What Is An Animation

Animation is a flow of images, sound and other graphical elements in a sequence such that it gives movement to the characters and brings it to life. It is an art form of arranging static images that creates logical motion. This is an art and a medium through which we can convey illustrated stories. It is even more powerful when we use it to convey meaningful information and present it to an audience. Whatever the subject may be. There needs to be a simple need of a story to be animated.

If the process of animation is understood completely, the real work is simple. Complex illustrations need to be broken down into simpler and minute scenes. Illustration is visual. Anything that can be visualized as images and objects and that can be used to convey a message, am idea or a story is an illustration. It could be a simple video explainer or an animated story.

Animation And Its Various Types

Animation requires many still images placed one after another to create a story. The images have to be placed one after another and played to create an illusion of movement. This movement can be achieved by either frame by frame animation or motion tween. Frame by framed is the oldest technique of animating. Every frame in an animation has to be created and placed one after another to create an illusion of movement. The difference between each frame may be really subtle. The content of the stage will be recreated in every frame. This is quite useful in complex animations.

Motion tween is a process of automatically creating in between frames between two images from the first frame to the last frame. The intermediary frames smoothly evolved from the first frame and progressed to the last frame.

How to Animate

Animation is a that encapsulates creating the images for each scene, creating the graphics, sound and other elements scene by scene. You require a storyboard which conveys in simple terms what graphics will have to be drawn, how much text will appear and what is the audio for the scene. The storyboard has to be approved before illustrating each scene. Adobe After Effects and Adobe Flash are the software most popularly used for animating. There are many uses of telling an animated story. It could be for promoting a product, creating educational content or video presentation. Each type of purpose entails different ways of animating process that needs to be considered.