Animation Notes #1

What is Animation?
Animation precedes the invention of photography and the cine camera by several
decades. It is an art form in which a world of dynamic image and sound may be
synthesised completely out of nothing but a thought (see Peter Greenaway quote,
right).
Animation is 100% artifice, and as such, the synthesis of movement through the
sequential use of small fragments of time, which gives rise to this wondrous illusion,
is open to manipulation in extraordinary ways.
Animation is the most nimble of mediums. It has survived the mechanical
'persistence of vision' toys popular in the 19th century; found expression as an art
form in cinema; it was the means by which to experiment with time-based art and
cinematic forms to present new visual vocabularies; it was brilliantly positioned to
pioneer the use of computers to create moving images from numbers; it has
demystified complex processes; visualised scientific phenomena and provided
simulation models to help us understand the world; it has become an essential
ingredient in multimedia content; it is imbedded in the control interface display of
multi-million dollar jet fighter planes, it is integral to the computer games industry; it
increasingly underpins all special effects in motion picture production; and it has
provided content in an ideal form to distribute across a bandwidth poor networked
environment.
Animation is an art form which can come from anywhere and which can go to
anywhere - from a large production team working in a highly specialised studio or a
lone individual working out of a bedroom, to an Imax Cinema screen several metres
wide or a mobile phone screen a few centimetres across.
Animation can be as intimate and personal as a stick figure doodle jiggling in the
corner of a dog-eared school exercise book cum flip book, or as expansive and
public as animated laser lights splashed upon a cityscape(see Hong Kong's Harbour
'Symphony Of Lights' project - Lloyd Weir, Art Director, Laservision NSW and AIM
graduate 1996).

Laservision's Hong Kong Harbour

'Symphony Of Lights' project. Art

'Hello' - a multi award winning animated

film by 2003 AIM graduate, Jonathan
Nix.

ANIMATION IS...

The amplification of an idea through simplification and abstraction; a sight gag timed
to perfection; a visual poem; a moving painting; extraordinary sublime moments in
the orchestration of moving image and sound; throw-away sick slapstick humour
designed for the moment; stories that remain with you forever; time-based imagery
that can be fantastically surreal because of its unique process of realisation; a

Little else compares with the thrill of breathing life into characters that might never
have existed but for your imagination, or to move a large audience of strangers to
laugh out loud at their antics, or to keep a person interactively engaged with them
and the worlds you have invented, for hours on end.
Almost anything can be brought to life and be imbued with personality, twigs, clay,
drawings, objects, computer meshes, and, of course, anything becomes possible in
the world of animation. It can entertain, explain and fascinate. In all its wondrous
forms from the traditional 'bonk 'em on the head' cartoon styles, to TV commercials,
sophisticated narrative works and simulations, to experimental, digitally composited,
special effects driven and art films, animation is a powerful vehicle for ideas.

Annemarie Szeleczky used sticks of

macaroni and torn paper (left) and the
Aussie breakfast spread, 'Vegiemite' for
the experimental animation in her
research project - "The Development of