Motion Tweening

I used the motion tween button to create a motion tween of cars. These two cars are racing while going into the distance. This has been done by making the image at the end smaller then the first one. The rest of the work was done by the Flash program. The hardest part of this task was drawing the car. :p

Persistance of vision

For my first animation, i used Adobe Flash CC. I used a large number of frames to create the illusion of motion. This started by drawing a stick-man on his own on the stage in the first frame. Then on the second frame u see a slight movement of a second stick-man coming into the scene from the right, this is followed up by a number of frames(4-5) which shows the second stickman entering the stage till he shows off his whole body. Once the second stick-man's whole body is on the stage, i used 4 different frames to make an illusion of his arms moving, then an energy beam comes out of his hand shooting the first stick-man. This makes the first stick-man kneel in pain which i showed through different poses. Then finally the second stick-man jumps out of the scene and a bomb is placed on the point he was standing in. The bomb then explodes. I used 3 frames per second as a speed. This creates a slower yet more visual illusion.

12 principles of animation

1. SQUASH AND STRETCH

This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it's broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.

2. ANTICIPATION

This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed. The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher's wind-up or a golfers' back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a characters personality.

3. STAGING

A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once. Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audience's attention to the story or idea being told. Care must be taken in background design so it isn't obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation. Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene.

4. STRAIGHT AHEAD AND POSE TO POSE ANIMATION

Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. The lead animator will turn charting and keys over to his assistant. An assistant can be better used with this method so that the animator doesn't have to draw every drawing in a scene. An animator can do more scenes this way and concentrate on the planning of the animation. Many scenes use a bit of both methods of animation.

5. FOLLOW THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION

When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. "DRAG," in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly. Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

6. SLOW-OUT AND SLOW-IN

As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene. 

7. ARCS

All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.

8. SECONDARY ACTION

This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary or supporting action.

9. TIMING

Expertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique. The basics are: more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action. Fewer drawings make the action faster and crisper. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement. Most animation is done on twos (one drawing photographed on two frames of film) or on ones (one drawing photographed on each frame of film). Twos are used most of the time, and ones are used during camera moves such as trucks, pans and occasionally for subtle and quick dialogue animation. Also, there is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood, emotion, and reaction to another character or to a situation. Studying movement of actors and performers on stage and in films is useful when animating human or animal characters. This frame by frame examination of film footage will aid you in understanding timing for animation. This is a great way to learn from the others.

10. EXAGGERATION

Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. Its like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your film more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated.

11. SOLID DRAWING

The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing. The way you draw cartoons, you draw in the classical sense, using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life. You transform these into color and movement giving the characters the illusion of three-and four-dimensional life. Three dimensional is movement in space. The fourth dimension is movement in time.

12. APPEAL

A live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal. Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience's interest. Early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme. Over the years, the artists have learned that to produce a feature there was a need for story continuity, character development and a higher quality of artwork throughout the entire production. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.

Timeline of animations and pioneers

The development of Animation and the Pioneer’s

A history of pioneers that experimented and developed different takes on movement of images/photography and drawings had developed different types of animations methods that have now been developed immensely with digitalizing animation via computers etc. Some of these famous pioneering animators are of how animation has developed into the animations we see today.

In 1831 there was a Belgian scientist named Dr. Joseph Antoine Plateau and alongside with his was Dr. Simon Ritter. They both designed and constructed a machine called a Phenakitscope. A Phenakitscope was a deception that the rotating disk containing small windows, and another disk behind it that has images on it gave the illusion of the animation effect, as it moved to the correct speed that it should be spun. This was very popular at the time because it was easy to construct and distribute.

Another pioneer is Emile Cohl, who first developed a method of the phantasmagoric (the character having a deceptive appearance, as from something from a dream or creativity,) containing 700 drawings on paper and then shot each frame onto a negative film to produce a film. It is considered to be the first animated cartoon in 1908, he is also known as "The Father of the Animated Cartoon". Photographed images that have been turned into an animation was also started up by Eadweard Muybridge, the man who was asked by the former governor of California, to investigate if a trotting horse’s feet had all lifted off the ground at once. Similar to how we use stop motion today, Muybridge took a series of 25 frames per second as well to create an animation to prove that it is true. Lastly, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis the creators of cinematography that was first aired publicly in December 28, 1895 in France.

