Limited animation

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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 cartoons and feature films of Walt Disney from the 1930s and 1940s are widely acclaimed for depicting animated simulations of reality, with exquisite detail in every frame. However, this style of animation is very timeconsuming and expensive. "Limited" animation creates an image that uses abstract art, symbolism, and fewer drawings to create the same effect, but at a much lower production cost. This style of animation depends upon animators' skill in emulating change without additional drawings; improper use of limited animation can be easily recognized as unnatural. It also encourages the animators to indulge in artistic styles that are not necessarily bound to the limits of the real world. The result is a new 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 mainly 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.

Rotoscoping
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(Redirected from Rotoscope)

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.[1] 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 mattefor an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.

Contents
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o o o o o o

1 History 2 Technique 3 Examples 3.1 Animated films 3.2 Live action films 3.3 Video games 3.4 Music videos 3.5 Television shows 3.6 Miscellanea 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Films with live action and animation

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A scene from Gertie the Dinosaur, the first live-action/animated film

A live-action/animated film is a motion picture that features a combination of real actors or elements: live-action and animated elements, typically interacting.

Stop motion
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A simple stop motion animation of a moving coin

Pingu, a famous Swiss stop-motion claymated television series.

clay animation

Stop motion (also known as stop action or frame-by-frame) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Motion animation using clay is called clay animation or clay-mation.

Puppetry
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(Redirected from Puppet animation)

"Puppet show" redirects here. For other uses, see Puppet show (disambiguation).

Puppetry

Puppet theater with Gioppino and Brighella, Bergamo Italy

Puppetry is a form of theatre or performance which involves the manipulation of puppets. It is very ancient, and is believed to have originated 30,000 yearsBC.[1] Puppetry takes many forms but they all share the process of animating inanimate performing objects. Puppetry is used in almost all human societies both as an entertainment in performance and ceremonially in rituals and celebrations such as carnivals.[2] Most puppetry involves storytelling. The impact of puppetry depends on the process of transformation of puppets, which has much in common with magicand with play. Thus puppetry can create complex and magical theatre with relatively small resources.

Storytelling
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For other uses, see Storytelling (disambiguation). Raconteur redirects here, for the rock band see: The Raconteurs

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appropriate. (January 2009) This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page. (January
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The Boyhood of Raleigh by Sir John Everett Millais, oil on canvas, 1870. A seafarer tells the young Sir Walter Raleigh and his brother the story of what happened out at sea

Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories ornarratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instillmoral values.

Clay animation
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Clay animation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable" made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay.

clay animation

A clay animation scene from a Finnish TV commercial.[1]

All traditional animation is produced in a similar fashion, whether done through cel animation or stop motion. Each frame, or still picture, is recorded on film or digital media and then played back in rapid succession. When played back at a frame rate greater than 1012 frames per second, a fairly convincing illusion of continuous motion is achieved. While the playback feature creating an illusion is true of all moving images (from zoetrope to films tovideogames), the techniques involved in creating CGI are generally removed from a frame-by-frame process.

[edit]Technique
In clay animation, one of the many forms of stop-motion animation, each object is sculpted in clay or a similarly pliable material such as Plasticine, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature. As in other forms of object animation, the object is arranged on the set (background), a film frame is exposed, and the object or character is then moved slightly by hand. Another frame is taken, and the object is moved slightly again. This cycle is repeated until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film. The human mind processes the series of slightly changing, rapidly playing images as motion, hence making it appear that the object is moving by itself. To achieve the best results, a consistent shooting environment is needed to maintain the illusion of continuity. This means paying special attention to maintaining consistent lighting and object placement and working in a calm environment.

[edit]Production

Cutout animation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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. The TV series South Park is a notable example (though first episodes were made with actual paper cutouts) as are Angela Anaconda and more recently, Charlie and Lola. South Park is now made with Maya and Corel Draw. One of the most famous animators still using traditional cutout animation today is Yuriy Norshteyn.

Silhouette animation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Silhouette animation is animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes. This is usually accomplished by backlighting articulated cardboard cut-outs, though other methods exist. It is partially inspired by, but for a number of reasons technically distinct from, shadow play.

