Unit: 4 ANIMATION

User interface:

UI animation or user interface animation adds visual effects to UI elements and components to make
them interactive. This interactivity helps guide users through a website or digital product while creating
an immersive and enjoyable user experience.

Animation Editor

You could say an animation editor is an artist, problem solver, team player and business orientated
person. To create an animation, hours of editing and reviewing an idea will tell an effective story.

As an animator, I have experienced editing first hand. It’s a very important job that shouldn’t be taken
lightly. You would think animation is planned to a tee beforehand where scenes are written, shots are
animated and clips are put together in the order they were written, right? Wrong, the process is more
complex than you would think an editor would do.

Main Responsibilities

As an animation editor, you are involved in every process of planning and production, you may even
help with the concept and end up writing or re-writing scenes yourself. Making an animation is a
collaborative effort and is usually completed with a team of people. As an editor, you are involved in the
Animation process from the beginning all the way to the end.

What is an Animation Editor?

You could say an animation editor is an artist, problem solver, team player and business orientated
person. To create an animation, hours of editing and reviewing an idea will tell an effective story.
Animation Process

The animation editor is involved in all sections of the Animation Process:

Idea Generation: The editor sits with the director (editor and director can be the same person in small
projects) thinking of a concept for a story and aligns each others’ vision.

Style and Character Design: The editor helps to decide on the look, feel, mood and style for the
animation and characters.

Script and Storyboard: The editor sits down with the director to get all the details concerning dialogue
and camera angles.

Animatic: A static visual display of each scene is created with the placement of desired sound and music.
This is essentially a rough draft before animating begins to check the flow of the story and possible
changes of the order of the visuals or sound.

Creating Content: Content is created to use in the animation.

Animating: Editing and reordering the footage is essential in telling the story in the most direct way
possible, following the director’s vision. Making alterations such as adding or subtracting time and
selecting specific footage will allow for a good creative output.

Pace & Timing: The editor checks that the animations have good timing and that the sound and music
conveys the desired mood and pace.

Intercutting: Changing between compositions and alternating footage to create the desired effect.

Syncronizing: Ensures the sound effects play in time to the visuals. Music is reviewed to see if it fits the
animation well and recorded voices are synchronised to the mouth movements of the characters.

Animation Scene

A scene is a single event or conversation between characters, occurring during one period of time and in
one single place, that moves the story forward toward a climax and resolution.

Definition of Animation :

Animation is the process of creating an illusion of motion and shape change by means of rapid display of
various type of pictures that were made to create a single scene.

Principles of Animation :
Before doing animation, every animator should follow these principles to create a good animation.
These principles was evolved from past animation techniques but these principle are also very useful
and essential for doing animation. In 1981 two bright Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
introduced twelve basic principles of animation to produce more realistic works. These principle are also
applicable on present computer animations.

There are 12 basic principles of animation, they are-

1.Squash and Stretch –

This is the most important principle of animation, it gives the sense of weight and volume to draw an
object.

2.Anticipation –

In this principle animator will create a starting scene like that it shows that something will happen,
almost nothing happens suddenly.

3.Staging –

Animator creates such type of scene which attract audience so that audience’s attention is directed
toward that scene.

4.Straight Ahead –

In this principle, all frames are drawn from beginning to the end and then fill all the interval or scene.

5.Flow through and overlapping action –

Two object’s action have different speed in any scene can easily describe this principle.

6.Slow in and Slow out –

When an abject have maximum acceleration in between and resist on the beginning and end will show
this principle’s working.

7.Arc –

Arcs are present in almost all animation as no object will follow straight line and follows some arc in its
action.

8.Secondary action –

As with one character’s action second character move shows the multiple dimension of an animation.
9.Timing –

For playing a given action a perfect timing is very important.

10.Exaggeration –

This principle creates extra reality in the scene by developing a proper animation style.

11.Solid drawing –

In this principle, any object will created into 3D form to get realistic visualization of scene.

