Animation

Animation is the process of creating motion and shape change^{[Note 1]} illusion by means of the rapid display of a sequence of static images that minimally differ from each other. The illusion—as in motion pictures in general—is thought to rely on thephi phenomenon. Animators are artists who specialize in the creation of animation.

Animations can be recorded on either analogue media, such as a flip book, motion picture film, video tape, or on digital media, including formats such as animated GIF, Flash animation or digital video. To display animation, a digital camera, computer, or projector are used along with new technologies that are produced.

Animation creation methods include the traditional animation creation method and those involving stop motion animation of two and three-dimensional objects, such as paper cutouts, puppets and clay figures. Images are displayed in a rapid succession, usually 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second.

History

Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion into a still drawing can be found in paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are often depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion. ^[2]

An earthen goblet discovered at the site of the 5,200-year-old Burnt City in southeastern Iran, depicts what could possibly be the world’s oldest example of animation. The artifact bears five sequential images depicting a Persian Desert Ibex jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree.^[3]

Ancient Chinese records contain several mentions of devices that were said to "give an impression of movement" to human or animal figures,^[4] but these accounts are unclear and may only refer to the actual movement of the figures through space.^[5]

In the 19th century, the phenakistoscope (1832), zoetrope (1834) and praxinoscope (1877), as well as the common flip book, were early animation devices that produced an illusion of movement from a series of sequential drawings, but animation did not develop further until the advent of motion picture film and cinematography in the 1890s.

The cinématographe was a projector, printer, and camera in one machine that allowed moving pictures to be shown successfully on a screen which was invented by history's earliest film makers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, in 1894.^[6] The first animated projection (screening) was created in France, by Charles-Émile Reynaud, who was a French science teacher. Reynaud created thePraxinoscope in 1877 and the Théâtre Optique in December 1888. On 28 October 1892, he projected the first animation in public,Pauvre Pierrot, at the Musée Grévin in Paris. This film is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used. His films were not photographed, but drawn directly onto the transparent strip. In 1900, more than 500,000 people had attended these screenings.

A projecting praxinoscope, 1882, here shown superimposing an animated figure on a separately projected background scene

The first film that was recorded on standard picture film and included animated sequences was the 1900 Enchanted Drawing,^[7]which was followed by the first entirely animated film - the 1906 Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton,^[8] who, because of that, is considered the father of American animation.

The first animated film created by using what came to be known astraditional (hand-drawn) animation - the 1908 Fantasmagorie by Émile Cohl

Charlie in Turkey (1916), an animated film by Pat Sullivan for Keen Cartoon Corporation.

In Europe, the French artist, Émile Cohl, created the first animated film using what came to be known as traditional animationcreation methods - the 1908 Fantasmagorie.^[9] The film largely consisted of a stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action in which the animator’s hands would enter the scene. The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame ontonegative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look.

The author of the first puppet-animated film (The Beautiful Lukanida (1912)) was the Russian-born (ethnically Polish) director Wladyslaw Starewicz, known as Ladislas Starevich.^{[citation needed]}

The more detailed hand-drawn animations, requiring a team of animators drawing each frame manually with detailed backgrounds and characters, were those directed by Winsor McCay, a successful newspaper cartoonist, including the 1911 Little Nemo, the 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur, and the 1918 The Sinking of the Lusitania.^[10]

During the 1910s, the production of animated short films, typically referred to as "cartoons", became an industry of its own and cartoon shorts were produced for showing in movie theaters. The most successful producer at the time was John Randolph Bray, who, along with animator Earl Hurd, patented the cel animation process which dominated the animation industry for the rest of the decade.

El Apóstol (Spanish: "The Apostle") was a 1917 Argentine animated film utilizing cutout animation, and the world's first animated feature film.^[11] Unfortunately, a fire that destroyed producer Frederico Valle's film studio incinerated the only known copy of El Apóstol, and it is now considered a lost film.

Computer animation has become popular since Toy Story (1995), the first feature-length animated film completely made using this technique.

In 2008, the animation market was worth US$68.4 billion.^[12] Animation as an art and industry continues to thrive as of the mid-2010s, because well-made animated projects can find audiences across borders and in all four quadrants. Animated feature-length films returned the highest gross margins (around 52%) of all film genres in the 2004-2013 timeframe.

Animation studio

An animation studio is a company producing animated media. The broadest such companies conceive of products to produce, own the physical equipment for production, employ operators for that equipment, and hold a major stake in the sales or rentals of the media produced. They also own rights over merchandising and creative rights for characters created/held by the company, much like authors holding copyrights. In some early cases, they also held patent rights over methods of animation used in certain studios that were used for boosting productivity. Overall, they are business concerns and can function as such in legal terms.

