Multimedia System

Chapter Seven: Animation

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 Overview of Today’s Topics
What is animation?
Types of animation
File types of animation
Using Flash to build your animation and animation
terminology

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 What is animation
A sequence of images that create the illusion of
movement when played in succession.
Here are some simple examples:

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 Why use animation?
Four Stroke Engine
Easier to show somebody how something
works then to try and explain it.
Also animation:
Indicate movement

Illustrate change over time

Visualize three-dimensional objects

Attracts attention

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 How does animation work?
Simulation of movement through a series of pictures that
have objects in slightly different positions
Each drawing is called a frame (a snapshot of what’s
happening at a particular moment)
Required Frames Per Second FPS:
Movies on film  24 fps
TV 30 fps
 9000 frames for five minute cartoon
Computer animation  12 to15 fps
Jerky if anything less

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 Sampling and Quantizing of Motion
Since each frame is just an image 
Each frame is sampled into a discrete samples and each
sample becomes a pixel  Sampling process
 Remember:
More samples means better quality (10 pixels by 10 pixels vs
200 pixels by 200 pixels)
More samples means bigger file sizes
Each pixel gets assigned a colour, maybe just 2
colours(black and white1bit colour) or maybe 16
million colour (24 bit colour)  Quantization process

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 Frame Rate (Frames Per Second FPS)
Frame Rate: indicates the playback speed of the
animation in frames per second
Low frame rate appears choppy
Question: BUT high frame rate can also appear choppy,
WHY?
 Answer: if the computer playing the animation is not fast enough to
process and display the frames.

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 2-D Animation
Two types of 2-D animation techniques:
Cel Animation (also called traditional animation,
classical animation, hand-drawn animation, frame by
frame animation)
Path Based Animation
Both types still are made of frames:
The more frames per second, the more believable the
movement will be.
The more frames per second, the bigger the final version
of the movie file will be (more bytes)

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 Cel Animation

 An animator must HAND draw every single frame!

 To simplify, one background is drawn and then the item that
will move is drawn on a clear sheet of plastic (a cel), one
drawing for each frame.
 When moving to the next scene, just change the background

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 Path Based Animation
Pick:
a starting point for an object, (start frame)
an ending point for an object (end frame)
a path for the object to follow
And then the computer generated all the frames in between
(called TWEENING), so that the artist doesn’t have to
draw the intermediate frames (like the artist did in cel
based animation)

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 Path Based Animation Software
The software that generates the frames has features
such as:
Looping
Transition (Fade in and Fade out)
Repetitions  allows the user to pick how many times
the animation repeats
Setting the Frames Per Second
 Largerfile size
 More realistic motion

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 2-D Animation Terminology
Question: What do these terms mean?
Keyframe
Tweening

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 
3-D Animation
3-Dimension animation involves 3 steps:
Modelling
Rendering
Animating

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 Where can you get animation?
Purchase CDs or buy off the internet or get free clipart
on the internet, for example:
OR, you can create your own:
Animated Gifs can be create in Photoshop or in other
software tools
Using Flash
We will look at two different file types of animation:
Animated gifs
Flash animation

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 Animated GIFS
No Plug-ins Required:
 Animated GIFs require no plug-ins, and the authoring
tools to create them are often free and easy to learn.
No Sound:
 If you need sound in addition to motion, you cannot use
an animated GIF by itself. Instead, you may want to
consider other animation alternatives, such as Flash, or
even video

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 Using Photoshop to make an animated gif

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 Flash
A multimedia authoring and playback system
Launched in 1996 by Macromedia
Adobe bought it in 2005
Flash became popular for its animated graphics
Responsible for much of the animations,
advertisements and video components found on
today's Web sites
Flash is the industry's most advanced authoring
environment for creating interactive websites, digital
experiences and mobile content.

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 Essential Flash Terminology
 Question: What kind of tween would have been used in this Flash
animation?
 Stage: rectangular area where the visible motion will take place
 Timeline: series of frames in a row and stacks of layers. Indicates key
frames, regular frames and empty frames
 Shape: basic shapes drawn with the shape tools, line tool or a single letter
 Symbol: store in a library and can be reused. Changes to the library
symbol will result in changes in all of the copies of this symbol currently
on the stage.
 Graphic: static graphic, can be used in other symbols
 Button: interactive part of animation with user, responds to mouse clicks and
rollovers.
 Movieclip: reusable piece of animation, can turn a simple animation into a
18 movieclip symbol and reuse it.
 Comparing File Types:
Animated GIF Flash Director
Created by Depends Adobe Adobe

Extension Source depends .fla (source) .dir (source)

.gif (movie) .swf (movie) .dcr (movie)
.gif (Flash can make
gifs too!)
Size Larger than Vector images take Vector images take up
normal gif up less space than less space than GIF
GIF bitmapped bitmapped images
images
Uses Banners, small Interactive video, More interactive sites
areas graphics, animation
Need to play it Nothing Flash Player (Free Web browser plug in
and works with most (The Shockwave
browsers) Player)

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