" 2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models (such as 2D geometric models, text, and digital images) andby techniques specific to them. The word may stand for the branch of computer science that comprises such techniques, or for the models themselves.
2D computer graphics are mainly used in applications that were originally developed upon traditional printing and drawing technologies, such as typography, cartography, technical drawing, advertising, etc. In those applications, the two-dimensional image is not just a representation of a real-world object, but an independent artifact with added semantic value; two-dimensional models are therefore preferred, because they give more direct control of the image than 3D computer graphics (whose approach is more akin to photography than to typography).
In many domains, such as desktop publishing, engineering, and business, a description of a document based on 2D computer graphics techniques can be much smaller than the corresponding digital image—often by a factor of 1/1000 or more. This representation is also more flexible since it can be rendered at different resolutions to suit different output devices. For these reasons, documents and illustrations are often stored or transmitted as 2D graphic files.
2D computer graphics started in the 1950s, based on vector graphics devices. These were largely supplanted by raster-based devices in the following decades. The PostScript language and the X Window System protocol were landmark developments in the field. "
" Computer animation is the art of creating moving images via the use of computers.It is a subfield of computer graphics and animation.
Increasingly it is created by means of 3D computer graphics, though 2D computer graphics are still widely used for low bandwidth and faster real-time rendering needs.
Sometimes the target of the animation is the computer itself, but it sometimes the target is another medium, such as film.
It is also referred to as CGI (Computer-generated imagery or computer-generated imaging), especially when used in films. To create the illusion of movement, an image is displayed on the computer screen then quickly replaced by a new image that is similar to the previous image, but shifted slightly.
This technique is identical to how the illusion of movement is achieved with television and motion pictures. Computer animation is essentially a digital successor to the art of stop motion animation of 3D models and frame-by-frame animation of 2D illustrations.
For 3D animations, objects (models) are built on the computer monitor (modeled) and 3D figures are rigged with a virtual skeleton.
For 2D figure animations, separate objects (illustrations) and separate transparent layers are used, with or without a virtual skeleton.
Then the limbs, eyes, mouth, clothes, etc.
of the figure are moved by the animator on key frames.
The differences in appearance between key frames are automatically calculated by the computer in a process known as tweening or morphing.
Finally, the animation is rendered. For 3D animations, all frames must be rendered after modeling is complete.
For 2D vector animations, the rendering process is the key frame illustration process, while tweened frames are rendered as needed.
For pre-recorded presentations, the rendered frames are transferred to a different format or medium such as film or digital video.
The frames may also be rendered in real time as they are presented to the end-user audience.
Low bandwidth animations transmitted via the internet (e.g.
2D Flash, X3D) often use software on the end-users computer to render in real time as an alternative to streaming or pre-loaded high bandwidth animations. "
" Pixilation (from pixilated) is a stop motion
technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in
an animated film, by
repeatedly posing while one or more frame is
taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames.
The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet. This technique is often
used as a way to blend live actors with animated ones in a film,
such as in
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb by the Bolex
Brothers, which used the technique to compelling and eerie
effect.
The first work known to use the pixilation
technique was Emile
Courtet's 1911 film Jobard ne peut pas voir les femmes
travailler (Jobard cannot see the women working). "
" Stop motion animation can create a disorienting, and
distinctive, staccato effect, because the animated object is perfectly
sharp in every frame, since each frame of the animation was actually
shot when the object was perfectly still. Real moving objects in similar
scenes of the same movie will have motion blur, because they moved
while the shutter of the camera was open.
Go motion was designed to prevent this, by moving the animated model
slightly during the exposure of each film frame, producing a realistic
motion blur. The main difference is that while the frames in stop motion
are made up by images of stills taken between the small movements of
the object, the frames in go motion are images of the object taken while
it is moving.
Go motion today
Go motion was originally planned to be used extensively for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, until Steven Spielberg decided to try out the swiftly developing techniques of computer-generated imagery instead.
