Monday 27.9.10

I found this morning’s lecture on Animation really interesting. Andy Wyatt is the programme leader of the Digital Animation course at Falmouth, and has been working in the industry for 20 years, doing stuff for the BBC and as a writer.

Animation is basically an optical illusion, the illusion of movement created by the frame by frame movement of an image, caused by a phenomenon called persistence of vision.

2D drawn animation – Frames drawn by hand and photographed, this is liberating as it is pure movement, and doesn’t have to have characters or tell a story

2D cel animation – The background stays the same and things in the foreground move around

Cut-out animation – Paper is cut out and moved for each frame

Stop-motion animation – uses 3D objects and photographs them for each frame

Pixilation – real-life situations photographed frame-by-frame, it’s named after a Victorian photographer who pretended he could film pixies

3D CGI – Computer-generated frames

Other – Sand on a glass plate, paint on glass, scratching onto film negatives, time lapse, mixed mediums.

We then started our own animation, with a self portrait morphing in any way we wanted to an object of our choice, into the next person’s self portrait, drawing around 40 frames to make a 5-second animation, so that the all link in together.

Research: the Phenakistoscope (1872), the Zoetrope (1867), Erica Russell (Feet of Song), Jan Svankmajer, Blu (graffiti artist, Muto), Smith & Faulkes