a brief glimpse into the field of Computer Graphics Animation
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Cel Animation is one of the more traditional forms of animation - and the most difficult to execute. Artists will draw the keyframes by hand, and then a bank of other artists will draw the inbetween frames on transparencies or cels. Then, each page is photographed in turn and the photos are viewed in sequence. Disney was the most successful practitioner of this method and it has been used since roughly 1920. The difficulty stems from the sheer number of drawings needed to complete a given work. One second of animation requires twenty-four individual pages. A full-length animated film can easily contain upwards of one million individual drawings and take over three years to complete. |
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Even though GIF animation has been possible since 1987, very little support or know how got around about GIF extensions. Alchemy Mindworks, years later, would build a product called GIF Construction Set. It supported all the extensions to GIF, but no one was using them. To top it off, Unisys, which owned the compression algorithm used to encode & decode every GIF, said they were going to start collecting royalties on them. Public outrage made Unisys back off, only charging software companies that use the algorithm. Alchemy decided to shelve their product and made it bookware. Transparency, one of the GIF89a features, gets recognized when the Web hit big. In order to avoid the Unisys royalty, the PiNG format is proposed. PNG combines GIF features (transparency & interlacing) with better compression and color. Heiner Wolf buzzed into the ears of browser-builders at WWW conferences around the world promoting GIF an an inline animation format for the Web. Scott Fur at Netscape was convinced and added the cross-platform compatibilty to Netscape 2 betas. However, a lack of GIF89a compliant animation tools in the market convinced Netscape not to announce the support. Java was so impossible for the non-programmer. CGI was inaccessible to most and incomprehensible to a portion of those who had it. Shockwave was beta at best at that point and Director would put it out of most people's hands. Netscape had nothing on the GIF ability in their site. In 1997, GIF Animation is the predominant form of animation on the Web. Shockwave and Splash are used but mostly by larger professional shops. Java and Javascript is used for controlled applications, but GIF89a continues to be the easiest way to get animation on pages. - Royal E. Frazier, Jr. |
| Flash,
a popular authoring software developed by Macromedia, is used to create
vector graphics-based animation programs with full-screen navigation interfaces,
graphic illustrations, and simple interactivity in an antialiased, resizable
file format that is small enough to stream across a normal modem connection.
The software is ubiquitous on the Web, both because of its speed (vector-based
animations, which can adapt to different display sizes and resolutions,
play as they download) and for the smooth way it renders graphics. Flash
files, unlike animated but rasterized GIF and JPEG, are compact, efficient,
and designed for optimized delivery. Known as a do-it-yourself animation package, Flash 4 gives Web designers the ability to import artwork using whatever bitmap or illustration tool they prefer, and to create animation and special effects, and add sound and interactivity. The content is then saved as file with a .SWF file name extension. |
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| There are a large number of newer software packages available that can produce quality, detailed animations. Animation:Master, Lightwave, 3DStudioMax, and Maya are only a few. These products can assist in creating high-quality 3D animations such as those seen in popular movies like Shrek or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within |