Animate: to bring to life.

Animation: bringing sequential images to life.

All animation is enabled by persistence of vision.

• When sequential still images are viewed in rapid succession, they are perceived as a continuous stream.
  
  
  
• For images that are designed with patterns or character poses that progress logically in sequence, our minds "fill in the blanks" and logical motion or action is perceived.
  
  
  
• The animator's job is to design sequential images that create motion illusions that express desired cinematic, emotional or pedagogical effects.
  
  
  
• All animation is a "trick", enabled by technology and perception.
  
  
  

Traditional Cel Animation uses 2D drawings, manually created by artists, to create a cinematic art form, which emphasizes visual storytelling, character development, staging, etc., in order to convey dramatic or entertaining stories to an audience.

Over the years, techniques have been employed to increase the efficient use of artists' time within the animation production process. (i.e. walk-cycles, panning backgrounds to imply foreground motion, etc.).

Cel animation can be very labor intensive.

Frames per second: the rate at which sequential frames are displayed under a given display system

• Feature films are projected at 24 fps.
  
  
  
• NTSC video is displayed at 30 fps (actually 60 intelaced fields per second).
  
  
  
• PAL video is displayed at 25 fps (actually 50 interlaced fields per second).
  
  
  
• Computer ``multimedia'' animation are displayed at various framerates, with 10 fps being the minimum tolerable rate for viewing of motion images, but user expectations are increasing with the increased availability of integrated multimedia playback on personal comupters and the WWW.
  
  

So, a 90 minute feature film requires 90 min. x 60 sec. x 24 fps = 129600 frames, many of which may require some routine, iterative procedures to produce.

Computer animation applies the computer's facility for iterative execution of algorithmic processes to the creation of sequential images for animated display.

Computer animation can be very labor intensive.

• Animated feature films of recent vintage (which increasingly are "computer animated") typically take about three years to work their way through this process, with hundreds of people being directly involved with the production. Check the credits.
  
  
  

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This file was last modified on September 19, 2000.