What is Animation?

Right from Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Popeye, and Tom and Jerry to now Nemo, Andy, Shrek, Wall-E, Minions, we’ve seen everything. In fact, we grew up watching them. They are a part of our life. Gone are the days when only kids used to watch cartoons or animated movies. Now, elders too enjoy watching Doraemon helping Nobita or mischievous Shinchan. Animation is the only medium that brings fantasies to everyone’s life.

People are curious to know more about the it and how it works. Some even see it as a career option. Most of them often make the mistake of thinking that animation means only cartoons, which is incorrect. A cartoon is a form of animation, whereas it is a broad concept. It is everywhere.

So in this article, I’ll talk about this very same USD 400 Billion worth industry and go into more detail to learn about how it works.

Let’s start with a basic question.

What is Animation?

“It is a filmmaking technique by which still images are manipulated to create moving images.”

Wikipedia

In simple language,

“Anything that moves is an animation.“

basicdas

Be it Walt Disney’s cartoons, the Falcon spaceship in Star Wars, Special effects in the Avatar movie, Flashing breaking news on news channels, moving icons on your phone applications, flickering LED banners at train stations, etc. All of these are animations. I made a small video for you to showcase exactly that.

So, now you have understood that animations are not only cartoons. It is everywhere. Now we’ll see how do Animators create animated videos?

How do animators create animation?

As I have mentioned earlier, Animation is an illusion. It makes us believe that an object has moved from its original position. To make this possible, animators use frames. It means it involves drawing or creating each frame and then playing them at a particular speed to create the illusion of movement. Like how I did in the below example.

I drew a character on each frame, I changed its position each time and changed the pages at a specific speed to create the illusion of a moving character.

There are three different types of animation.

1. Traditional Animation – The oldest type of animation where an animator sketches each and every frame of the scene on paper (nowadays on the computer). For 1 minute of animation, video animators draw more than a thousand frames on paper!!
2. Stop-motion Animation – In this type, animators physically move and photograph actual objects to create an animation clip. For example, Clay animation, cutout animation, pixilation, etc.
3. Computerised Animation – In this type, animators do everything from drawing to animating frames inside a computer.

You can find out more about Three types of Animation on this blog, where I have discussed them in detail, with examples from real-life.

Software Used

• Adobe After Effect
• Autodesk Maya
• Autodesk 3D
• Adobe Animate
• Blender
• Toon Boom

There are many others but the ones above are widely used.

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Frequently Asked Questions