What is animation? Cartoon technology

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

We all grew up on the good old Soviet cartoons. But, seeing Dunno, Funtik or other favorite characters on the screen, no one thought about how much effort was put into creating one minute of the cartoon. What is animation? Where did her story begin? Puppet and hand-drawn animation - which one is older? You will find answers to these questions in this article.

What is animation?

Animation is a set of techniques based on the creation of moving images, or rather the illusions of their movement, since many still pictures and scenes are used for this. That is, in fact, this is shooting pictures or puppets depicting individual moments of movement. Animation appeared much earlier than the Lumiere brothers invented cinema. Modern animation is increasingly called the term "animation", from the English "revival". Animation, animation - these are close concepts, but not identical. Their relationship can be characterized as follows. Animation is the creation of animation when frame-by-frame shooting of drawings, scenes, paper structures, etc.

Invention of animation

What is animation? Part of the childhood of many children. But where did it start?

In 1877, the self-taught engineer Emile Reynaud designed a praxinoscope, a mechanical toy with a mirrored rotating drum and a tape on which pictures were applied. Hand-drawn animation originated from this invention. Later, Reynaud improved his unit: now hand-drawn pantomimes, which were painted by hand, lasted from 7 to 15 minutes, although it must be admitted that this device for synchronizing image and sound was primitive, but not for those times

Moving Pictures

The animation technology looks like this: on each next frame, the hero's figure is presented in a slightly different phase of movement. Separately taken pictures are photographed one by one and projected onto the screen. Broadcast speed - 24 frames per second.

What is animation? This is a creative work, the creation of which takes a lot of time and labor of hundreds of people. The producers define the overall idea of the tape, the writers work on the plot and write the script, which is then broken down into scenes and episodes, illustrated by a series of sketches. After all this falls on the table to the director-animator, who distributes the scenes between animators: each of them draws a certain positioncharacters in the episode. Intermediate scenes will be drawn by junior animators. The rest of the artists are busy creating the background against which the action unfolds.

Then the contour drawings need to be painted. They are transferred to transparent plastic, outlined with ink and painted. After that, the operator photographs the drawings using a special camera. The last step is to synchronize the image and sound.

There is another technique for creating a cartoon.

Puppet animation

Russia is the birthplace of puppet or volumetric animation. With the development of this type of cartoon, a new technique for creating films appeared. Nevertheless, the process of creating the tape remained no less laborious.

The first stage of creating a cartoon is writing a script and thinking over the images of the characters. According to the sketches of the characters, dolls, their costumes and shoes are sewn, which will correspond to the image of each of the characters. This is the most time-consuming stage of work, since each doll must be movable.

Second stage - shooting the phases of the movement of the dolls, corresponding to the scenario. One episode can be filmed for several days, or maybe several months. A full-length puppet cartoon can be filmed for 3 years or even longer. But basically, volume animation has a duration of 5-15 minutes, but even this takes several months.

Why is this happening? For example, according to the script of the cartoon, the hero runs along a forest path. To shoot this scene, the character puppet is placed in front of a moving set, onwhich depicts trees, sun, clouds, sky, birds. Creating the effect of a running character, the animator manually moves the hero's legs and arms, and turns his head. In this way, each phase of the character's run is gradually filmed. Along with the body, the phases of the movement of clothes and hair are also filmed. So, during one day of shooting a cartoon, when all the photos are combined into one video sequence, the creators of the tape shoot only a couple of seconds of screen time.

When computer technology came to animation, puppet cartoons began to be shot much faster.

Electronic animation - animation

Electronic animation, or animation, is created using a computer: pre-prepared graphic files are sequentially arranged in the form of a slide show. Flash-animation is no less popular when a cartoon is created using a special Macromedia Flash program. It is easy to use and set up, which makes it popular.