M1 - Explain persistence of vision

Unit 31 Computer animation
Task 3, M1 - Explain persistence of vision

Persistence of vision is an effect that the eye gives the brain where it seems to keep an image after seeing one for around 0.4 seconds. This would mean that the things we see in the present are essentially a blend of things we have seen a fraction of a second ago.

This theory that we can see things 0.4 seconds after they have gone is used in movies and animation. The still images when played together at a fast speed like 24 frames per second the eye will keep the first image while the second is played so it will give the illusion of fluid movement or animation even though they are all still images.

Before computer animation there were toys and tools that people used which gave the persistence of vision effect where it seemed to show flowing fluid movement.

This is a video of a Phenakistiscope disk which is an old tool which was used to show animation. With the use of persistence of vision the images seem to move as the disk spins.

P3 - Discuss the advantages and limitations of animated GIFs

Unit 31 – computer animation
P3 – Discuss the advantages and limitations of animated GIF’s
Lee Mercer
14/11/2013

DHTML or Dynamic HTML is a combined form of HTML and some script such as CSS, PHP or Java. This can be used to create animation on web pages which can include games or rollover buttons

Flash is another tool that can be used to create frame by frame animation using vectors or bitmaps, Sound or videos can also be included into flash.

Shockwave is used for 3D graphics and streaming videos. Shockwave allows the compilation of many different assets into one multimedia project.

Quick time is a multimedia platform that is useable by both Mac and Windows even though it was made by Apple, it supports animation, sound and videos.

Real player is another cross platform multimedia platform for Mac and Windows which is seen as a solution for many peoples format problems.

Advantages

·         File size – GIF files are made up of a few frames or images so they take up much less file space than other types of files.

·         Lossless compression – GIF files support a compression method called LZW or lossless compression. This allows the files to be made much smaller without losing quality, this helps on websites as you can minimise the bandwidth.

·         Minimal bandwidth – Minimising bandwidth is a key task for anyone who owns a website and using gifs can greatly help this. As they have a much smaller file size the GIF file type is a good choice for minimising bandwidth.

·         Transparency – Most GIF’s support transparency in their images allowing other images to be seen through the GIF.

Limitations

·         256 colours – GIF file types are limited to 256 colours which means you can’t go into as much fine detail as other image types but at the same time it allows for a much smaller for a much smaller file size.

·         Blocky images – As GIF’s are saved as images and not vector files the image can become blocky and distorted when zoomed in. This could be a problem if you are trying to portray fine art or other such files.

·         Dithered images – Dithering is used to make images that have a limited colour pallet such as GIF’s with only 256 colours look like they have intermediate colours. This reduces the effect of banding when colours are gradually changing. 

P2

Unit 31 - Computer animation

P2 - Explain different uses of animation

Lee Mercer

14/10/2013

Advertising

The advertising market is huge and can really make or break a product or service, if you are trying to sell a product you want to make sure you have as big of a market as possible and through advertising and animation you can do this.
So if we take for example that we are trying to sell a new car which holds new technology saving people in crashes it wouldn’t be very cost effective to video you smashing cars over and over again. This is where animation comes in, you can design the car on the computer using programs that can still portray its crumple zones and show off the safety features and then move it into an animation program like after effects. Using this you can both show off your products and keep cost down as much as possible.

Creative arts

Animation doesn’t have to have a purpose it can be used for art, for expressing how you feel at a certain moment in time. Art throughout the centuries has been used to express artist’s feelings and show there talent using tools to make different types of art and animation is the same, it can be used to simply show the artists mind and thought process through a series of abstract images moving and flowing together.

Entertainment

Animation is used and seen every day in the entertainment industry, from your top of the range cinema movies to your games and even TV programs. Animation has changed the face of entertainment making it possible to show things that would be too expensive, large or dangerous to try to create in the real world.
Using animation we can create illusions that still images or objects are moving a key example of this is with Claymation programs such as Wallace and Gromit. Programs like this utilise both cameras to take the still images and computers to run the images together with Morphing, Tweening and Masking to create the illusion to the viewer of actual fluid movement.