Today, the mechanical method of achieving motion blur using go motion
is rarely used, as it is more complicated, slow, and labor intensive
than computer generated effects. However, the motion blurring technique
still has potential in real stop motion movies where the puppet's
motions are supposed to be somewhat realistic. Motion blurring can now
be digitally done as a post production process using special effects
software such as After Effects, Boris FX, Combustion, and other similar special effects commercial software. "
" Cutout animation is a technique for producing animations using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut
from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or even photographs. The world's earliest known animated feature films were cutout animations (made in Argentina by Quirino Cristiani); as is the world's earliest surviving animated feature.
Today, cutout-style animation is frequently produced using computers, with scanned images or vector graphics taking the place of physically cut materials. South Park is a notable example of this transition since its first episode was made with paper cutouts before switching to computer animation.
Other notable examples include Angela Anaconda, and—more recently—Charlie and Lola. One of the most famous animators still using traditional cutout animation today is Yuriy Norshteyn. "
Learn with Terry Gilliam how to make a cutout animation
" A blast from the past! The youthful Terry
Gilliam explaining the methods behind his cutout animations.This has
been circulating the interwebs for a bit, and we thought we’d share it
with you all. Should be a treat for all you Monty Python fans out there. "
" A flip book or flick book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change. Flip books are often illustrated books for children, but may also be geared towards adults and employ a series of photographs rather than drawings. Flip books are not always separate books, but may appear as an added feature in ordinary books or magazines, often in the page corners. Software packages and websites are also available that convert digital video files into custom-made flip books. "
A flip book is a collection of combined pictures intended to be flipped over to give the illusion of movement and create an animated sequence from a simple small book without machine.
" Norman McLaren drawing on film.There are three basic methods to produce animation directly on film. One starts with blank film stock, the other one with black (already developed) film. On blank film the artist can draw, paint, stamp, or even glue or tape objects. Black film (or any footage) can be scratched, etched, sanded, or punched. Any tool the artist finds useful may be used for this, and all techniques can be combined endlessly. The frame borders may be observed or completely ignored, found footage may be included, any existing image might be distorted by mechanical or chemical means. A third method takes place in a darkroom, using unexposed film that is exposed frame by frame. The artists places objects onto the fresh stock and then uses a small light beam to create the images. This third category of work has to be sent to a lab and processed, just like films created with a camera.
Large formats such as 70 or 35mm film may be preferred for their relatively larger working area, but direct animation is done on 16 mm or even Super 8 mm film as well. Since the sound strip on 35 mm film is optical, it is possible to create synthetic sound as well as images by drawing or otherwise reproducing forms in the soundtrack area.
The first and best known practictioners of drawn-on-film animation include Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, then later artists including Steven Woloshen, Richard R. Reeves and Baerbel Neubauer, who produced numerous animated films using these methods. Their work covers the whole span between narrative and totally abstract animation. Other filmmakers in the 1960s expanded the idea and treated the film stock more and more radical towards destruction, up to the point where a film was treated beyond any possibility to survive projection. Some artists made this destruction a statement, others went back one step and copied the original work film strip to get a projection copy.
Direct animation can be an inexpensive way to produce a film; it can even be done on outtakes, or discarded film strips from other projects. It is a form of animation that is inviting to beginners and accomplished artists alike. Norman McLaren wrote a short illustrated introduction "How to make animated movies without a camera" which was originally published by UNESCO in 1949. Helen Hill published a collection called Recipes for Disaster that includes a wide range of approaches to creating images directly on film. Today, cameraless animation is being produced worldwide. "
" Phil Lord: The whole [directing] process is intimidating because you’ve got these guys that have been on 20 movies or more, and everybody on the [live-action] set is more experienced than you. “Cloudy [with a Chance of Meatballs]” was really no different at the beginning, but the temperament of an animation studio is such that everybody’s kind of like us — people are relatively soft-spoken, it’s not the same. Like on a movie set, you really are commanding an army, and you have to learn the difference between “action” and “ACTION!”
