If your animation will use characters with complicated appearances, you’ll also need to prepare model sheets showing how they appear in various poses and full-length.
For a cartoon depicting Superman flying, you may want to show only the Man of Steel’s cape flapping and clouds whizzing from the foreground into the background on an otherwise static sky. For an animated logo, you may want to have only the company name spin to call attention to it, and then for only a fixed number of times, so that people can read the name clearly. Limited animation in cartoons has the disadvantage of not looking particularly lifelike. For cartoons targeted to young children, this is not as much of a concern as in animated works intended for an older audience.
Ball bouncing. Walking/running. Mouth movement (talking). Jumping rope. Wing/cape flapping.
Staple or bind sheets of typing or construction paper together. Use a notepad. Use a pad of sticky notes.
Draw them by hand. If you do this, start with simple images (stick figures) and backgrounds and gradually tackle more complex drawings. You’ll need to take care that the backgrounds are consistent from page to page to avoid a jittery appearance when you flip the pages. Photographs. You can take a number of digital photos, then print them out on sheets of paper and bind them together, or use a software application to create a digital flipbook. It’s easiest to do this if your camera has a burst picture mode that lets you take a number of pictures as you hold down the button. Digital video. Some newlywed couples choose to create coffee-table flipbooks of their wedding, using a portion of the video shot during their wedding. Extracting individual video frames requires using a computer and video editing software, and many couples choose to upload their videos to online companies such as FlipClips. com.
You may want to experiment with leaving out or rearranging a few of the images to make the animation appear jerkier or change the animation pattern before you bind the book together.
Pen-and-ink animators use a similar technique with preliminary drawings before coloring and inking them. They lay them one on top of each other, first to last, then hold down one of the edges as they flip through the drawings.
Character voices Vocals to any songs A temporary musical track. The final track, along with any sound effects, are added in post-production. Animated cartoons before and into the 1930s did the animation first, then the sound. The Fleischer Studios did so in their earliest Popeye cartoons, which required the voice actors to ad-lib in between scripted places in the dialogue. This accounts for Popeye’s humorous mutterings in cartoons such as “Choose Your Weppins. ”
Advertising agencies make use of animatics as well as photomatics, a series of digital photographs sequenced together to make a crude animation. These are usually created with stock photos to keep the cost down.
Reference sheets are also created for the backgrounds needed for where the action takes place.
If the animation is primarily set to music, such as Fantasia, you can also create a bar sheet to coordinate the animation to the notes of the musical score. For some productions, the bar sheet can substitute for the X-sheet.
Usually only the key points and actions are rendered first. A pencil test is made, using photos or scans of the drawings synchronized with the soundtrack to make sure the details are correct. Only then are the details added, after which they, too, are pencil-tested. Once everything has been so tested, it is sent to another animator, who redraws it to give it a more consistent look. In large productions, a team of animators may be assigned to each character, with the lead animator rendering the key points and actions and assistants rendering the details. When characters drawn by separate teams interact, the lead animators for each character work out which character is the primary character for that scene, and that character is rendered first, with the second character drawn to react to the first character’s actions. A revised animatic is created during each phase of drawing, roughly equivalent to the daily “rushes” of live-action movies. Sometimes, usually when working with realistically drawn human characters, the frame drawings are traced over stills of actors and scenery on film. This process, developed in 1915 by Max Fleischer, is called rotoscoping.
Gouache (a form of watercolor with thicker pigment particles)[6] X Research source Acrylic paint Oil Watercolor
Only the image of the character on object on the cel is painted; the rest is left unpainted. A more sophisticated form of this process was developed for the movie The Black Cauldron. The drawings were photographed on high-contrast film. The negatives were developed onto cels covered with light-sensitive dye. The unexposed portion of the cel was chemically cleaned, and small details were inked by hand.
