The animation consists of a series of static images presented in rapid succession, in order to create the illusion of movement. There are several techniques to create an animation: you can draw by hand (flip-book), draw and paint on glass, use step one shooting or use a computer to create two or three dimensional images. Although each method makes use of different techniques, the principle by which the viewer's eye is deceived is always the same.
Steps
Part 1 of 5: General Principles of Animation
Step 1. Plan in detail the story you intend to animate
For simpler animations, like a flip-book, it will probably be enough to organize everything mentally, but to make more complex work you will need to create a storyboard. A storyboard resembles a very long comic, in which words and images are combined to summarize the overall story or a part of it.
If the animation will make use of characters with complex graphic characteristics, you will also need to prepare model sheets (the studies of the characters), which show their appearance in various poses and in full length
Step 2. Determine which parts of the story will be animated and which will be static
In order to be able to tell the story effectively, it is usually neither necessary nor cost effective for every object to move. In this case we are talking about limited animation.
- In an animation depicting Superman flying, you may only need to show the Man of Steel's waving cloak and the clouds whizzing past from foreground to background, in a sky that otherwise remains static. An animated logo might just feature the name of the film company that rotates to get attention, and only for a limited number of spins, so that audiences can clearly read the name.
- The limited animation has the disadvantage of not having a particularly realistic appearance. For animations aimed at children's audiences, this is not as serious a problem as in those aimed at adults.
Step 3. Determine which parts of the animation you can repeat
Some actions can be broken down into sequential executions to use them multiple times in an animated sequence. Sequences like this are called animation loops or loops. Some of the actions that can be repeated in a circular way are the following:
- A bouncing ball.
- Walking / running.
- The movement of the mouth (speaking).
- Jumping rope.
- A flapping wing or a waving cloak.
Step 4. You can find detailed instructions on how to animate these actions on this website:
Angry Animator.
Part 2 of 5: Making a Flip-Book
Step 1. Get several sheets of paper that you can flip through
A flip-book consists of a number of sheets, usually tied to one edge, which creates the illusion of movement when you grab them with your thumb at the opposite edge and flip through the pages quickly. The more sheets an action represents, the more realistic the motion will appear: a live-action film, played by real-life actors, uses 24 frames per second, while most animated ones use only 12. You can make the flip-book in one of the following ways:
- Join them together by tying them or using staples, sheets of printer paper or colored cards.
- Use a notebook.
- Use a pad of sticky paper.
Step 2. Create the individual images
You can make them in several ways:
- Draw them by hand. In this case, start with simple images (stick figures) and backgrounds, then move on to more complex designs. To prevent the backgrounds from appearing blurry when you browse the pages, you will need to be careful to make them homogeneous with each other.
- Photos. You can take a number of digital photographs, then print them on sheets of paper to tie together, or use a computer program to create a digital flip-book. Using this technique will be easier if your camera has a "burst" mode, which allows you to take a burst of photos as long as the shutter button is held down.
- Digital video. Some newly wed couples choose to create a luxury flip-book of the wedding, using a portion of the videos shot during the wedding. Extracting single frames requires the use of video editing software; many couples upload their videos to online sites, such as FlipClips.com.
Step 3. Assemble the images
If you drew them on an already bound notebook, the montage is already done. If not, sort the images so that the first is at the bottom of the stack and the last is at the top, then tie the sheets together.
Before moving on to book binding, you may want to experiment, excluding or rearranging some images to make the animation run more jerky, or to change the pattern
Step 4. Browse the pages
Bend them up with your thumb and release them at a steady speed. You should see moving images.
The authors of animated drawings employ a similar technique, making preliminary drawings, before coloring and inking the final ones. They overlap them one on top of the other, from first to last, then hold one edge in place while leafing through the designs
Part 3 of 5: Making an Animated Drawing (Rodovetro)
Step 1. Prepare the storyboard
The production of most of the animated drawings requires the employment of a team of several designers. To guide the animators it is necessary to create a storyboard, which also serves to tell the story to the producers, before the actual drawing phase begins.
