Animation

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Overview of Today’s Topics
What is animation?
Types of animation
File types of animation
Using Flash to build your animation and animation
terminology
History of animation
Review

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What is animation
A sequence of images that create the illusion of
movement when played in succession.
Here are some simple examples:

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Why use animation? Four Stroke Engine
Easier to show somebody how
something works then to try and
explain it.
Also animation:
Indicate movement

Illustrate change over time

Visualize three-dimensional objects

Attracts attention
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How does animation work?
Simulation of movement through a series of pictures
that have objects in slightly different positions
Each drawing is called a frame (a snapshot of what’s
happening at a particular moment)
Required Frames Per Second FPS:
Movies on film  24 fps
TV 30 fps
9000 frames for five minute cartoon
Computer animation  12 to15 fps
Jerky if anything less

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Sampling and Quantizing of Motion
Since each frame is just an image 
Each frame is sampled into a discrete samples and each
sample becomes a pixel  Sampling process
Remember:
More samples means better quality (10 pixels by 10 pixels vs 200
pixels by 200 pixels)
More samples means bigger file sizes
Each pixel gets assigned a colour, maybe just 2
colours(black and white1bit colour) or maybe 16
million colour (24 bit colour)  Quantization process

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Frame Rate (Frames Per Second FPS)
Frame Rate: indicates the playback speed of the
animation in frames per second
 Low frame rate appears choppy
 Question: BUT high frame rate can also appear
choppy, WHY?
Answer: if the computer playing the animation is not fast
enough to process and display the frames.

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2-D Animation
Two types of 2-D animation:
 Cel Animation (also called traditional animation,
classical animation, hand-drawn animation, frame by
frame animation)
 Path Based Animation
Both types still are made of frames:
 The more frames per second, the more believable the
movement will be.
 The more frames per second, the bigger the final version
of the movie file will be (more bytes)

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Cel Animation

An animator must HAND draw every single frame!

To simplify, one background is drawn and then the
item that will move is drawn on a clear sheet of plastic
(a cel), one drawing for each frame.
When moving to the next scene, just change the
background

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Path Based Animation
Pick:
a starting point for an object, (start frame)
an ending point for an object (end frame)
a path for the object to follow
And then the computer generated all the frames in
between (called TWEENING), so that the artist doesn’t
have to draw the intermediate frames (like the artist did
in cel based animation)

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Path Based Animation
Question: What name do we give to the start frame
and the end frame? (not the frames that are computer
generated, rather the frames drawn by us?)
Question: Why is the act of generating the frames in
between the first frame and the last frame called
tweening?
Question: The path the object follows have to be a
straight line, TRUE or FALSE?
Question: What software allows us to do path based
animation?

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Path Based Animation Software
The software that generates the frames has features
such as:
 Looping
 Transition (Fade in and Fade out)
 Repetitions  allows the user to pick how many times
the animation repeats
 Setting the Frames Per Second
 Larger file size
 More realistic motion

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What can we do to change the motion?
If the animation appears too slow, we can speed
up the motion by:
 Reduce the number of frames
 Increase the frame rate

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Slowing down the motion by adding more
frames
Assume now that the motion is a bit too fast, 2 ways
to slow it down:
Way 1: Add more frames:
Keep the frame rate the same
Increase the number of frames between the key frames to
stretch out the animation
Way 2: Lower the frame rate (eg: go from 20fps to
5fps)
Keep the same number of frames as original but stretches out
movie

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2-D Animation Terminology
Question: What do these terms mean?
 Keyframe
 Tweening

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3-D

Animation
3-Dimension animation involves 3 steps:
 Modelling
 Rendering
 Animating

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Special Effects Animation
Morphing:
An Animation
Process of blending together two images into a
series of images
Useful for showing how image might change
over time
Warping:
Distorts a single image
Warp frown into smile

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Where can you get animation?
Purchase CDs or buy off the internet or get free
clipart on the internet, for example:
OR, you can create your own:
Animated Gifs can be create in Photoshop or in other
software tools
Using Flash
We will look at two different file types of animation:
Animated gifs
Flash animation

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Animated GIFS
No Plug-ins Required:
 Animated GIFs require no plug-ins, and the authoring
tools to create them are often free and easy to learn.
No Sound:
 If you need sound in addition to motion, you cannot
use an animated GIF by itself. Instead, you may want
to consider other animation alternatives, such as
Flash, or even video

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Using Photoshop to make an animated gif

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Flash
A multimedia authoring and playback system
Launched in 1996 by Macromedia
Adobe bought it in 2005
Flash became popular for its animated graphics
Responsible for much of the animations,
advertisements and video components found on
today's Web sites
Flash is the industry's most advanced authoring
environment for creating interactive websites, digital
experiences and mobile content.
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Why is Flash so popular?
Interactive content rich with video, graphics, animation
Import multimedia elements from other applications
Support vector graphics:
much more space efficient over bitmapped frames
scale up with accurate detail no matter how large the
window is resized by the user.
Flash Player is a free client application that works with
popular Web browsers to play the animation
Adobe Flash Player is the standard for delivering high-
impact, rich Web content.
Designs, animation, and application user interfaces are
deployed immediately across all browsers and platforms
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Flash

in action
Question: Suppose we had the following starting
picture and the given ending picture, what THREE
things do you think you would have to consider in
order to make it appear animated but it should have
a smooth animation, not jerky?
Question: Which colours will be used in tweening?

Start picture End picture 23

Essential Flash Terminology
Question: What kind of tween would have been used in this Flash
animation?
Stage: rectangular area where the visible motion will take place
Timeline: series of frames in a row and stacks of layers. Indicates key
frames, regular frames and empty frames
Shape: basic shapes drawn with the shape tools, line tool or a single letter
Symbol: store in a library and can be reused. Changes to the library
symbol will result in changes in all of the copies of this symbol currently
on the stage.
Graphic: static graphic, can be used in other symbols
Button: interactive part of animation with user, responds to mouse clicks and
rollovers.
Movieclip: reusable piece of animation, can turn a simple animation into a
movieclip symbol and reuse it.
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Essential

Flash Terminology
Tweening: Creating the intermediate frames based on the
starting keyframe and ending keyframe. There are 2 types of
tweens:
Motion Tween Shape Tween
Works with symbols only Works with shapes only
Can’t morph (only movement) Can morph shapes
Only one symbol per layer if the Can have more than one shape per
symbol will have a motion tween layer but be careful, depends on
what you want to morph

Can be used with motion guide Can’t use motion guide

Motion Guide: lets you animation an object along a path that you
draw yourself. Only works with symbols 25
Comparing File Types:
Animated GIF Flash Director
Created by Depends Adobe Adobe
Extension Source .fla (source) .dir (source)
depends .swf (movie) .dcr (movie)
.gif (movie) .gif (Flash can make
gifs too!)
Size Larger than Vector images take Vector images take
normal gif up less space than up less space than
GIF bitmapped GIF bitmapped
images images
Uses Banners, small Interactive video, More interactive sites
areas graphics, animation
Need to play Nothing Flash Player (Free Web browser plug in
it and works with (The Shockwave
most browsers) Player)

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