Techniques
Traditional silhouette animation as invented by Reiniger is subdivision of cutout animation (itself one of the many forms of stop motion). It utilises figures cut out of paperboard, sometimes reinforced with thin metal sheets, and tied together at their joints with thread or wire (usually substituted by plastic or metal paper fasteners in contemporary productions) which are then moved frame-by-frame on ananimation stand and filmed top-down with a rostrum camera such techniques were used, albeit with stylistic changes, by such practitioners as Nobur fuji in the 1940s and Bruno J. Bttge in the 1970s.[3] Michel Ocelot's television series Cin si (Cinema If, 1989) was a little different, combining cutouts and cels and also, more occasionally, liveaction and clay animation (this series is better known as Princes et princesses, the feature film version mentioned below).[2] This was also the first silhouette animation to successfully make characters appear to speak for themselves (traditionally, either intertitles or voice-over narration had been used) as the mixed medium made accurate lip syncing possible.[4] Traditional animation can also be used to imitate silhouette animation, as seen regularly in Be-PaPas' Shjo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena, 1997). Most recently, several CGI silhouette films have been made, which demonstrate different approaches to the technique Jossie Malis' use already 2D, vector animation,[5] Michel Ocelot's "Earth Intruders" (2007) and a scene in Azur et Asmar (Azur & Asmar, 2006) use 3D figures rendered as silhouettes, while Anthony Lucas' Academy Award-nominated The Mysterious

Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005) mixes 2D characters and 3D backgrounds, both of which are combination of live action and CGI. Computer animation has also been used to make more explicit reference to shadow theatre particularly of the Southeast Asian wayang kulit style by adding visible rods to the characters which appear to be operating them (ironically, in CGI, it is the other way round). This was used in Jan Koester's Our Man in Nirvana (2006)[6] and the opening of the Disney feature The Jungle Book 2 (2003). Michel Ocelot's television series Bergres et dragons(Shepherdesses and Dragons), which, as of March 2008, is still in development,[7] uses a mixture of 2D and 3D computer animation to simulate the look of his earlier, analogue silhouette animation. However, traditional, cutout silhouette animation is still practised to this day by such people as Edward S. de Leon and Reza Ben Gajra, where it is often combined with other forms of stop motionanimation such as Lumage. [edit]Use

of colour

Silhouette films are traditionally monochrome, with the foreground solid black and the background being various shades of grey the more distant an elements in intended to be, the paler the shade of grey, thus creating an illusion of depth. In Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed, different scenes were tinted in different all-over colours, as was the standard practice among features of the time. Das Geheimnis der Marquisin (The Marquise's Secret, 1922) is a reversed, white-on-black silhouette film. Jack and the Beanstalk (1955), which Reiniger was forced to shoot in colour, uses full-colour painted backgrounds with the black silhouettes, some of which are inlaid with translucent, coloured, "sweet wrapper" material for a stained glass effect. Though she seems to have made the most of this expanded format, she disapproved if it herself and went back to monochrome films for most of her remaining career,[3] perhaps finding an acceptable middle ground with Aucassin et Nicolette(Aucassin and Nicolette, 1976), which used a more restrained colour palette for its backgrounds (which were built out of pieces of translucent plastic).[8] Among other, later filmmakers, the dominant method of shooting silhouette films in colour has been to imitate the tinted look of Prinzen Achmed by using backgrounds with many different tones of one colour, or sometimes two close or complementary colours. Full-colour cutout animation in which the characters are mainly seen in profile is sometimes described as colour silhouette film, though this is dependent on one's definition of a silhouette, as opposed to profile or side-on viewpoints in general.

Model animation
Model animation is a form of stop motion animation designed to merge with live action footage to create the illusion of a real-world fantasy sequence.

Go motion

Go motion is a variation of stop motion animation, and was co-developed by Industrial Light & Magic and Phil Tippett for the 1980 George Lucas film Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