Sometimes, instead of placing all the cels on a single stack, several stacks are created and the camera moves up or down through stacks. This kind of camera is called a multiplane camera and is used to add the illusion of depth. Overlays can be added over the background cel, over the character cels, or on top of all the cells to add additional depth and detail to the resulting image before it’s photographed.
Paper cut-outs. You can cut or tear pieces of paper into parts of human and animal figures and lay them against a drawn background to produce a crude two-dimensional animation. Dolls or stuffed toys. Best known with Rankin-Bass’ animated productions such as Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer or Santa Claus Is Coming to Town and Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken, this form of stop-motion dates back to Albert Smith and Stuart Blackton’s 1897 The Humpty Dumpty Circus. You’ll have to create cutouts for the various lip patterns to attach to your stuffed animals if you want to have them move their lips when they speak, however. Clay figures. Will Vinton’s Claymation animated California Raisins are the best-known modern examples of this technique, but the technique dates back to 1912’s Modelling Extraordinary and was the method that made Art Clokey’s Gumby a TV star in the 1950s. You may need to use armatures for some clay figures and pre-sculpted leg bases, as Marc Paul Chinoy did in his 1980 film I go Pogo. Models. Models can be either of real or fantasy creatures or vehicles. Ray Harryhausen used stop-motion animation for the fantastic creatures of such movies as Jason and the Argonauts and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Industrial Light & Magic used stop-motion animation of vehicles to make the AT-ATs walk across the icy wastes of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.
If you plan to have speaking characters, you’ll have to work out the correct mouth shapes for the dialog they’re to utter. You may also find it necessary to create something similar to the photomatic described in the section about pen-and-ink animation.
As with live-action film, you’ll more likely have to be concerned with actually lighting a scene as opposed to drawing in the effects of light and shadow as you would in pen-and-ink animation. [8] X Research source
Animator Phil Tippett developed a way to have some of the moving of models controlled by computer to produce more realistic motions. Called “go motion,” this method was used in The Empire Strikes Back, as well as in Dragonslayer, RoboCop, and RoboCop II. [9] X Research source
Three-dimensional animation requires learning additional skills besides animation. You’ll need to learn how to light a scene, and also how to create the illusion of texture. [10] X Research source
For 2-D animation, a fast processor is helpful, but not absolutely necessary. Nonetheless, get a quad-core processor if you can afford it, and at least a dual-core processor if you’re buying a used computer. [11] X Research source For 3-D animation, however, you want the fastest processor you can afford because of all the rendering work you’ll do. You’ll also want to have a significant amount of memory to support that processor. You’ll more than likely spend several thousand dollars on a new computer workstation. [12] X Research source For either form of animation, you’ll want as large a monitor as your planned work area can accommodate, and you may want to consider a two-monitor setup if you have several detail-oriented program windows open at once. Some monitors, such as the Cintiq, are designed specifically for animation. You should also consider using a graphics tablet, an input device connected to your computer with a surface you draw on with a stylus, such as the Intuos Pro, in place of a mouse. Starting out, you may want to use a cheaper stylus pen to trace over your pencil drawings to transfer images to your computer. [13] X Research source
For 2-D animation, you can produce animated images quickly using Adobe Flash, with the help of one of the many free tutorials available. When you’re ready to learn to animate frame-by-frame, you can use a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop or a program that has a feature similar to Photoshop’s Timeline feature. For 3-D animation, you can start with free programs like Blender and then move on to more sophisticated programs such as Cinema 4D or the industry standard, Autodesk Maya. [14] X Research source
When exploring your animation software package, take a look at “Part Three: Creating Pen-and-Ink Animation” if your software is for 2-D animation and “Part Four: Creating Stop-Motion Animation” to determine what portions of the process the software will automate for you and what portions you’ll have to do outside of it. You can post videos to your own website, which should be registered either under your own name or that of your business. You can also post to a site such as YouTube or Vimeo. Vimeo allows you to change which video you’re posting without changing the link to it, which can be helpful when you’ve created your latest masterpiece. [15] X Research source