... There are things that are really the same [in live-action or animation], but it’s not like we’ve only been speaking with computers for the last four years. You’d hang out with other filmmakers and talk to them about their shots, and [with] storyboard artists and animators or performers, you’d have the same issues of trying to communicate what you want, but still allow the latitude for them to bring what they can bring. And it’s no different in live action where you’re still trying to create a community where people can mess up and try new stuff and it’s okay. ... "
" Rotoscoping From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
Patent drawing for Fleischer's original rotoscope. The artist is drawing on a transparent easel, onto which the movie projector at the right is throwing an image of a single film frame.Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device has been replaced by computers in recent years. In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscoping refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.
Another Rotoscope was invented by LeRoy Wottring for orthoptic training. See patent 2316139. The device was manufactured by the Wottring Instrument Company of Columbus, Ohio. In 1950, American Optical purchased the assets of Wottring Instruments and continued to build and market the product. Orthoptic training was used for a variety of eye conditions including amblyopia. "
Adult Swim
.Rotoscoping is used to capture realistic human movement by drawing over film footage of live actors. Perhaps this sounds like cheating, but adding an artist's vision to the movements of a human actor can create a unique storytelling medium that is just as stylistic as any other form of animation.
One of the most sophisticated examples of rotoscoping is the film Waking Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Delpy. Waking Life took the 2001 Sundance Film Festival by storm, impressing audiences and critics with not only its animation style, but director Richard Linklater's ability to tell a moving, rich story using a frenetic animation style like rotoscoping.
A much more simple example of rotoscoping is Tom Goes to the Mayor on Adult Swim. Actors are photographed performing the scenes. Then the photos are digitally processed using a graphics filter. When the rendered photos are strung together, the story is told using limited animation, no lip movements and little movement in arms and legs. "
" Limited animation is a process of making animated cartoons that does not redraw entire frames but variably reuses common parts between frames. One of its major trademarks is the stylized design in all forms and shapes, which in the early days was referred to as modern design. The short-subject cartoons and feature-length cartoons of Walt Disney from the 1930s and 1940s are widely acclaimed for depicting animated simulations of reality, with exquisite detail in every frame. This style of animation is time-consuming and expensive. "Limited" animation creates an image with abstract art, symbolism, and fewer drawings to create the same effect, at a much lower cost. This style of animation depends upon animators' skill in emulating change without additional drawings; improper use of limited animation is easily recognized as unnatural. It also encourages the animators to indulge in artistic styles that are not bound to real world limits. The result is an artistic style that could not have developed if animation was solely devoted to producing simulations of reality. Without limited animation, such ground-breaking films as Yellow Submarine, Chuck Jones' The Dot and the Line, and many others could never have been produced.
The process of limited animation aims at reducing the overall number of drawings. Film is projected at 24 frames per second. For movements in normal speed, most animation in general is done "on twos," meaning 12 drawings per second are recorded meaning that each drawing uses two frames of film. Faster movements may demand animation "on ones," while characters that do not move may be done with a single drawing (a "hold") for a certain amount of time. It is said that the Disney average was about 18 drawings per second, pretending that all characters of a scene share the same sheet of paper. Limited animation mainly reduces the number of inbetweens, the drawings between the keyframes which define a movement, and can cause stuttering if inbetweens are poorly setup.
Overall, the use of limited animation does not necessarily imply lower quality as it allows the use of many timesaving techniques that can improve the quality and flow of the keyframes and overall presentation of an animation.
The use of budget-cutting animation measures in animation dates at least to the 1920s; a handful of the Bosko cartoons in the early years of the Looney Tunes series used several visible tricks (such as mirror images and repeated scenes) to give the shorts the comparable appearance of the Disney shorts of the same era, even though they were produced on a budget of just over half of their Disney counterparts (Disney himself was known to recycle animation in his early years as well); meanwhile, Max Fleischer took the obvious shortcut of recording the entire soundtrack in one session after the animation was completed in his 1930's cartoons. The 1942 Merrie Melodies short "The Dover Boys" was a particular early prototype of the use of limited animation, though pressure from Warner Bros. curtailed much further use of the technique.
