What is animation? Technology for creating cartoons

We all grew up on good old Soviet cartoons. But, seeing on the screen Neznayku, Funtika or other loved heroes, no one thought about how much effort is put on the creation of one minute cartoon. What is animation? Where did her story start? Puppet and hand-drawn animation - which one is older? You will find answers to these questions in this article.

What is animation?

Animation is a set of techniques, based on the creation of moving images, or rather the illusions of their movement, because it uses a lot of still pictures and scenes. That is, in fact, it is shooting pictures or dolls depicting individual moments of movement. Animation appeared much earlier than the Lumiere brothers invented the cinema. Modern animation is increasingly called the term "animation", from English "animation." Animation, animation - these concepts are close, but not identical. Their relationship can be characterized as follows. Animation is the creation of animations, when frame-by-frame shooting of drawings, scenes, paper constructions, etc. is performed.

The invention of animation

What is animation? Part of the childhood of many children. But where did it begin?

In 1877, the self-taught engineer Emil Reynaud constructed a praxinoscope - a mechanical toy with a mirror rotating drum and a ribbon, on which pictures were painted. Drawing animation originated from this invention. Later, Reynaud improved his unit: now the painted pantomimes, which were painted by hand, lasted from 7 to 15 minutes, although one can not but admit that this device for synchronizing images and sound was primitive, but not for those times

Moving pictures

The animation technique looks like this: on each next frame the hero figure is represented in a slightly different phase of the movement. Separately taken pictures are photographed one by one and projected onto the screen. The translation speed is 24 frames per second.

What is animation? It is a creative work, the creation of which takes a lot of time and labor of hundreds of people. Producers define the general purpose of the tape, script writers work on the story and write a script that will then be broken into scenes and episodes illustrated by a series of sketches. After all, this gets on the table to the director-animator, who distributes the scenes between the artists-animators: each of them draws a certain position of the characters in the episode. Intermediate scenes will be drawn by junior multipliers. The rest of the artists are engaged in creating a background on which the action unfolds.

Then the contour drawings need to be painted. They are transferred to a transparent plastic, inked and painted. After that, the operator photographs pictures using a special camera. The last stage is the synchronization of the image and sound.

There is another technique for creating a cartoon.

Puppet animation

Russia is the birthplace of a puppet, or three-dimensional, animation. With the development of this type of cartoons, a new technique for creating movies has appeared. But nevertheless the process of creating the tape remained no less laborious.

The first stage of creating a cartoon is writing a script and thinking through the images of the characters. According to the sketches of the characters, dolls, their costumes and shoes are sewn, which will correspond to the image of each of the heroes. This is the most time-consuming stage of work, since each doll must be mobile.

The second stage is the filming of the phases of the movement of the puppets corresponding to the scenario. One episode can be shot for several days, and maybe several months. A full-length puppet cartoon can be shot for 3 years or even longer. But basically the volume animation has a duration of 5-15 minutes, but even this takes several months.

Why is this happening? For example, according to the scenario of the cartoon, the hero runs along the forest path. To remove this scene, the character doll is placed against a background of moving scenery, which depicts trees, the sun, clouds, sky, birds. Creating the effect of a running character, the multiplier manually moves the legs and arms of the hero, turns his head. In this way, each phase of the character's run is gradually filmed. Together with the body, the phases of movement of clothing and hair are removed. So, during one day of shooting a cartoon, when all photos are combined into one video series, the tape makers take only a couple of seconds of screen time.

When the animation came computer technology, puppet cartoons began to be shot much faster.

Electronic animation - animation

Electronic animation, or animation, is created with the help of a computer: in sequence as a slide show, pre-prepared graphic files are built. Not less popular is the flash-animation, when the cartoon is created using a special program Macromedia Flash. It is easy to use and configure, which determines its popularity.