Currently there are about 200 animation studios dedicated to the production and distribution of animated films that are active. They can be either actual production houses or corporate entities. Many of these animation studios help with the fulfillment of animation works for big brand names and have carried out outsourced projects including Nemo.

American studios

Winsor McCay was widely renowned as the father of the animated cartoon, having converted his cartoon strip Little Nemo into a 10-minute feature film, co-directing it along with J. Stuart Blackton, released on April 8, 1911.^[1] However, the idea of a studio dedicated to animating cartoons was spearheaded by Raoul Barré and his studio, Barré Studio, co-founded with Bill Nolan, beating out the studio created by J.R. Bray,Bray Productions, to the honour of the first studio dedicated to animation.^[2]

Though beaten to the post of being the first studio, Bray's studio employee, Earl Hurd, came up with patents designed for mass-producing the output for the studio. As Hurd did not file for these patents under his own name, but handed them to Bray, they would go on to form the Bray-Hurd Patent Company and sold these techniques for royalties to other animation studios of the time. The patents for animation systems using drawings on transparent celluloid sheets and a registration system that kept images steady were held under this firm. Bray also developed the basic division of labor still used in animation studios (animators, assistants, layout artists, etc.).^[3]

Walt Disney

The biggest name in animation studios during this early time was Disney Brothers Animation Studio (now known asWalt Disney Animation Studios), co-founded by Walt and Roy O. Disney. Started on October 16, 1923, the studio went on to make its first animated short, Steamboat Willie in 1928, to much critical success,^[4] though the real breakthrough was in 1937, when the studio was able to produce a full-length animated feature film i.e. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which laid the foundation for other studios to try to make full length movies.^[5] In 1932 Flowers and Trees, a production by Walt Disney Productions and United Artists, won the firstAcademy Award for Best Animated Short Film.^[6] This period, from the 1920s to the 1950s or sometimes considered from 1911 to the death of Walt Disney in 1966, is commonly known as the Golden Age of American Animation as it included the growth of Disney, as well as the rise ofWarner Bros. and MGM as prominent animation studios.^[7] Disney continued to lead in technical prowess among studios for a long time afterwards, as can be seen with their achievements. In 1941, Otto Messmer created the first animated television commercials for Botany Tie ads/weather reports. They were shown on NBC-TV in New York until 1949.^[5] This marked the first forays of animation designed for the smaller screen and was to be followed by the first animated series specifically made for television, Crusader Rabbit, in 1948.^[8] Its creator, Alex Anderson, had to create the studio 'Television Arts Productions' specifically for the purpose of creating this series as his old studio, Terrytoons, refused to make a series for television. Since Crusader Rabbit however, many studios have seen this as a profitable enterprise and many have entered the made for television market since, with Bill Hanna refining the production process for television animation on his show Ruff and Reddy. It was in 1958 that the The Huckleberry Hound Show claimed the title of being the first all new half-hour cartoon show. This, along with their previous success with the series Tom and Jerry, elevated Hanna's animation studio, Hanna-Barbera Productions, to dominate the North American television animation market during the latter half of the 20th Century.^[9]

In 2002, Shrek,^[10] produced by DreamWorks and Pacific Data Images won the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Since then, Disney/Pixar have produced the most number of movies either to win or be nominated for the award.

Direct-to-video market

Direct-to-video animation has seen a rise, as a concept, in the Western markets. With many comic characters receiving their versions of OVA's, original video animations, under the Westernized title of direct-to-video animations, the OVA market has spread to American animation houses. Though the term direct-to-video carries negative connotations in the North American and European markets, their popularity has resulted in comic characters ranging from Hellboy, Green Lantern: First Flight and Ultimate Avengers, to television shows such as Family Guy and Futurama, all releasing direct to video animations under the animation studio moniker. DC Comics have even unveiled their own direct to video studio, producing animated movies for the sole purpose of sale in the direct-to-video market, under the name DC Universe Animated Original Movies. With growing worries about piracy, direct to video animation might become more popular in the near future^[11]

Ownership trends

With the growth of animation as an industry, the trends of ownership of studios has changed with time. Current studios such as Warner Bros. and early ones such asFleischer Studios, started life as small, independent studios, being run by a very small core group. After being bought out or sold to other companies, they eventually consolidated with other studios and became larger. The drawback of this setup was that there was now a major thrust towards profitability with the management acting as a damper towards creativity of these studios, continuing even in today's scenario.^[12]

Currently, the independent animation studios are looking to ensure artistic integrity by signing up with big animation studios on contracts that allow them to license out movies, without being directed by the bigger studios. Examples of such co-operation are the joint ventures between DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures and that of Blue Sky Studios and 20th Century Fox.