Limited animation was originally founded as an artistic device, though it was soon used widely as a cost-cutting measure rather than an aesthetic method. The UPA studio made the first serious effort to abandon the keyframe heavy approach perfected by Disney. Their first effort at limited animation, Gerald McBoing-Boing, won an Oscar, and it provided the impetus for this animation method to be accepted at the major Hollywood cartoon studios, including Warner Brothers and MGM. However, the real attraction of limited animation was the reduction in costs: because limited animation does not require as many drawings as fully keyframed animations, it is much less expensive to produce. The 1950s saw all of the major cartoon studios change their style to limited animation, to the point where painstaking detail in animation occurred only rarely.
Limited animation techniques in America were used during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to produce a great number of inexpensive Saturday morning cartoons. Such TV series as Clutch Cargo are known for being produced on extremely low budgets, with camera tricks used in place of actual animation. Despite the low quality of the animation, the TV cartoon studios Hanna-Barbera, DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, Jay Ward and Filmation thrived during this period. The desire of the time to emulate full animation with limited animation led to many highly apparent visual issues.
Techniques
These techniques used to produce cartoons on a reduced budget included:
Cels and sequences of cels were used repeatedly — animators only had to draw a character walking once.
Characters are split up into different levels: only portions of a character, such as the mouth or an arm, would be animated on top of a static cel.
Clever choice of camera angles and editing.
Use of camera techniques such as panning to suggest movement. A famous implementation of this is the "crash" technique, which involves the camera shaking rapidly back and forth or up and down to simulate a shock wave.
"Smear animation:" movement is rapid and portrayed in only three frames: the beginning state, the ending state, and a "blur" frame similar to that of a picture taken with a camera that had a low shutter speed.
Cel reversal (simply using a mirror image of the cell to represent the opposite angle). Many cartoon characters are drawn symmetrically to expedite this technique.
The visual elements were made subsidiary to audio elements, so that verbal humor and voice talent became more important factors for success ("talking heads").
Silhouette helped avoid having to keep track of shading on an animated character or object.
Sliding a cel across a background to suggest movement.
Stock footage: sequences that are reused frequently. This is the case of the character transformations in the Magical girls subgenre of Japanese anime series. Filmation used this strategy for much of its productions, and Hanna-Barbera often used it when necessary (most notably on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.)
Extensive recaps of previous episodes or segments, to cut down on the amount of new material necessary (used often in serial shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle or Underdog).
The most egregious case of limited animation, known as Syncro-Vox, involved pasting a film of the moving lips of a real-life person over a still frame of an "animated" character to give the appearance that the character is doing the talking. Cambria Studios held a patent on the technology, and as such, it was primarily used on their productions, such as Clutch Cargo; it still has limited use today, the most widely known example being the online series The Annoying Orange.
Chuckimation, another notoriously low-budget process, simply moves various "animated" figures by hand or by throwing them across a space. Most commonly used with stop-motion animation, it usually does not allow for characters' mouths to move.
Examples
Animated cartoons which made use of limited animation include Gerald McBoing-Boing, Rooty Toot Toot, Mister Magoo, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Underdog, The Pink Panther, Little Einsteins, Clutch Cargo, and Kinnikuman.
Much of Japanese animation (anime) makes use of techniques adapted from limited animation. Osamu Tezuka started to use this technique in Astro Boy in order to save money and time. However, the technique is now combined with manga styles and aesthetics, and is a very distinct style. Limited animation in anime is frequently used in action scenes such as mecha battles or transformation scenes. Limited animation is seen most frequently in television serials, but the aesthetic is so grounded in the medium that even bigger-budget feature films make use of it. Most Japanese animation is significantly less expensive than its American counterparts as a result, with Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo (the most expensive Japanese animated feature film yet produced) costing only $34,000,000. "