Education

Education is changing rapidly and in most parts there is a vast overhaul and everyone is moving away from pens and paper and moving to electronic substitutes. As of this there are many new ways of getting your message across to students, one way of this is through animation.
Animation can be used in almost any subject to make learning fun via methods like showing how the bones in the human body move together to showing how to pick apart a document getting only the most important pieces.

Others

Since animation is moving forward there are new innovations that help everyone in ways never imagined these could be helping the forces train to helping architects plan for disasters.

Military

In the military the soldiers are often asked to train and surpass limits but it is not always possible to train for every situation as sometimes you may have to kill someone. There is a quite recent tool implemented into the army called the Dismounted Close Combat Trainer or DCCT for short. This tool is a virtual range connected to real army rifles, this tool helps train for combat situations that would be too dangerous to simulate in real life but can be safely and accurately done through computer animations.
Other examples of this are flight and boat simulations. It would be extremely expensive for every trainee pilot or sailor to be trained on actual vehicles so using animation we can create ultra-realistic simulators which mimic exactly what would happen if certain scenarios occurred.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb5Y_1u_Qk0

Disaster planning

Another area where animation has made a huge impact is the architecture industry. Now as well as just making designs for buildings they can also simulate how the building would support its self in a disaster like a hurricane for example. This is a great tool and saves more than just money it saves lives.

Unit 31 Computer Animation

Task 1A - Explain different types of animation

Lee Mercer

30/09/2013

Animation 
Animation is a collection of still images that are put together in a way that shows them quickly one after another giving the illusion of fluid movement to the viewer. There are many different ways of recreating this through either computer programs or more traditional methods such as stop motion.
 
A common method of animation is the stop motion method of animation, this is used in television programs like Wallace and Gromit.

Two traditional methods of animation
The first method of animation I am going to talk about was pioneered by two brothers. Auguste and Louis Lumière were the pioneers of film making, they started off working at their father’s photography firm in France and soon after their fathers retirement they began to create moving pictures.
The first film screening was a private screening unlike the ones we have today was a private screening and was held in 1895 it was only shown to a few people. The first public admission of this film was held in the Salon Indien du Grand Café which is in Paris, It consisted of ten short films the first of which was titled Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon which translates into English as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. This was the first film ever to be created and consisted of about 17 meters of film which was wound through a projector by hand.

The second method of I am going to look at is the Kinetoscope which was created by Thomas Edison in 1888. Though Edison created the Kinetoscope it was largely designed by his employee William Dickson and was designed between the years of 1889 and 1892. The first exhibiton of motion picture took place on April 14, 1894 it took ten individual Kinetoscope’s to show.

Over the course of 1895 it became obvious to Edison that the Kinetoscope was going to lose sales against the projection methods of the Lumière brothers and after the second year of the motion picture methods being out the sales went down almost 90%. This is when Edison moved his attention to trying to project his animation; He then helped create the Vitascope which he hoped would be better than the projector of the Lumière brothers.

Computer animation techniques 
Times have moved on from the times where pictures would be manually dragged through a projector to create motion now we have technology that could show the illusion of motion. Common programs that create this are Flash, Scratch or Sony After effects.

Most cinema movies now have some animation in and this method was pioneered by James Cameron who created the movie Avatar, this movie was the first of many now to use a camera with two lenses to give the user the image of 3D.

Motion is created by the view of frames. Frames are shown at a speed usually of about 30 per second and this using the eyes ability to imprint an image for a split second can give the illusion on fluid movement. Some of the common methods to create the effect of motion are Tweening, Morphing and masking;

Tweening

The term Tweening is short for in-betweening and is the name given to the process of adding intermediate frames in between two images. This method can give the first image the illusion that it is slowly evolving into the second.

Morphing

Morphing is the term used to describe seamless transition between two frames in an animation. Although we use computers to do this now it was previously done by cross-fading the images on a film reel.

Masking

Is the method of covering part of an image or scene to later add something into it. This again is done mainly by computers now but used to be done with methods like Chromakey.



Below is an image from a large animated series called Final Fantasy: The spirits Within. This animation was created using computers and looks like a normal film but is made wholly of animation and is one of the most realistic animations on the market.