Task 1- Animation Techniques

Optical Toys

There are many different types of optical toys for example there is Thaumatrope, Phenakistoscope and Xoetrope.
Thaymatrope was found in the 19th century. Its basically where you draw a picture on each of a disk which is  then attached to an piece of string giving you an illusion of an animation when the string is twirled quickly.
Here is an example of an Thaymatrope; 

The coined name translates roughly as "wonder turner", from Ancient Greek. Because in the 19th century when the Thaymatrope was credited by either John Ayrton Paris or Peter Mark Roget  because animation wasn't as big as it is now and when the Thaymatrope was created it actually did make wonders for the animation industry and was involved in films such as  the film The Prestige.

Phenakistoscope was an early animation device that used a spinning disk of sequential images and the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion. Similar to an Thaymatrope but on a bigger wheel and with image going around the circumference of the wheel and except from having string to spin on it has an spinning disk which is placed on a vertical handle helping the disk spin and show all 8-12 frames in loops doing another illusion of an animation.  

Xoetrope is basically a cylinder  that consists of  slits which are cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion. Xoetrope translated basically means turning, so it name does explain the turning of the cylinder. Here is an example of a xoetrope;

Here is my experiment with the Xoetrope technique, I drew Micky mouse on different frames which on each frame he slowly changed walking position. Once done I used an copy device to allow me to put my drawing on the computer so i could then upload to adobe Photo shop so i could play my images in a sequence creating an walking Micky mouse animation. 

Cell 

Cell is short for celluloid, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation.  

Image link

It is just like onion skinning, there's a background which is basically a still image and then you get a transparent piece of paper like an tracing paper and draw what ever image you want to move onto the background image. It makes it more easier and smoother to do an drawing animation.
Here's my example of doing an Cell animation; 

Key frame 

Key frame animation is used to help do an smooth transition between each frames. A animation frame is basically different positions in the animation strip. using Key frame defines the timing of movement the viewer will see in the frames and then will automatically fill the remaining frames with inbetweens. Here are some of my examples;

 In this example i used Motion tween on flash. Motion tween is basically moving  an object from one end to another. All I had to do was tell the car where to start and where to stop by using an invisible guide line and then Flash did the rest. 

On this video i used masking, this is basically where you have two layers in your animation. For example in my video I had a background of a landscape of mountains then on my seconds layer I just did a circle and applied the masking animation this is where flash changed the circle into a transparent circle which then guides it self along the background creating a kind of 'peak hole' for the background. 

In this experiment i used,  Shape Tween. This is where you can do a smooth transition from images going to words and vise versa.

 

I did an nesting video in this example, i basically had to make it look like i had different people running across using basic animation tools. 

Video  

Using an DSLR camera to record a video of me and my friend walking, i did this so i could experiment with filtering the video using flash.

Firstly i had to split my video into 24 different frames to allow each frame to have a filter so basically i used adobe after effects to split my 11 second video up into a lot of still pictures which i then saved into a private folder. After i choose an random picture from that folder i went onto adobe photo shop and picked a filter i liked, once i was happy with the filter i basically told photo shop and it copied the sequence i did onto the rest of the photos into the folder.
Now that all my photos were filtered, all i had to do was change it back in to a video which i did using adobe premiere.

Here is the before and after effects; 

Stop Motion

We did a class experiment to help describe what stop motion is. Stop motion is basically where you move an object or whatever you want in small step. each step is then recorded in tiny bits. For example;

In this video, they will have to move each object for example the block bit by bit. They can do this by pausing the camera, moving the block and then playing the camera again just to pause it and move the block to record again etc.  

Here is our example,

   

We came in one by one, pausing and playing the camera with each movement. we made it a bit more interesting by making four people jump and by doing kicking movements etc in the back ground. we also thought us 'splatting' against the wall will make an interesting effect.

 

Even though this might take longer than a basic video, it can help inanimate objects move and animate in different ways.