'To animate' means to give life to something. Animation and motion graphics are NOT the same thing although motion graphics are referred to as animation all over the web. As web 2.0 (next generation web design) becomes more and more established, both motion graphics and animation are becoming commonplace. Flash especially is rife on the web these days and is an extremely useful development tool for interactive applications, video and in this case, animation and motion graphics.
fig.1
bugs bunny and taz by ©Warner Bros
Take Disney and Warner Bros as a good clean animation example. These are two famous studios who present a very good example of pure animation. Notice the theatrical nature of the pose they have drawn.
fig.2
pluto by ©Disney
The problem with this definition of animation though, is what to classify series such as South Park. It has no pure animation, yet it is classed as animation.
Anomolies like this are bound to confuse, but as the saying goes, there are exceptions to every rule. Just try to learn the rules first. If you haven't breathed life into your work, you haven't animated it, you've merely made it move. VERY IMPORTANT.
One thing is for sure. Animation is an illusion, one created to fool the viewer into thinking they see movement, much in the same way that film is also an illusion. 24 frames are passed in front of a viewers eye, divided only by a shutter to stop the viewer from seeing the film stock moving over the projector light. (A great way to experiment with this principle is to build a zoetrope. Another way to teach children animation is to introduce them to the flipbook. This does not work in the same way as a shutter but it is still useful in terms of a basic introduction to animation.)
This series of images shown in rapid succession, nearly always teamed with sound and music, fools the brain into thinking it sees not just movement, but life. |