12.Appeal –

Any character need not be as same as any real character but it somewhat seems to be like that which
create a proper thinking in the audience’s mind.

Forms of Animation

1.Traditional Animation

2.2D Animation

3.3D Animation

4.Motion Graphics

5.Stop Motion

There are many different types of animation but most of them fall into five major categories. There are
advantages and disadvantages to each of them depending on how the artist prefers to create. Knowing
the different kinds of animation can help artists to choose their careers in animation.

Featured Programs

1. Traditional Animation

Traditional animation can also be referred to as cell animation. This type of animation requires the
animator to draw every single frame by hand to create an animated scene. This is usually done on a light
table that allows the artists to see the previous drawing through the top layer of paper. Well-known
companies like Disney are known for using this type of animation. Traditional animation is still done
today on computers with special tablets.
2. 2D Animation

2D animation refers to vector-based animations similar to the ones used in Flash. This style of animation
has been growing in popularity because the technology is so accessible. Although artists have the option
of editing frame by frame, vector-based animation gives the artist the option to create rigs for the
characters and move single body parts at a time rather than constantly redrawing the characters. It gives
more flexibility to beginners in animation because they don’t have to rely so heavily on drawing skills.

3. 3D Animation

3D animation is also known as computer animation and it is currently the most commonly used form of
animation. The process of 3D animation is very different from t he traditional style but they both require
the artist to share the same principles of movement and composition in animation. 3D animation has
less to do with drawing and more to do with moving a character in a program. The National Science
Foundation emphasizes how heavily 3D animators must rely on physics to create realistic animations.
The animator creates keyframes or specific movements and lets the computer fill in the rest.

4. Motion Graphics

Unlike the previously mentioned types of animation, motion graphics are not driven by characters or
storylines. This art form focuses on the ability to move graphic elements, shapes, and text. This process
is commonly used for things like television promotions, explainer videos, and animated logos. The
skillset necessary for the other types of animation doesn’t apply to motion graphics because there’s no
need to mimic body movement or facial expressions. Advertisements rely heavily on motion graphics
and present plenty of career opportunities.

5. Stop Motion

Stop motion animation is very similar to traditional animation because it combines a series of still
images that are slightly different to show movement. The largest difference is that stop motion uses
photography and captures real objects. With stop motion, the artists take a photo of an object or scene
and slightly moves the objects before taking another photo. The artist repeats this process until the
scene is completed and uses each photo as a frame in the animation. It’s similar to a flipbook with
photos.

What is a Keyframe?

A keyframe is a point (one frame) on a video timeline where you tell the video editing software a specific
properties settings. Some common properties are scale, rotation, opacity and volume.
Keyframe Animation

A keyframe animation is the shift in a property setting in between two keyframes. The idea is to trigger a
change to your video that takes place over a certain set of time.

That change could be a change in magnification or scale (zoom in or out), a change to the framing
(moving the image within the frame), rotating the image, a change in the color of the image, fading in or
fading out, or a change to the audio.

Almost any parameter that you can set within the timeline can be animated using keyframes.

Timelines:

The timeline shows where animation occurs in a document, including frame-by-frame animation,
tweened animation, and motion paths. Controls in the layers section of the timeline let you hide, show,
lock, or unlock layers, and display layer content as outlines.

Advantages

It helps in choosing frame rates for creating animations, these rates are 12, 24, and 30. 30 frames per
second give the best results for animation.

Timeline helps the animator in understanding the time in respect to frames as 24 frames mean one
second of animation therefore for making an animation of 1 minute means 60 seconds, a number of
frames will be needed are 1440, out of these some are keyframes while remaining are the copies of
frames to provide smoothness.

With the help of a timeline, animations can be looped over some frames if needed in animation.

A timeline has the concept of layers so the animation can be broken into smaller components like
background on different layers and foreground components on separate layers.

