Digital Animation (CGI)

Digital Animation (CGI)

CGI is the application of computer graphics to create or contribute to images in art, printed media, video games, films, television programs, commercials and stimulators. The visual scenes may be dynamic or static, and may be 2D, though the term "CGI" is most commonly used to refer to 3D computer graphics used for creating scenes or special effects in films and television. They can also be used by a home user and edited together on programs such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie.

The term computer animation refers to dynamic CGI rendered as a movie. The term virtual world refers to agent-based, interactive environments.

Computer graphics software is used to make computer-generated imagery for movies, ect. Recent availability of CGI software and increased computer speeds have allowed individual artists and small companies to produce professional-grade films, games, and fine art from their home computers. This has brought about an internet subculture with its own set of global celebrities, cliches, and technical vocabulary.

Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device was eventually replaced by computers.

In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscope refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.

HISTORY.

The technique was invented by Max Fleischer, who used it in the series Out of the inkwell staring around 1915, with his brother Dave Fleischer dressed in a clown outfit as the live-film reference for the character Koko the Clown. Max patented the method in 1917.

Fleischer used rotoscoping in a number of his later cartoons, most notably the Cab Calloway  

dance routines in three Betty Boop cartoons from the early 1930's, the animation of Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels (1939). The Fleischer studio's most effective use of rotoscoping was in their series of action-oriented Superman cartoons, in which Spiderman and other animated figures displayed very realistic movement.

TECHNIQUE.

Rotoscope output can have slight deviations from the true line that defers from frame to frame, which when animated cause the animated line to shake unnaturally or "boil". Avoiding boiling requires considerable skill in the person performing the tracing, though causing "boil" intentionally is a stylistic technique sometimes used to emphasis the surreal quality of rotoscoping, as in the music video "Take on Me" and animated TV series Delta State. 

Puppets

Puppets.

A puppet is an inanimate object or representational figure animated by an entertainer, who is called a puppeteer. It is used in puppetry, which is a very ancient form of theatre.

There are many different varieties of puppets, and they are made of a wide range of materials, depending on their form and intended use. They can be extremely complex or very simple in their construction. 

ORIGINS.
Puppetry was practiced in Ancient Greece and the oldest written records of puppetry can found in the works of Herodotus and Xenophon, dating from the 5th century BC. The Greek word for puppet means "drawn by strings, string-pulling".

Pixilation

Pixilation.

Pixilation is a stop motion technique were live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet. This technique is often used as a way to blend live actors with animated ones in a movie, such as in The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb by the Bolex Brothers.

An early example of this technique is El hotel eletrico which was made in 1908.

Claymation

Claymation.

Claymation is one of the many forms of stop motion animation. Each animation piece, either character or background, is "deformable"- made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay.

TECHNIQUE.

All traditional animation is produced in a similar fashion, whether done through cel animation or stop motion. Each frame, or still picture, is recorded on film or digital media and then played back in rapid succession. When played back at a frame rate greater than 10-12 frames per second, a fairly convincing illusion of continuous motion is achieved. While the playback feature creating an illusion is true of all moving images, the techniques involved in creating CGI are generally removed from a frame-by-frame process.

Stop Motion

Stop Motion

Stop Motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used is stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or clay-mation. Not all stop motion requires figures or models; many stop motion films can involve using humans, household appliances and other things for comedic effect. Stop motion using objects is sometimes referred to as object animation.

Drawn on film-Cel Animation-Painting on Film

Drawn on film-Cel Animation-Painting on Film.

CELL

A cell, short for cellulose, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painting for traditional, hand-drawn animation. Actual celluloid was used during the first half of the 20th century, but since it was flammable and dimensionally unstable it was largely replaced by celluloid acetate. With the advent the computer assisted animation production, the use of cels has been practically abandoned in major productions. Disney studios stopped using cels in 1990 when Computer Animation Production System replaced this element in their animation process.

TECHNIQUE

Generally, the character are drawn on cels and laid over a static background drawing. This reduced the number of times an image has to be redrawn and enables studios to split up the production process to different specialised teams. Using the assembly line way to animate has made it possible to produce films much more cost-effectively. The invention of the technique is generally attributed to Earl Hurd, who patented the precess in 1914. The outline of the images are drawn on the front of the cel while colours are painted on the back to eliminate brushstrokes. Traditionally, the outlines were hand-inked but since the 1960's they are almost exclusively xerographed on. Another important breakthrough in cel animation was the development of the Animation Photo Transfer Process, first seen in The Black Cauldron, released in 1985.