Animation TechniquesBy Donagh Slevin

A zoetrope is a device that produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures. The term zoetrope is from the Greek words ζωή (zoē), meaning "alive, active", and τροπή (tropē), meaning "turn", with "zoetrope" taken to mean "active turn" or "wheel of life".

Zoetrope

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. The Kinetoscope was designed for films to be viewed by one individual at a time through a peephole viewer window at the top of the device

Kinetiscope

A flip book or flick book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change.

Flip Book

A cel, short for celluloid, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation. Actual celluloid (consisting of cellulose nitrate and camphor) was used during the first half of the 20th century, but since it was flammable and dimensionally unstable it was largely replaced by cellulose acetate.

Cel animation

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films.[1][2] Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator.

Rotoscoping

Drawn-on-film animation, also known as direct animation or animation without camera, is an animation technique where footage is produced by creating the images directly on film stock, as opposed to any other form of animation where the images or objects are photographed frame by frame with an animation camera.

Drawn on Film

Computer animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images.

Digital applications

Clay animation or Claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay.

Calymation

Stop motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own.

Stop Motion

The strengths of using a zoetrope is that you can create any illusion being that you can turn an umbrella into a mushroom, also it is a simple to make.

a zoetrope weaknesses are just to make the images run smoother you have to spin the drum fast enough and it is not convenient for a whole crowd to watch because it is so small

Strength & Weaknesses

I’m afraid that Kinescope doesn't have strength & weaknesses.

Flip book doesn't have it as well Rot scoping doesn’t have it as well So does Drawn on Film

Cel animation is the most familiar and accessible form of animation. It can be successful as just a sketchy line drawing on a solid colour background, or have fully rendered characters with shadows and highlights like "Roger Rabbit" or "Prince of Egypt".

It all starts with a talented artist drawing a succession of subtly changing pictures with a pencil on paper. This simplicity of technique is what makes it so flexible and accessible. You can do anything that your animator can draw.

Finally, there is computer generated animation. We feel that computers are great tools for fixing or augmenting images created elsewhere. Computers are the really facile optical printers of our era.

From our perspective, for everything other than technical animation and logo animation, CG is the least cost effective form of animation.

If you are looking for longer form character animation projects, we always urge clients to consider stop motion or clay animation. One of the reasons that stop motion animation is appropriate for longer form is that it's costs are very non-linear. The longer the project, the lower the Cost Per Second becomes; until CPS plateaus at around 10 minutes of animation. This non-linear cost per second is as a result of the start up costs associated with having to manufacture everything that ends up in front of the camera. Every prop, every setting, all of the character puppets; indeed, the entire world that the animated characters will inhabit must be manufactured. We call these the "threshold costs" of doing stop motion animation. All things being equal, the threshold costs are the same for a 30 second animation as they are for a 3 minute animation. Once the threshold costs have been paid, the cost of producing longer animations is merely film footage, the animator's time, and the cost of the support staff.

Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. was an American animation studio that dominated American television animation for nearly three decades in the mid-to-late 20th century.

The company was originally formed in 1957 by former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera and live-action director George Sidney in partnership with Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems television division as H-B Enterprises, Inc. Established after MGM shut down its animation studio and ended production of its animated short films (such as the popular Tom and Jerry series), H-B Enterprises, Inc. was renamed Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. in 1959.

Over the next four decades, the studio produced many successful animated shows, including The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Quick Draw McGraw Show, The Flintstones, The Yogi Bear Show, Top Cat, The Jetsons, The Magilla Gorilla Show, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Wacky Races, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and The Smurfs among others. The studio also produced several notable feature films and cartoon shorts for theatres along with a number of specials and movies for television.

Hanna Barbera used Cel animation, Melrose, New Mexico native William Hanna and New York City-born Joseph Barbera first teamed together while working at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio in 1939. Their first directorial project was a cartoon entitled Puss Gets the Boot (1940), which served as the genesis of the popular Tom and Jerry series of cartoon theatricals. Hanna and Barbera served as the directors and story men for the shorts for eighteen years, winning seven Academy Awards for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) between 1943 and 1953 for their work. By 1956, they had become the producers in charge of the MGM animation studio's output.[5]

Even though Fred Quimby had taken sole credit for producing most of the Tom and Jerry series, he never actually worked on it. Outside of their work on the MGM shorts, Hanna and Barbera moonlighted on outside projects, including the original title sequences and commercials for the hit television sitcom I Love Lucy.[6]

MGM decided in early 1957 to close its cartoon studio, as it felt it had acquired a reasonable backlog of shorts for re-release.[5] Hanna and Barbera, contemplating their future while completing the final Tom and Jerry and Droopy cartoons, began producing animated television commercials.[7] During their last year at MGM, they developed a concept for an animated television program about a dog and cat pair who found themselves in various misadventures

Aardman Animations, Ltd., also known as Aardman Studios, or simply as Aardman, is a British animation studio based in Bristol, United Kingdom. The studio is known for films made using stop-motion clay animation techniques, particularly those featuring Plasticine characters Wallace and Gromit. However, it successfully entered the computer animation market with Flushed Away (2006).

Aardman was founded in 1972 as a low-budget project by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who wanted to realise their dream of producing an animated motion picture. The partnership provided animated sequences for the BBC series for deaf children Vision On. After creating a segment called "Greeblies" (1975) using clay animation, became what was the inspiration for creating Morph, a simple clay character. Around the same time Lord and Sproxton made their first foray into adult animation with the shorts Down and Out and Confessions of a Foyer Girl, entries in the BBC's Animated Conversations series using real-life conversations as soundtracks. However, these two shorts were not actual Aardman productions. Aardman also created the title sequence for The Great Egg Race[1] and supplied animation for the multiple award winning music video of Peter Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer".

Aardman used stop & clay Motion, they produced a number of shorts for Channel 4 including the Conversation Pieces series. These five shorts worked in the same area as the Animated Conversations pieces, but were more sophisticated. Lord and Sproxton began hiring more animators at this point; three of the newcomers made their directorial debut at Aardman with the Lip Synch series. Of the five Lip Synch shorts two were directed by Peter Lord, one by Barry Purves, one by Richard Goleszowski and one by Nick Park.

Park's short, Creature Comforts, was the first Aardman production to win an Oscar. Park also developed the clay modelled shorts featuring the adventures of Wallace & Gromit, a comical pair of friends: Wallace being a naive English green-knitted-tank top-wearing inventor, and Gromit his best friend, the intelligent but silent dog. These films include A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), the latter two winning Academy Awards.

Right now in the 21st century, everyone has replaced stop motion, model motion with CGI because it is old fashioned and sometimes some objects disappear when filming. In CGI, the characters can opened/closed their eyes and open their mouths so that everyone would understand.

Animation Today

On TV, I didn’t like when the animation replaced stop & model motion with CGI because I think that they would look stupid, I would still prefer the original animation to some shows because it’s good.

In the movies, everyone are still doing CGI because everyone were getting used to it. The popular GCI movie is Shrek.

What do I like/dislike of animation on TV and film