Step 2. Record a preliminary soundtrack
Since it is easier to synchronize an animated sequence to a soundtrack than the other way around, you must first record a preliminary one, which consists of the following elements:
- Voices of the characters.
- Sung parts of the songs present.
- Provisional music track. The final track is added in post-production, along with the sound effects.
- For animated films made up to 1930, animation was created first, then sound. In their first short films dedicated to Popeye, Fleischer Studios followed this process, which required voice actors to improvise between lines of dialogue. This explains the humorous humming of Popeye in shorts such as Choose Your "Weppins" (1935).
Step 3. Create a preliminary story reel
The story reel, also called animatic, is used to synchronize the soundtrack with the storyboard to identify and correct coordination errors present in the soundtrack or script.
Advertising agencies make use of animatic, but also photomatic, which consists of a series of digital photographs sequenced to form a crude animation. Generally, archival photos are used to make them, in order to contain costs
Step 4. Create model sheets for the main characters and the most important props
These preparatory sketches show characters and objects from a large number of points of view, also indicating the style through which they will be drawn. Some characters and objects could be represented in three dimensions, thanks to the creation of models called maquettes.
Reference preparatory sketches are also created for the backgrounds on which the action will take place
Step 5. Refine the sync
Examine the animatic carefully to see what poses, lip movements, and other actions will be needed for each frame. Make a note of this in a table called the machine sheet.
If the animation is primarily tuned to music, as is the case with Fantasia, you can also create a bar sheet to synchronize the animation to the notes of the musical accompaniment. In some productions, the bar sheet can completely replace the machine sheet
Step 6. Draw a layout of the scenes
The shots of animated films are planned with sketches similar to those made by a director for a film with real actors. In larger productions, groups of designers conceive the look of backgrounds in terms of framing, camera movement, lighting and shading, while others develop the poses each character will have to assume in a given scene. In smaller productions, however, it could be the director who performs all these operations.
Step 7. Create a second animatic
This animatic is composed of the storyboard and layout drawings, together with the soundtrack. After the director has approved it, the final design phase can begin.
Step 8. Draw the shots
In traditional animation, each shot is drawn in pencil on sheets of transparent paper perforated on the edge, in order to adapt to the hooks of the strap (or peg bar), the physical support fixed to a counter or a light table. The strap prevents the sheets from slipping and ensures that each element of the design is represented in its place.
- Usually, only the key points and actions are drawn initially. A pencil test is carried out, using photographs or scans of the drawings synchronized with the soundtrack, to ensure that the details are correct. Only at this point are the details added, in turn subjected to a pencil test. After all the material has been rehearsed in this manner, it is handed over to another animator, who redraws it entirely to give it a homogeneous look.
- In large productions, it is possible for each character to be entrusted to an entire team of animators: the lead animator portrays the key points, while the assistants take care of the details. When characters drawn by different teams interact, the animating leaders of each character determine which is the main character of the scene in question, which is then created first, while the secondary character is drawn according to the actions performed by the first.
- During each phase of the drawing, an updated version of the animatic is created, roughly equivalent to the daily projections of a film with real actors.
- When working with human characters drawn in a realistic way, it can happen that the figures are traced starting from actors and scenarios imprinted on the frames of a film. This process, developed in 1915 by Max Fleischer, is called a rotoscope.
Step 9. Paint the backgrounds
As the shots are drawn, the background images are transformed into "sets" on which to photograph the drawings of the characters. Although mostly digitally made today, backgrounds can be hand painted in the traditional way, using one of the following techniques:
- Gouache (a type of aqueous paint that contains pigment particles of a certain consistency)
- Acrylic paint.
- Oil.
- Watercolor.
Step 10. Transfer the designs to the glasses
The rhodium glasses are thin transparent acetate sheets. Like the sheets of paper used previously, they have perforated edges to be inserted on the hooks of a strap. The images can be traced from the drawings or photocopied on the glass. The latter is then colored on the back with the same type of technique used for the background.
- Only the image of the characters and the elements to be animated is painted on the glass, while the rest is left intact.
