2D Animation Research

Animation Techniques

2D Animation Techniques

Classic hand drawn animation is the most basic kind of animation that exists. Traditional animation is a very hands-on process; 2D animation is accomplished by hand-drawing hundreds upon thousands of individual frames only to transfer them to clear plastic cels, hand-paint them, and then film them in sequence over a painted background image. This requires a team of artists, cleanup artists, painters, directors, background artists, and film/camera crews, along with the storyboard artists and script writers to work out the original concepts; for large-scale projects, the amount of time, labor, and equipment involved can be staggering. An example of traditional animation is Studio Ghibdi's Spirited Away.

Cut-out animation

Cut-out animation may be the best animation to use for my design as most of my characters are free-flowing entities like ghosts. I think making fluid animation using this technique is the best process to take. Using bones have advantages as I only have to create a range of bitmaps that I will move and alter within Flash. Some advantages of using this kind of animation is that you don't have to use lots of expensive cels, you don't have to draw the characters for every single frame and it can be a generally quicker process while keeping the animation fluid.

The disadvantages to cut-out animation are that I can spoil an animation by misplacing one of the images. You have to be careful about ruining a scene by nudging the cut outs, once you move a cut out you cannot easily go back to how the scene looked in the previous shot. Another problem is I will have to create a lot of cut-outs to get fluid animation and I also have to plan ahead if I’m going to create a certain character in a certain position.

An example of cut-out animation are the Crusha milkshake adverts. 

Rotoscope animation is a technique that allows you to create animation that mimics live action video. For example, a live actor may be filmed doing a series of actions, and the animator would have the digital character mimic the actions of the human actor for a realistic animated scene.

Different other types of animation can be see below:

Flip book - Keith Haring has made some famous ones.

Computer Assisted Animation (2D)

This term refers to all types of animation that use a computer somewhere in the process.

One could argue that this means ALL ANIMATION today.

Mostly we use it to describe the tools that have come to replace pencil, paper and film, for example:

Flash animations - Many TV series are now done in Flash, check out this example.

Coloring and layering hand drawn animation using a computer

Drawing directly into an animation software with a Pen Tablet

3D Animation Techniques

3D animation- Pixar's Up, Toy Story

Stereoscopic 3D - Coraline, Avatar

CGI cut out - South Park

Motion Capture (an aid tool for 3D animators)- Final Fantasy, Avatar, Gollum in Lord of the Rings.

Morphing (Remember the changing faces in Michel Jackson's Clip Black or White? that's Morphing.)

Stop Motion Techniques

Clay or Plasticine ("claymation")- Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit

Real Clay animation (and lot's of other stuff you won't suspect)- Jan Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue

Puppet animation- Tim Burton and Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas

Pixilation - Peter Gabriel's music video "Sledgehammer"

Cut outs - Daniel Greave's Flat World is a stunning combination of classic hand drawings with cut outs.

Types of Animation that are done on a light table, shot frame by frame under a camera:

Sand animation - This is sometimes done as a performance art, shown live for an audience, and sometimes it's stop framed into proper film.

Oil colors - Caroline Leaf's The Street, and the frankly-unbelievable Old Man and the Sea by Alexander Petrov.

Plasticine - Ishu Patel's Afterlife


Types of animation named after a software

Some types of animation are named after the software used to create them.

Flash animation has come to mean a certain kind of graphic look and feel, which has also spawned the pleading request "Can you make it NOT look like Flash, PLEASE!"

There are also:

GIF animations - GIF is a type of file format, used for small, light weight animations with no more than a few frames.

After Effects animation - usually means either cut outs done in After Effects, or animation done with the program's Puppet Tool (which is amazing, BTW).

Blender, Mudbox, and Maya - all names of 3D animation softwares.

Pivot stick figure - A freeware for making stick figure animations. So simple, and so popular!

Morphing is a type of animation that uses a software to fill in the gap between two images - MJ's "Black or White" music video.