Animation: The Evolution Of Animation

English

Presentation

The evolution of Animation

Ever since the beginning of photography, people learned that pictures taken in quick series, of a moving object, could be flipped through to create the illusion of a moving picture. Animation is a graphic representation of drawings to show movement within those drawings. How did we go from a red and a blue pencil plus a hundred sheets of paper to software such as MAYA, Blender and Z-brush?

An Egyptian burial chamber, Shadow play figures, Zoetrope (1866), Flip book (1868), traditional animation.

Early animations, which started appearing before 1910, consisted of simple drawings photographed one at a time. It was extremely labour intensive, as there were literally hundreds of drawings per minute

In many ways he can be thought of as the Henry Ford of animation. He innovated process, equipment, and studio organization. Studios would simply hire a bunch of illustrators, put them in a room, give them a pack of smokes and a bottle of whiskey, put a stack of paper next to them, and tell them to animate a sequence using whatever gags they wanted. The individual animator was in charge of the entire process. Disney realized that this system didn’t take advantage of the stronger talents of animators. He knew that some were better at creating backgrounds, some better at drawing individual poses, some better at storyboarding, FX animation, at creating in-betweens, or inking and painting. He organized his studio along these lines, and the results were instantly superior to the other studios of the 1930s. This success allowed him to continue to push for innovation, both artistically and

Cel animation is extremely time consuming and requires incredible organization and concentration to detail. The way of doing animation today is different and is more effective and it majorly depends on the new advanced computer technology.

Disney’s Fantasia stands as a signpost in the development and evolution of 2D animation: beautiful and perfectly animated. 2D animation had reached it’s “state of the art”: The technique, equipment, and 2D pipeline had been developed to the point at which “how” to make animation was no longer a question. Now animators could concentrate on “what” they could do with it and how to draw audiences towards a deeper connection with the characters. Equipped with a stable “tool bag” and “animation process” true character animation was born!

Given the nature of the technology we use, you could ask the question “Why has it taken 40 years for CG animation to develop?” The answer lies in the rift between scientists and artists. The first examples of computer animation can be seen in the early 1960s, and continued to develop throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The creators of CG technology were primarily concerned with command-driven graphics and animation. They wanted animation that could simulate reality, using “real” physics data. They viewed the “cartoonists” at Disney or other studios as funny, playful, and insignificant. There wasn’t anything they could learn from 2D animators, and 2D animators, looking at the