Computer Animators
Animation as an art form has been around for almost one hundred years. From the earliest days of hand drawn cels, individual pictures strung together, to the complex rendering of 3-D virtual worlds, animation packs peoples' lives. Do you wonder how the computer-animated movies are made or want to become a computer animator? Computer Animation is a fast growing field. There are many different areas to of animation, computer animation is what this paper is about, history of animation and how it came to be and how to get there and what computer animators do for their job is what is in this paper.
Animation was first developed in 1906 by Stuart Blackton, a young English-born adventurer. His first short film, “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”, was a sensation with audiences. Blackton’s illusion was created by a very simple method, comical faces were drawn on a blackboard, then erased. The camera was stopped after each face was photographed. The 'stop-motion' provided a startling effect as the facial expressions changed before the audience's eyes.
A major breakthrough for animation came in 1915, when J. R. Bray was granted patents for his use of glassine paper. Bray created a two-dimensional look with his animation by drawing on a clear plastic sheet and then placing it over a pre-drawn background. Max Fleischer's rotoscope consisted of a drawing board, fitted with a piece of frosted glass, and a motion picture projector mounted underneath which magnified a single frame of motion picture film onto the glass. When the figure on one frame had been traced onto translucent paper, a crank advanced the film to the next frame.
People who choose a career path as a professional animator work in a challenging, fast-paced, and rewarding field. The resurgence in popularity of animation has re-opened countless opportunities for highly creative individuals, with computer skills. The latest need for computer animators is created by the expansion of the World Wide Web. Businesses of all types are hiring web developers to design web pages to promote their products and services to prospective customers who are accessing the Internet. Web developers and animators, use animated gifs, an image that appears to be alive, to display their talents in the hope of crossing the bridge to a full time position in animation. The better the gif the brighter the future! This is a highly competitive career choice and individuals most often find themselves starting out at the bottom.
Australian animators had adopted their animation techniques from America. Stop motion animation was first used by American J. Stuart Blackton in 1898. It was used to make a short animated film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus. At its
The animation techniques give
Kelly, Kevin. "A Brief History Of Stop- Motion Animation." Film RSS. N.p., 4 Feb. 2009. Web. 26 Mar. 2014.
In the 1980’s animation hit it peak with feature films, animated television, commercial that was paying very well, bands, and music videos. Stop motion animation was being the star in animation. Cable television shows would hire stop-motion animators to create their logo entirely with stop-motion animations, one network that did this was MTV. Also, some music videos would be completely done with stop-motion animation. Stop motion animation was almost used everywhere. Will Vinton created an animation studio that would produce the most iconic character today like the stop motion of Noid and the California Raisins made in clay for a commercial. These characters would become bigger than the brands they were to promote. “ Films such as Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Dragon Slayer, and Robocop would be filled with stop-motion visual effects to the point that the lines between reality and the imagined were so well blurred, many people thought it just couldn’t get any
Before talking films were big people were fascinated with the idea of moving pictures in the
Bliss, John, Art that Moves: Animation Around the World. Chicago, Illinois: Heinemann Raintree, 2011. Print
“Whenever someone hears the word ‘anime’ they immediately think of Japanese animation or in the very least Asian cartoons. Really, though the word ‘anime’ is derived form the word ‘animation’. And the definition of animation is the making of movies by filming a sequence of slightly varying drawings or models so that they appear to move and change when the sequence is shown.” (par. 1)
Just like most art forms it takes practice to become really good at animating. Computers have helped to make animation a quicker and simpler process then it once was. Now computers have been used in almost every animated film that has come out in the last ten years. Because of this animation quality has improve dramatically to the point that animated characters are serving as major characters in many of the top movies today. This includes characters such as Ja-Ja Banks in Starwars, The many dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park movies, and Gollum in the Lord of the Ring movies.
By many, animated documentary is considerate a new expression, or evolution, of the documentary, even if this genre (if it can be called so) is been around since the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the firsts examples were short animations such as Winsor McCay’s 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania or the propagandistic cartoons made during the World War I by John Randolph Bay, one of the pioneers of educational animation, who used it as a teaching tool for the US army training.
Animations are a series of drawings, computer graphics, or photographs of objects, like puppets and models, which are different from each to create a variety of entertainment for the audiences. Animations are what brings excitement and mystery, hooking the audience in through interest. It is a form of some sort of “magic” where things that aren’t real but from the imagination comes to life in front of people who live these mundane, ordinary lives, adding color to the eyes and mind. The creators of such amazing arts and creation are animators.
Animation is a visual technique that creates the illusion of motion, rather than recording motion through live action. The technique is used mainly for motion pictures. Animation can be created by illustrators, filmmakers, video makers, and computer specialists. Animation is most popular in creating cartoon movies. Advertisers also employ animation to develop commercials for television. In addition, producers of instructional films may use animation to help explain a difficult idea or one that could not be shown in live action. Animation can also be combined with live action in a movie. Many animators continue to make many drawings by hand. Since the mid-1980's, however, computer assistance combined with hand-drawn animation has become standard in many movie studios. These methods created such feature-length animated films as The Lion King (1994) and The Prince of Egypt (1998).
In this chapter, it has shown a brief history of animation and how it started in the early days of animation. It also discussed about 2D in brief and 3D. Also the techniques applied in making of animation since early ages with the evolution of 2D to 3D animation.
Computer technology invades the film industry. The existence of computers have aided in the production of genres of film ranging from action movie special effects, to cartoon animation and claymation. Computer Generated Imagery, better known as CGI, assists filmmakers in many ways. An image can be made two-dimensional from a three-dimensional scene, camera angles can be altered to make a character seem larger and thus more important than its surrounding bodies, and colors can be brightened or neutralized, among other things (Parsons, Oja 1). Without the aid of computers, movies would not have the ability to be what they are today.
Animation, like any other creative art, requires a successful animator to be: patient, talented, disciplined, and willing to work hard. Among the term animation are subcategories such as: character and effects. Character animation is the hardest, in that is requires the most skill. The animator must have a critical eye for every detail that goes into the final project. Character animation can also be broken up into its own subcategories such as: 2D, 3D, traditional, stop motion, and motion graphics. However, 2D and 3D are the most commonly pursued. Regardless if the project is generated by hand or by computer, the overall goal of the animator is to entertain. The animator must have both a clear concept of how to entertain the audience, and
Computer Graphics is the bond between humans and computers. Computer graphics is a large field that branches into almost all fields of computer science; however its roots are young. Computer graphics has massively grown over the past 40 years and is now our primary means of communication with computer applications. Do to technological limitations in the 1950s, computer graphics began as a small, specialized field. The Whirlwind project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is marked as the origin of computer graphics (Machover 14).