Types of Animation

1. draw every frame by hand
   photograph on an animation stand, eg Oxberry
   camera overhead pointing down,
   focussed on glass table at waist level,
   foot pedal single frame release.
   Good animators can do 7,500 frames (5 minutes) per year.
   Faster with a computer and a good Paint program.

2. 21/2 D
   draw a matte background, and the moving figures on transparent celluloid, and stack them for photographing on an animation stand.
   Need to use solid colours with no shading, as shading cannot be maintained consistently between frames.
   El Cheepo: just change the top layer between frames: result: only one thing moves at a time.
   

3. Keyframes
   Main artist draws story board with a sample frame for each shot
   Lesser artists draw keyframes every 10 frames.
   Inbetweeners draw the other 9.
   Colorists colour them in.
   Faster with a computer and special software interpolating the inbetween frames.

4. Computer Animation System
   Uses a scripting language to define: Objects,
   their actions,
   camera actions. Actions can be specified by: Kinematics (velocities)
   Inverse Kinematics (positions and times)
   Dynamics (forces) Figures have a skeleton, and
   parent/child relationship for sections of limbs
   Current research is aimed at using a Dance Notation for specifying human movement.

Software

The computer animation industry is very competitive. Success depends heavily on software research and development, especially for new algorithms and efficiencies. Forever, software is not powerful enough or fast enough.

A recent project at Animal Logic required 30 GB of disc for 500 frames (20 seconds of film), each frame taking 10 minutes to render. A possible fluid hydrodynamics solution would have required 30 minutes computation per frame.

The hardware typically available is a farm of about a 1,000 cpu's. The output is various formats, from 2048x1556 to 1800x850.

Software is based on a number of proprietary systems, such as