Components of Timeline

Following are the components of the timeline:

Frames

Layers Play and pause button

Loop Control

Onion Skin

Frame rate
Graph Editor:

The Graph Editor controls how the system interpolates those in-between key values. Nearly any
property of any item can be animated by keyframing the values of an item's channel. Channels are the
animateable properties of any item gathered together in list form.

Graph Editor, giving you a more intuitive approach to manipulating animation curves and keys in your
scene. The Graph Editor is presented as graph view of scene animation so you can create, view, and
modify animation curves various ways.

Dope sheet (animation):

A dope sheet is a traditional animation tool that allows an animator to organize his thinking and give
instructions to the cameraman on how the animation is to be shot. It consists of five sections (see
below) and is a bit longer, and a bit narrower, than A4. Every eighth line down is marked thicker than
the rest and shows half a foot of film. One second of animation would take three of these sections. The
dope sheet is also referred to as a camera instruction sheet or an exposure sheet.

Layout

The typical dope sheet is divided into five sections which are separated by many vertical and horizontal
lines, the horizontal lines represent one frame of film while the vertical ones separate the sections:

1. The column on the far left is used by the animator to jot down notes on the path of the action and
their thoughts about how the action should be visualized.

2. The next column is used to write down any dialog that may be happening in the scene. The sound is
split up into its phonetic components and marked down in the frame that it appears in in the film.

3. The central section is split up into six smaller columns, each one representing one level of animation.
Animation should never exceed five levels of acetate, any more and it will be too thick to see through.
The numbers of the drawings are marked down in the order they are to be shot in while the sixth
column is for the background.

4. The final column is for camera instructions, giving information for panning, trucking and field size.
5. Finally, at the top of the dope sheet, the animator writes in the sequence number, page
number, scene number and scene name.

3D Object Animation:
3D animation for commercial purposes will require a few things, your character, your script, and
your budget. You’ll go back and forth with a vendor for a while as you try to find a 3D animation
script, concept, and style that will be executable with the budget you have. Unless you are made
of money, this will probably mean certain compromises in quality, style, duration, and
complexity of your original idea.

Once you’ve come to a rough agreement and approximation of costs, and everyone agrees to
the work involved, a studio will need to do the following steps to realize your commercial:

Conceptualization - environments and characters and design sensibilities will need to be

conceptualized by 2D concept designers.

Storyboarding - your spot will be fully boarded out by a small team of story board artists.

Research - if your spot has some intense design ideas, or fx heavy elements, some amount of
time will be spent on research to find the best possible way to execute the concept.

Modeling - Artists who specialize in creating 3D models will be brought on board to create the
characters and environments

Texturing - Artists who specialize in shading the 3D models will be brought on board to give the
character and environments their final look.

Rigging - technical artists who specialize in giving characters tools and controls that allow
animators to move the models will be appointed.

Animation - Animators are now brought in to realize the movement and acting necessary for the
commercial.

Fx - things such as water, particles, explosions, and other computer heavy tasks will be worked
upon by artists who specialize in such things.

Editor - this individual will be working closely with you and the studio throughout the process to
ensure that we have a combination of spots that closely matches the original concept and
appropriately communicate the intent and pacing required.

Rendering - This is a computer intensive step where we take everything that has happened thus
far, and spit out the final frames as they will appear in their final form.
Compositing - This is the stage where we take the frames that have been rendered, and layer
them together to create a final image. For instance, we may render images of the character, the
environment, and an explosion all separately for various technical reasons, at a basic level, a
compositor is required to bring these images together.

Color - This is an end stage where we grade the final product to unify the shots produced, or
introduce various moods and concepts that we wish to communicate.

Output - Once upon a time, this was fairly simple, with a broadcast standard, but as more and
more target platforms are targeted, this can become quite a task in and of itself when VR, web,
mobile, and electronic billboards need to be considered.

Generally speaking, the work will be broken down into three rough stages, (although with small
budgets and tight deadlines, these stages are often overlapping) pre-production, production,
and post production. Pre production being conceptualization, research, story boarding.
Production encompassing most of the rest of the pipeline, and post production roughly falling
into compositing through output.