Introduction

Development Notes:
This page is currently under development. It is by no means ready for use.

What Is Animation?

Well, do we really have to explain that here? You wouldn't be here if you didn't have a glue, right?

We like what we found at Wikipedia: "Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement." Animation, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Animation&oldid=358878912 (last visited May 1, 2010).

That sounds very much like every video or movie is an animation, a series of images being displayed. But the important part is "[...] artwork or model positions [...]".

So the question is now: How do we get the artwork or the model positions? That leads us to the ...

Types Of Animation

Some say there are 4 types of animation:

• traditional animation ("by hand" development of each of the images)
• stop motion (or step-by-step) (using a camera to take the images that finally build the animation. e.g. clay animation)
• computer animation
• other animation techniques (like: drawn-on-film, paint-on-glass)

We do not think that the term "computer animation" is very helpful as many techiques can now be done, enhanced or mixed with computer tools. But let us stick with the term as long as we do not have a better one.

Computer animation in this case can be defined as the animation that uses a computer to create at least some of the images just based on rules and other data.

Computer animation can be divided into two different ...

The Animation Creation Process

The full process includes the following steps:

• development
• pre production
• production
• post production
• sales and distribution

We will look closer into pre production, production and post production steps. Develoment takes care of the creation of the story as such and does typically not include creation of any artwork other than textual descriptions. Sales and Distribution are important, but also do not have an animation content as such.

Pre Production

the following tasks are usually seen as being part of pre production

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