One of the pioneers that portrayed the potential of claymation is Willis O’Brien, He was a motion picture special effects and stop-motion animator. He was well known for his work on the visual effects on movies such as ‘The Lost World’, ‘King Kong’ and ‘Mighty Joe Young’. Willis O’Brien’s work was influenced by Thomas A. Edison who is an inventor of phonography, the motion picture camera etc. As O’Brien’s film ‘The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy’ was noticed by Edison, O’Brien was hired by the Edison company to animate a series of short films also keeping to the prehistoric theme. Working closely with Willis O’Brien was Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion model animator. Harryhausen along with Peter Peterson worked closely with O’Brien making the film ‘Mighty Joe Young’ with the stop-motion animation. Ray Harryhausen developed his own brand of stop-motion animation, which was known as “Dynamation”. These pioneering developers work closely together in order to create one rare visual aspect of animation at the time. By using different styles of animation to combine their methods and techniques of creating animation into one production of animation to make success.

Bibliography:

Phenakistoscope-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenakistoscope

Dr. Joseph Antoine Plateau - http://www.xtimeline.com/evt/view.aspx?id=335417, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Plateau

Émile Cohl - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Cohl

Eadweard Muybridge - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge

The Lumière Brothers - http://www.exeter.ac.uk/bdc/young_bdc/movingpics/movingpics10.htm

Willis H. O'Brien - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_H._O'Brien

Thomas Edision - http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledison.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

Ray Harryhausen -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Harryhausen

Pete Patterson - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Peterson_(animator)
Alice (1988) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(1988_film)

Initial assignment! WHOO!!!

• ·       Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgian physicist. He was the first person to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistoscope.

·       William George Horner (1786 – 22 September 1837) was a British mathematician; he was a schoolmaster, headmaster and schoolkeeper, proficient in classics as well as mathematics, who wrote extensively on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, but also on optics. His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designationHorner's method, in particular respect of a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819. The modern invention of the zoetrope, under the nameDaedaleum in 1834, has been attributed to him.

Horner died comparatively young, before the establishment of specialist, regular scientific periodicals. So, the way others have written about him has tended to diverge, sometimes markedly, from his own prolific, if dispersed, record of publications and the contemporary reception of them.

·       Charles-Émile Reynaud (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918) was a French inventor, responsible for the first projected animated cartoons. Reynaud created the Praxinoscope in 1877 and the Théâtre Optique in December 1888, and on 28 October 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris. This is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used.

Ryanaud's late years were tragic after 1910 when, his creations outmoded by the Cinematograph, dejected and penniless, he threw the greater part of his irreplaceable work and unique equipment into the Seine. The public had forgotten his "Théatre Optique" shows, which had been a celebrated attraction at the Musée Grevin between 1892 and 1900. He died in a hospice on the banks of the Seine where he had been cared for since 29 March 1917.

·       Eadweard James Muybridge (/ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, birth name Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-pictureprojection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name.

He emigrated to the United States as a young man and became a bookseller. He returned to England in 1861 and took up professionalphotography, learning the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He went back to San Francisco in 1867, and in 1868 his large photographs of Yosemite Valley made him world famous. Today, Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motionphotographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used incinematography.

In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, but was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. He travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875.

In the 1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, traveling back to England and Europe to publicise his work. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He returned to his native England permanently in 1894, and in 1904, the Kingston Museum, containing a collection of his equipment, was opened in his hometown.

·       Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents was the widespread impact of his inventions: electric light and powerutilities, sound recording, and motion pictures all established major new industries world-wide. Edison's inventions contributed tomass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

His advanced work in these fields was an outgrowth of his early career as a telegraph operator. Edison developed a system of electric-power generation and distribution^[5] to homes, businesses, and factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world. His first power station was on Pearl Street in Manhattan, New York.

• ·       The Lumière (pronounced: [lymjɛːʁ]) brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas [oɡyst maʁi lwi nikɔla] (19 October 1862, Besançon,France – 10 April 1954, Lyon) and Louis Jean [lwi ʒɑ̃] (5 October 1864, Besançon, France – 6 June 1948, Bandol), are credited to be first filmmakers in history. They patented the cinematograph, which contrary to Edison's "peepshow" kinetoscope, the former allowed viewing by multiple parties at once, like current cinema. Their first film, Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon, shot in 1894, is considered the first real motion picture in history. Curiously, their surname, "Lumière", is French for "light".

• A thaumatrope is a toy that was popular in the 19th century. A disk with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to blend into one due to the persistence of vision
• Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina. The myth of persistence of vision is the belief that human perception of motion (brain centered) is the result of persistence of vision (eye centred).
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• Example of a thaumatrope (click the link) www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD0ovANHdqQ