The Different Types Of Animation

In ICT there are 3 different types of animation. In this report I will be explaining how they are used and how they work. The 3 different types of animation are called: Moving, Morphing and Masking. Each of these are used in very different ways.

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A) Different Types Of Animation

Moving Animation
The first is moving animation. Moving animation is also known as Frame-by-Frame animation. Moving or animation pictures have on average 10 or more images/frames laced together. The background image is always the same, but the moving parts are printed in different places, frame after frame the object made moves in the selected place by the designer. Theses types of animation are very simple and quick to make. This type of animation also uses something called a motion tween. Motion tweens can be used to keep an animation rolling smoothly going from beginning to end and then back to the beginning of the made animation without it looking too amateur.

This is an example of a moving animation. This animation is of a person stamping their feet, it has a loop so it goes over and over again.

Morphing Animation
The next type of animation is Morphing; with this type of animation you can create a transition from one image to another. The morphing happens in different stages, so for whoever is looking it can be an illusion of one image transforming into another, hence the name “morphing”. Morphing can be easily made with a lot of online downloadable softwares such as BitMorph; this allows everyone to make morphs with any 2 pictures they want to use. In this picture you can see the stages of morphing in animation. Slowly it transforms from a young boy to a cat.

Masking Animation
The last type of animation is Masking, Masking in animation is covering over a piece of the background or scene to add something onto it later. This is mainly used to put an animated item into a real world image. Masking is not always used on real world items but you can do it on animated ones as well, by adding another layer onto flash you can do this easily. Adding another layer covering whatever you want to be masked will simply enable you to hide certain parts of the animation below the layer you are planning on. This technique can be used on applications such as Flash.

B) Persistence Of Vision
There is also something called Persistence of vision. What is this? Persistence of vision is a theory that a strip of still images in any order can be given the effect of animation if viewed by the human eye at a certain rate. This gives the effect that the image is still there for a split second after it has gone and therefore gives the illusion of animation moving. In this type of animation there are a few people that helped to develop this. One of these people is William Horner. William Horner was the creator of an item called Zoetrope. This is the zoetrope made

He created this in the year 1833. It was created by he pictures were drawn on a strip which could be set around the bottom third of a metal drum, with the slits now cut in the upper section of the drum. The drum was placed on a spindle so that it could be spun, and viewers looking through the slits would see the cartoon strip form an animation. The faster the drum was spun, the smoother the animation that is produced.

Traditional Animation Techniques
There are also Traditional Animations too. There are various different. The first I will explain is Limited Animation. What is Limited Animation though? The answer is that some types of animation makes use of special techniques to limit the effort involved in making the full animation, so that not every frame has to be drawn individually. When producing anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours of animated film at 12-24 (or even 36) frames per second, that can stack up to thousands or even millions of individual drawings.

Drawn Animation
Drawn Animation is very simple and used up to this day. The most common is using a flipbook. Many people have used drawn animations to educate and entertain. Drawn animations is made by drawing on one page and then on the next page you draw the same object but in a different position. An example of this can be a stickman running from one page to another. A flipbook is not the only way to make a drawn animation. You could do it page by page next to each other, like a storyboard. Storyboards are like flipbooks but they are just used on one page instead of a separate page.

This is an example of a storyboard.

Below is a flipbook

Cel Animation
Cel animation is one of the first types of animations along with drawn. Cel animation is a method of producing cartoons using sheets of transparent cellulose acetate (used for fashion products also) for drawing cartoon frames. The sheets are transparent so that they can be laid over other cels or a painted background and then photographed. Cel animation is very time consuming and complicated, so now it has replaced with computer generic graphics.

Claymation
Claymation is also a very entertaining way of making animations. It is mainly used in the children animation because of the form it looks to be in. Claymation is a form of stop animation. Claymation is has been used a lot recently on mainly children channels. Since Claymation has been used, there has been a rise in the purchase of Play dough products

This is one of the most popular Claymation shows in the world, Wallace & Gromit

Cut Out Animation
The final type of animation is called cut out animation. The name speaks for itself, it is simply cutout shapes organized on a flat surface, and manually moved and repositioned to mimic animation. Cutouts can be colored paper, white paper with drawings on it, even photographs, also it can be completely flat or even 3D objects, but this will be moving from cutout animation and into stop-motion animation.

My favorite cut out animation show, Blues Clues

C) The Ways Animation Are Used In

Advertising
Animations are used in very different ways, in advertising, entertainment and education wise. In advertising animation is used to catch the eyes of the audience to get them to want the product being advertised. Whether it is toys, to car insurance, animations are used in these ways and are very easy to make.

Entertainment
Using animation in entertainment is one of the simplest ways to entertain anyone of any age. Animation in itself is an piece of entertainment no matter what the animation is being used for, even in advertising it is an entertainment source. Animation is used in mainly children programs to get the younger to remember certain characters for a made up part of them, whether a talking animal or a tree with the voice of a human. These aspects in animations can get people to remember where the animation is from or a specific thing about it that they liked.

Education
For last, animation helps with education in a few ways. For me the main way of animation being used in education is to widen young children’s creativity. They can do this through play dough, cut outs and as I stated earlier, story boards. Story boards helps a child to create scenarios in their heads and make up what can happen in the next scenes, whether a knight in armor pulling a sword from a rock, or a man walking into his house. Children tend to have a lot of imagination, so letting them use animation will be a good way to express their big imagination.

D) The Advantages And Limitations of Animated GIFs
In animation there are GIFs. What is a GIF though? A GIF file is usually labeled with “.gif”. GIF files are compressed using "lossless" compression; this means that the image quality is not sacrificed as the file size reduces. However, if you save images with many colors as GIF files with a limited color palette, you will notice a reduction in quality. This is most obvious in photos. Unlike “.jpg”, GIF files do support transparent backgrounds. This allows GIF files to blend in with the background colours. However, the pixels of a GIF file can only be 100% transparent or opaque, so you are unable to do any drop shadows or partial transparency. If you are aiming to these kind of things it would be best to have the file saved as a “.png” which works well with doing these actions .
What are the advantages of using GIFs file though? First of all, they are very small in file size. If you are aiming to save a picture but you do not want to use up a lot of file space using a GIF is best to do.
Also they load up very quickly. Unlike other files such as JPGs or PNGs, GIFs open really quickly.
There are also a few disadvantages of using GIFs though. One of these is that they are very difficult to edit after they are made. This means once you finish it, you have to make sure it is at your satisfaction before you save it as a GIF.

E) The Advantages And Limitations Of Other Animation Formats
In animation there are a few different types of formats. The first one I am going to explain and compare is Flash player. Flash Player is software for viewing animations and movies using computer programs such as a web browser. Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both a multimedia authoring program and the Adobe Flash Player. Comparing this with a program such as Adobe Shockwave. A Shockwave Player is used to show multimedia content made in programs. The difference between 2 players these are that with shockwave you can create more complex items such as games and make it more interactive and the animation will be way more detailed. But with the Flash player it will be less detailed but much easier to make an animation.