Technical explanation
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. This frame-byframe, split-second motion is almost always created with the help of a computer, often through rods connected to a puppet or model which the computer manipulates to reproduce movements programmed in by puppeteers. [edit]Methods [edit]Vaseline This crude but reasonably effective technique involves smearing petroleum jelly on the camera lens, then cleaning and reapplying it after each shot, a time-consuming process but one which creates a blur around the model. This technique was used for the endoskeleton in The Terminator. [edit]Bumping

for creating motion blur

the puppet

Gently bumping or flicking the puppet before taking the frame will produce a slight blur, however care must be taken when doing this that the puppet does not move too much or that one does not bump or move props or set pieces. [edit]Moving

the table

Moving the table the model is standing on while the film is being exposed creates a slight, realistic blur. This technique was used by Aardman animation for the train chase in The Wrong Trousers and again during the Lorry chase in A Close Shave. In both cases the cameras were moved physically during a 1-2 second exposure. The technique was revived for the fulllength Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. [edit]Go

motion

The most sophisticated technique was originally developed for the film The Empire Strikes Back and was later used on films like Dragonslayer and is quite different from traditional stop

motion. The model is essentially a rod puppet. The rods are attached to motors which are linked to a computer that can record the movements as the model is traditionally animated. When enough movements have been made, the model is reset to its original position, the camera rolls and the model is moved across the table. Because the model is moving during shots, motion blur is created. [edit]Go

motion today

Go motion was used again in E.T. and was originally planned to be used extensively for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, until Steven Spielberg decided to try out the swiftly developing techniques ofcomputer-generated imagery instead. Today, go motion is rarely used, as it is more complicated and expensive than computer generated effects. However, the technique still has potential in real stop motion movies if a scene is supposed to contain slow motion effects. By filming each small movement of the object with a high speed camera, the go motion animated character or object will appear to move in slow motion when played in normal speed. This would be very hard to do using conventional stop motion, as the animator would have to move the puppet maybe less than a millimeter for each frame to achieve the same effect.

Object animation
Object animation is a form of stop motion animation that involves the animated movements of any non-drawn objects such as toys, blocks, dolls, etc. which are not fully malleable, such as clay or wax, and not designed to look like a recognizable human or animal character. Object animation is considered a different form of animation distinct from model animation and puppet animation, as these two forms of stop-motion animation usually use recognizable characters as their subjects, rather than just objects like static toy soldiers, or construction toys such as Tinker Toys, LEGO brand bricks (Brickfilm), Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, Playmobil, etc. Object animation is often combined with other forms of animation, usually for a more realistic effect (e.g., Model Animation or Puppet Animation to add more complex movement or depth to the characters). For example; A toy car can be animated, but is more often animated with a character easily seen driving the car. The use of animated objects in film has been present since the early days of cinema. [1]

An example of modern object animation can be seen on Robot Chicken, part of the regular Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network, which combines object animation with a variation of puppet animation, in this case the puppets are made to resemble plastic action figures from various TV shows, movies, and pop culture.

Graphic animation
Graphic animation is a variation of stop motion (and possibly more conceptually associated with traditional flat cel animation and paper drawing animation, but still technically qualifying as stop motion) consisting of the animation of photographs (in whole or in parts) and other non-drawn flat visual graphic material, such as newspaper and magazine clippings. In its simpliest form, Graphic "animation" can take the form of the animation camera merely panning up and down and/or across individual photographs, one at a time, (filmed frame-by-frame, and hence, "animated") without changing the photographs from frame to frame, as on Ken Burns various historical documentary films for PBS. But once the photos (or "graphics") are also moved from frame to frame, more exciting montages of movement can be produced, such as on Los Angeles animator Mike Jittlov's 1977 short film, Animato, also seen his feature film, The Wizard of Speed and Time, released to theaters in 1987 and to video in 1989. Graphic animation can be (and often is) combined with other forms of animation including direct manipulation animation and traditional cel animation. Examples are Frank Morris' 1973 Oscar-winning short film Frank Film, and Charles Braverman's Condensed Cream of the Beatles (1973), originally produced for Geraldo Rivera's late night TV show of the time, Goodbye America. Graphic animation was also used as a History of Playboy Magazine piece used on Saturday Night Live when the magazine's founder, Hugh Hefner, appeared on that show during the late 70s or early 80s.

Pixilation
Pixilation (from pixilated) is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-byframe 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 inThe Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb by the Bolex Brothers, which used the technique to compelling and eerie effect. Early examples of this technique are El hotel elctrico from 1908 and mile Cohl's 1911 film Jobard ne peut pas voir les femmes travailler (Jobard cannot see the women working).

The term is widely credited to Grant Munro. He made an experimental film named "Pixillation", available in his DVD collection "Cut Up - The Films Of Grant Munro".