendering" of a scene. 'Rendering' is also used to describe the process of calculating effects in a video editing file to produce final video output.

TYPES OF RENDERING

• Flat ShadingComputer creates an average color for an object and renders each face with different amounts of black or white added to simulate shading.

• Phong renderingIt probes every pixel in the visible area and tries to determine a correct color for it.

• Ray TracingEverything is rendered, including shadows, lighting, reflections and transparencies.

• RadiosityIt figures out relationship of objects in a scene. It produces extremely good results, realistic shading and seems to better capture the 'ambience' of an indoor scene.

Some formats are designed specially to contain animations, these formats include

• Director (dir)• Animation Pro (fli, flc)• 3D studio max (max)• Windows audio video interleaved format (avi)• Time based data format (quicktime, mov)• Motion video (mpeg, mpg)• Compuserve (gif)• Shockwave (dcr)

File compression is an essential part of preparing animation files for the web b/c file size should be small for rapid downloading. For example a director movie file can be compressed up to 75% by converting into Shockwave file (dcr).

ANIMATION FILE FORMATS

SUMMARY

• Animation is a gradual change over time and this effect adds great power to multimedia.

• Computer animation has considerably eased the process of animation.

• There are several types of animation

– Key Frame

– Cel Animation

– Rotascoping

– Clay Animation

– Model Animation etc.