- A more sophisticated process (the so-called APT process, or animation photo transfer) was developed for the film Taron and the Magic Pot. The drawings were photographed on high-contrast film and the negatives developed on rhodo-glasses coated with photosensitive dye. The portion of glass that had not been exposed was cleaned with a chemical process, and the minute details inked by hand.
Step 11. Lay the rhodium glasses on top of each other and photograph them
All the rod glasses are placed on the strap, and each of them has a reference indicating the layer it must occupy. A glass plate is placed on the stack to flatten it, and the image is then photographed. The rhodium glasses are then removed, a new stack is created and photographed. The process is repeated until each scene has been composed and photographed.
- Sometimes the rod glasses, instead of being placed on a stack in contact with each other, are placed in a device that moves them at different speeds and at various distances from each other. This device is called a multiplane camera and is used to create the illusion of depth.
- Over the background glass, the character's glass, or the top of the stack, coatings can be added to add further depth and detail to the final image before it is photographed.
Step 12. Combine the photographed scenes together
The individual images are sequenced exactly like the frames of a film, which, when projected, produce the illusion of movement.
Part 4 of 5: Creating a Step One Animation
Step 1. Prepare the storyboard
As is the case with other types of animation, the storyboard serves both as a guide for animators and as a means of communicating the flow of the story to other people.
Step 2. Choose the kind of objects that will be animated
As in animated drawing, step-one shooting consists of creating several images to be shown in rapid sequence to produce the illusion of movement. Step-one animation normally makes use of three-dimensional objects, but this is not the only option available. In fact, you can use any of the following techniques:
- Decoupage. You can cut out pieces of paper of human and animal figures, to lay them on a drawn background and create a two-dimensional animation. This is the case, for example, of the famous silhouette animations by Lotte Reiniger and the films of Gianini and Luzzati.
- Puppets. Known above all for Rankin-Bass animated productions such as `` Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer '' or `` Santa Claus Is Comin 'to Town' ', the Adult Swim Robot Chicken channel series, but above all for the feature films produced from Tim Burton (Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride), this technique was probably born in 1898, with the short film The Humpty Dumpty Circus, by Albert Smith and Stuart Blackton. In order for the puppets to move their lips to speak, you will need to make different mouths in various shapes and opening levels, to be replaced at each frame.
- Plasticine (or claymation). Will Vinton's California Raisins, but above all the feature film Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit series, both made by Aardman Animation, are the best-known modern examples of this technique, which actually dates back to the short film Modeling Extraordinary of 1912 and which, in the 1950s, he made Gumby, created by Art Clokey, a star of American television. For some plasticine figures, you can use wire armor to support the structure and attach it to the plinth, as did Marc Paul Chinoy in the 1980 film I Go Pogo.
- Models. They can represent real or fictional creatures, or vehicles. Ray Harryhausen used step-one animation to create the fantastic creatures of films such as The Argonauts and Sinbad's Fantastic Voyage. Industrial Light & Magic used this technique to make AT-ATs walk across the frozen wastes of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.
Step 3. Record a preliminary soundtrack
As in the case of animated drawings, you will need it to synchronize the action. You may need to make a machine sheet, a bar sheet, or both.
Step 4. Synchronize the soundtrack to the storyboard
As in the case of animated drawings, before you start moving objects you need to calculate the coordination of the soundtrack and animation.
- If you are going to get the characters to talk, you will need to determine what the correct mouth shapes are for the dialogue they will deliver.
- It may also be necessary to create something similar to the photomatic described in the section dedicated to animated drawings.
Step 5. Draw a layout of the scenes
This part of the step-one animation resembles, even more than in the case of animated drawings, the way in which a director makes sketches for a film with real actors, since even with this technique you find yourself working in three size.
As with real-life movies, you will have to deal with the lighting of the scenes, instead of drawing the light and shadow effects as you would in an animated drawing
Step 6. Organize and photograph the elements of the scene
You will need to attach the camera to a tripod to keep it motionless during filming. If you have a timer that allows you to take pictures automatically, you may need to use it, if you have the ability to adjust it for long enough periods of time to allow you to move elements to animate between shots.
Step 7. Move the objects to animate and photograph the scene again
Repeat this operation until you have completed photographing the entire scene from start to finish.