Visual effects

In filmmaking, visual effects (abbreviated VFX) are the processes by which imagery is created and/or manipulated outside the context of a live action shot. Visual effects involve the integration of live-action footage and generated imagery to create environments which look realistic, but would be dangerous, expensive, impractical, or simply impossible to capture on film. Visual effects using computer generated imagery has recently become accessible to the independent filmmaker with the introduction of affordable and easy-to-use animation and compositing software.

Timing

Visual effects are often integral to a movie's story and appeal. Although most visual effects work is completed during post-production, it usually must be carefully planned and choreographed in pre-production and production. Visual effects primarily executed in Post-Production, with the use of multiple tools and technologies such as graphic design, modeling, animation and similar software, while special effects such as explosions and car chases are made on set. A visual effects supervisor is usually involved with the production from an early stage to work closely with production and the film's director design, guide and lead the teams required to achieve the desired effects.

Graphic art software

Graphic art software  is a subclass of application software used for graphic design, multimedia development, stylized image development, technical illustration, general image editing, or simply to access graphic files. Art software uses either raster or vectorgraphic reading and editing methods to create, edit, and view art.

Many artists and other creative professionals today use personal computers rather than traditional media. Using graphic art software may be more efficient than rendering using traditional media by requiring less hand–eye coordination, requiring lessmental imaging skill, and utilizing the computer's quicker (sometimes more accurate) automated rendering functions to create images. However, advanced level computer styles, effects and editing methods may require a steeper learning curve of computer technical skills than what was required to learn traditional hand rendering and mental imaging skills. The potential of the software to enhance or hinder creativity may depend on the intuitiveness of the interface.

SuperPaint

SuperPaint was a pioneering graphics program and framebuffer computer system developed by Richard Shoup at Xerox PARC. The system was first conceptualized in late 1972 and produced its first stable image in April 1973. SuperPaint was among the earliest uses of computer technology for creative artworks, video editing, and computer animation, all which would become major areas within the entertainment industry and major components of industrial design.

SuperPaint had the ability to capture images from standard video input or combine them with preexisting digital data. SuperPaint was also the first program to use now-ubiquitous features in common computer graphics programs such as changing hue, saturation and value of graphical data, choosing from a preset color palette, custompolygons and lines, virtual paintbrushes and pencils, and auto-filling of images. SuperPaint was also one of the first graphics programs to use a graphical user interfaceand was one of the earliest to feature anti-aliasing.

SuperPaint was used in the mid-1970s to make custom television graphics for KQED-TV in San Francisco, and later to make technical graphics and animations for the NASA Pioneer Venus project mission in 1978. Due to differences with management at PARC, Shoup left Xerox in 1979 to found graphics company Aurora Systems, while colleague Alvy Ray Smith went to work at New York Institute of Technology. In 1980, Smith and others joined Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas' movie special effects firm, and this group later founded Pixar. Shoup won an Emmy award in 1983, and an Academy Award shared with Smith and Thomas Porter in 1998, for his development of SuperPaint.

Hardware

The SuperPaint system was a custom computer system built around a Data General Nova 800 minicomputer CPU and a hand-wired shift register framebuffer containing 16 memory cards, allowing for a resolution of 640 x 480 x 8 bits. Also included in the SuperPaint configuration was an 8-bit video digitizer, and direct conversion to standardNTSC video. The system still exists, and is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Image file formats &  File Sizes

Image file formats are standardized means of organizing and storing digital images. Image files are composed of digital data in one of these formats that can berasterized for use on a computer display or printer. An image file format may store data in uncompressed, compressed, or vector formats. Once rasterized, an image becomes a grid of pixels, each of which has a number of bits to designate its color equal to the color depth of the device displaying it.

Generally speaking, in raster images, Image file size is positively correlated to the number of pixels in an image and the color depth, or bits per pixel, of the image. Images can be compressed in various ways, however. Compression uses an algorithm that stores an exact representation or an approximation of the original image in a smaller number of bytes that can be expanded back to its uncompressed form with a corresponding decompression algorithm. Considering different compressions, it is common for two images of the same number of pixels and color depth to have a very different compressed file size. Considering exactly the same compression, number of pixels, and color depth for two images, different graphical complexity of the original images may also result in very different file sizes after compression due to the nature of compression algorithms. With some compression formats, images that are less complex may result in smaller compressed file sizes. This characteristic sometimes results in a smaller file size for some lossless formats than lossy formats. For example, graphically simple images (i.e. images with large continuous regions like line art or animation sequences) may be losslessly compressed into a GIF or PNG format and result in a smaller file size than a lossy JPEG format.

Vector images, unlike raster images, can be any dimension independent of file size. File size increases only with the addition of more vectors.

For example, a 640 * 480 pixel image with 24-bit color would occupy almost a megabyte of space:

640 * 480 * 24 = 7,372,800 bits  = 921,600 bytes