In this article for the Burnley College News Blog and I am going to discuss Web animation. I will discuss different areas such as the uses of web animation, the history of animation and discuss the different types of animation such as cell animation and stop motion. I will also discuss the file formats that are used for animation and go over vector and raster animation. Finally I will discuss the software in which animation can be played.
Uses of Web Animation
How and where is web animation used? Well, it is used in a variety of things across the Internet. For example it is use in banner ads, linear and interactive animations, promotion, information and entertainment.
Web Banners
A web banner or a banner ad is a form of advertising on the Internet. This is when you place a banner that has an advertisement placed on it, onto a webpage so that everyone who visits that website can view it, therefore it will attract more people to buy the product or whatever is being advertised. These web banners usually use some form of image weather it be a GIF or a JPEG file and they will also incorporate some form of animation to grab the attention of the viewers.These specific advertisements make money from people clicking on the banner and viewing the advertisement.
Linear and Interactive Advertisements
Commonly known as linear and non-linear advertisements. These are basically how the advertisements look. For example if the advert has no interaction, then it would be a linear advertisement. So basically the advert has a seta action that will occur every time you see the advert. However a non-linear advertisement, allows the user to change what happens in the animation by interacting with the banner.
This image shows a linear advertisement at the top of a web page. This has no user interaction and is just simply showing the advertisement.
Entertainment
I am going to discuss web animations that are made specifically for entertainment purposes. The majority of web animation is now mainly in the entertainment sector such as short animated films or animated games. There are many different websites that are dedicated to these specific web animated products. Animators can also use the web to promote there own specific animations on websites such as YouTube to make their animations more popular.
This video just shows how popular videos can become when placed on YouTube. This could give the animator further opportunities for making animations just like this one.
A History of Animation
In this section, I am going to discuss basically, where animation started and some of the early inventions that were used to produce animations. I will go over some of the major inventions in the history of animation. Below I will produce a timeline of the dates of when these products where invented.
1872- Eadweard Muybridge started his photographic gathering of animals in motion.
1889- Thomas Edison announced his creation of the kinetoscope, which projected a 50ft length of film in approximately 13 seconds.
1892- Emile Renynaud, combining his earlier invention of the praxinoscope with a projector, opens the Theatre Optique in the Musee Grevin. It displays an animation of images painted on long strips of celluloid. In the praxinoscope there was pictures inside the outer cylinder and each picture was reflected by one of the mirrors on the inner cylinder and when the device span around these reflections gave the impression of a moving picture.
1895- Louis and Augustine Lumiere issued a patent for a device called a cinematograph capable of projecting moving pictures. This was better than some of the other devices as it was available for a larger amount of people to view it.
1896- Thomas Armat designed the vitascope, which projected the films of Thomas Edison.
1906- J. Stuart Blackton made the first animated film which he called "Humorous phases of funny faces." His method was to draw comical faces on a blackboard and film them. He would stop the film, erase one face to draw another, and then film the newly drawn face (stop-start technique). This technique would create an image where the characters facial expressions where changing.
1910- Emile Cohl, French animator created the first paper cutout animation. The advantage of this technique is that you don’t have to re draw each frame. You just have to re position pieces of paper that have already been designed.
Stop Motion
Stop motion (also known as stop action) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Motion animation using clay is called clay animation or clay-mation.
Cel Animation
Also known as traditional animation, this is animation in which every frame is drawn by hand. This form of animation was very popular until the introduction of computer animation.
Computer Animation
This is process used to animate images using computer graphics. Computer animation is essentially a digital successor to the stop motion techniques used in traditional animation with 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of 2D illustrations.
So, as you can see, we have gone from basic, cel animation in which all the frames are hand drawn to computer animation The disadvantage of cel animation is that it will take a lot of time up having to capture every single frame whereas in computer animation, you can draw your images digitally and it isn’t as time consuming, however you cannot create images with such detail as if they are hand drawn.
Frame Rate
Also known as frame frequency, frame rate is basically, the amounts of frames are shown each second. So if for example, in your animation you have a high frame rate, then your animation is going to be faster than an animation that has a lower frame rate.
Key Frames
A key frame in animation, is basically, the points that determine, the start point and the end point of a specific movement. They are called "frames" because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film.
Tweening
Tweening is when the programme creates frames between two images that are in different positions. This makes it look as though one image is moving smoothly into the other image.
Vector Animation
Vector animation, is a type of animation that uses vectors instead of pixels, so it uses mathematical equations to create the animations. These types of animations allow for a smoother image. The most popular vector based animation programme is Macromedia Flash.
Raster Animation
Raster animation is the simplest form of computer animation. This method involves creating an image and then using the computer programme to make the image move. The most common programme for raster animation would be Adobe Photoshop.
.fla- this file format is a movie or animation that has been created with Adobe Flash. Often saved as a .SWF file for use on the Web; the FLA file is the editable project file saved by the Flash development program; the SWF (or "swiff") file is a compressed format that is viewable in most Web browsers with the Flash plugin.
.swf- This file time is an animation created with Adobe Flash, they might contain text, on top or vector and raster graphics. Files with this file format will play in any web browser that has the flash plug-in.
.gif- this is an image file that might contain up to 256 colors. color palette may be a predefined set of colors or may be adapted to the colors in the image; lossless format, meaning the clarity of the image is not compromised with GIF compression. GIFs are common format for Web graphics, especially small images and images that contain text, such as navigation buttons. However, JPEG (.JPG) images are better for showing photos because they are not limited in the number of colors they can display.
Web Animation Software
Real Player
RealPlayer is a cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. Real player was very popular in its early days. However bigger companies such as Microsoft and apple have now over taken it with iTunes and windows media player.
QuickTime Player
QuickTime, developed by apple, is another multimedia player that is capable of playing back various different forms of video, sound and images. It can be run on most windows and mac OS operating systems for free.
Some of the file formats that are supported by QuickTime are;
· AVI
· MPEG-2
· MPEG-4
· Quick Time Movie
· JPEG
Conclusion
And that’s the end! I hope these articles have been helpful to you in understanding digital graphics, web animation and video in interactive media. There will be more blogs to come soon. Thanks for reading!
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