Experimenting with Vine and GifBoom!

After learning about Vine and Gifboom in class, Nathan Laird and I teamed up and made a few videos to experiment with gifs! :)

The Principles of Animation

Nathan Laird and I found a really interesting book in the Massey library that explains all the techniques and principles of animation throughout history. 

The book is titled "The Illusion of Life - Disney Animation" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and describes process and fascinating story behind the Disney cartoons and films. The most interesting information we gathered is about their principles of animation, which are as follows:

Squash and Stretch
This is the most important principle, the purpose of the squash and stretch is to give a sense of weight and flexibility to characters/ or drawn objects.

Anticipation
The anticipation was introduced to prepare the audience for an action displaying a more realistic build up to an event. This way the audience would never miss the gag.

Staging
Similar to theatre, staging’s purpose is to direct the audiences attention and make clear what is of greatest importance to the scene.

Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose’
These describe the different approaches to the drawing process. “Straight Ahead Action” is drawing a scene out frame by frame from beginning to end, and ‘Pose to Pose’ involves starting with drawing a few key frames, then filling the intervals later.

Follow through and Overlapping action
This action describes two closely related techniques, which help render the movement more realistically. This helps give a more realistic impression. ‘Follow through’ means the separate parts of the body will continue moving after the character has stopped.

‘Overlapping action’ is where parts of the body move at different rates.

Slow in and Slow out
The movement of the character, and the timings to create a realistic movement particularly through acceleration and deceleration.

Arcs
Natural actions tend to follow more arched/ smooth paths rather then rigid ones. Therefore Adding arc movements to a character tends to add greater realism.

Secondary Action
Secondary actions often give support to a main action performed, therefore adding more life. They often are used to emphasize, rather then take attention away from the main action.

Timing
This refers to the number of drawings used for any given action. Timing is crucial for establishing a characters mood, emotion and reaction.

Exaggeration
This is essential for cartoons and animation, as it helps give a sense of realism and believeability to the given scene. There should be a balance in how the elements are exaggerated in relation to each other.

Solid Drawing
Solid drawing means keeping in mind the forms of three dimensional space/ form, giving a character volume and weight.This requires a basic understanding of three dimensional shapes, anatomy, weight, balance, light, etc.

Appeal
This relates to what the audience wants to see, in terms of charisma in a character. The important thing is that they feel the character is real and interesting.

Traditional vs Digital

Traditional

Traditional animation is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand. The technique was the dominant form of animation in cinema until the invention of computer animation.  Traditionally animated productions similar to now would start with a storyboard, which allows the animation team to plan the flow of the plot and the composition of the imagery. A soundtrack is then recorded featuring music, sound effects and dialogue performed by the voice actors. Often an animatic would then be created to give the animators and directors work out any timing and script issues. Model sheets of each character were made, to gives looks from a variety of angles and a variety of facial expressions. In the traditional animation process, animators will begin by drawing sequences of animation on sheets of transparent paper often using colour pencils.  The drawings are then transfrerred to a clear cel sheet and are inked & painted. Each of these cels is then stacked in sequencial order and photographed using a special animation camera. Then lastly the photographs sent in for development and the film is created.

An example of a classical film that uses the traditonal animation method is Walt Disney's "The Aristocats" (1970)-

URL- http://www.listal.com/viewimage/4351213

Digital 

Nowadays, most films and cartoons are created using a 100% computer animation process. Computer animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. Computer generated animations are more controllable than other more physically based processes.  To create the illusion of movement, an image is displayed on the computer monitor and repeatedly replaced by a new image that is similar to it, but advanced slightly in time. For 2D vector animations, the rendering process is the key frame illustration process, while tweened frames are rendered as needed.

An example of a typical Digital animated television series is Pendleton Ward's "Adventure Time"-

URL- http://animatedtv.about.com/od/picturegallerie1/ig/-Adventure-Time--Pictures/Princesses.htm

Applications

Vine

"Vine" is a mobile application by Twitter  that enables its users to create and post short video clips. Each video clip has a maximum time of 6 seconds, and can be shared on a variety of social networking services. Vine was founded by Dom Hofmann and Rus Yusupov in June 2012.

GifBoom

"GifBoom" is a mobile application that allows users to take a series of pictures, add effects, texts, and comments then share it on gifboom and other social networking websites.