Animator Phil Tippett developed a system to have part of the model movements controlled by a computer in order to make them more realistic. This technique, called go-motion, was used in The Empire Strikes Back, in The Dragon of the Lake of Fire, RoboCop and RoboCop 2
Step 8. Combine the photographed images together to obtain a sequence
As in the case of the rhodo-glasses in animated drawings, the single shots of the shot in step one become the frames which, projected in sequence, produce the illusion of movement.
Part 5 of 5: Creating a Computer Animation
Step 1. Decide whether to specialize in 2-D or 3-D animation
Compared to manual animation, computer animation greatly simplifies work in both fields.
Three-dimensional animation requires the learning of particular skills. You will need to learn how to light up a scene and create the illusion of surface texture
Step 2. Choose the suitable computer
The computer features you will need will depend on your choice of making a 2-D or 3-D animation.
- In the case of 2-D animation, a fast processor is useful, but not necessary. Nonetheless, you should get a quad-core processor if you can afford it, or, in the case of buying a used computer, one that is at least dual-core.
- For 3-D animation, however, due to all the rendering you'll need to do, you'll need the fastest processor you can afford. To support it, you will also need a significant amount of memory. You will probably have to invest several thousand dollars in a new high-performance computer.
- For both types of animation, you will need a monitor of the maximum size allowed by your work environment, and you may need to consider using a dual monitor system, in case you need to keep several program windows open that take care of several details. Some monitors, such as the Cintiq, are specifically designed for animation.
- You should also consider using a graphics tablet, a device connected to your computer that has a surface on which you can draw with a digital pen such as the Intuos Pro, which replaces the mouse. Initially, perhaps it would be good if I used a cheaper pen to trace the pencil drawings to transfer to the computer.
Step 3. Choose software suitable for your skill level
They exist for both 2-D and 3-D animation, and for beginners, there are inexpensive alternatives available; as your budget and skill improve, you can upgrade to more sophisticated and expensive versions.
- For 2-D animations, you can quickly create animated images using Adobe Flash, with the help of one of the many free demo videos available. When you're ready to learn frame-by-frame animation, you can use a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop, or one that has functions similar to Photoshop's timeline mode.
- For 3-D animation, on the other hand, you can start with free programs like Blender, and then move on to more sophisticated ones, like Cinema 4D or the industry standard Autodesk Maya.
Step 4. Practice
Immerse yourself in the software you have chosen to use, learn its secrets and then start creating animations on your own. Collect these animations into a demonstration file to show to others, in person or online.
- When exploring your software package, take a look at Part 3, "Creating an Animated Drawing", if your software is dedicated to 2-D animation, and Part 4, "Creating a Step One Animation ", to determine which parts of the process will be automated by the software and which parts you will need to implement by other means.
- You can post videos on your website, which should be registered under your name or that of your company.
- You can also post it on a sharing web platform, such as YouTube or Vimeo. This latter site allows you to make changes to the video you posted without having to change the link, which will come in handy after you have created your latest masterpiece.
Advice
- Among the books to refer to to know how to create animations in general, you can use Animation for Beginners - A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming an Animator by Morr Meroz, The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams and The Illusions of Life - Disney Animation by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. For cartoon-style animation, on the other hand, you can read Preston Blair's Cartoon Animation. They are all in English; for the moment, there are no such complete and exhaustive manuals in Italian.
- If you are particularly interested in 3-D animation, you can read the How to Cheat in Maya book series. To learn more about composing scenes and shots, you can use How to Make Your Own Jeremy Vineyard Movies.
- Animation can be combined with the acting of real actors. MGM did it in 1944 with the film Two Sailors and a Girl (Sing That Passes You), in one scene in which Gene Kelly dances with the mouse Jerry (the one from the Tom and Jerry series). The 1968 television series produced by Hanna-Barbera The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn combined real actors playing Huck, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher with animated characters and backgrounds. A more recent example is the 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, in which actors Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie act surrounded by entirely computer-generated backgrounds and vehicles. Constant technological improvements and cost reductions have made the integration of computer-generated elements into live action films increasingly common in recent years.
