How is animation cooked?

Animation as any other kind of art has a lot of different techniques. We decided to talk about some of them, explain what they mean, which peculiarities they have and how they are garnished. 

Let's make some kind of a cookbook with the most known recipes. 

Recipe #1 Traditional

Hand-drawn animation

Ingredients:

Pencil
Tracing paper
Light table

What was the beginning? Sure it was good old hand-drawn animation which made Disney studio famous.

An animator worked at a light table, where he draw a certain pose of a character on the tracing paper, then put on the next sheet and made subtle alterations in the pose to get the movement - that was the same process for all 12 pictures in 1 second of animation (one picture was duplicated for 2 frames - therefore the final number of frames was 24). The final movement of a character was filmed. 

This is a very short description concerning animation only. We shouldn't forget about storyboard artists, character and background artists and other outstanding people.

To learn more about this technique you may watch this old video about the working process at Disney studio that took place many years ago:

Nowadays hand-drawn animation technique is not so frequently-used, nevertheless we still may admire it, for example in the works of a famous Disney animator Glen Keane. The animation process became much easier due to modern technologies, however, as Glen states it, an animator in hand-drawn animation is still 'an actor with a pencil in his hand'.

Recipe #2
2D: Computer hand-drawn animation

Ingredients:
Digitizer

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Flash

Toon Boom Studio, etc.

An animator changes paper to a computer and becomes an actor with a digitizing pen in his hand. This technique is ruled by the same principle as traditional hand-drawn animation - in an animation program each frame is drawn manually on the basis of the previous one, everything is done on a separate layer. The sequence of drawn frames creates movement  – animation.

Depending on production requirements 1 second may include from 8 to 24 drawn frames.

Recipe #3 Meat dish
2D: Cutout animation

Ingredients:

Digitizer

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Flash

Toon Boom Studio, etc.

Cutout animation is not so time-consuming as hand-drawn animation, however, it also requires some time for preparation and setup of  an animation object.

An animator has a function of a 'butcher' to some extent.

Then an animator moves the parts of the character's body to create the movement itself.

Great thanks to our friend from Polygon.by Marina for letting us using her character as a 'lab rat'  =)

The elements of hand-drawn animation are frequently used together with cutout animation to get a more credible movement. 

Recipe#4 Specialty

3D animation.

Ingredients:
Cinema 4D
3ds max
Maya, etc.

For the last few years 3D animation has become very popular. This technique made Pixar studio famous with its first movie 'Toy story', moreover it is already 2 years Disney studio hasn't used a 2D animation technique for its full-length projects having switched to 3D technologies.

An animator has got a puppet in his hands - a 3D model, and now he can make everything that draws his imagination... or almost everything.

We won't describe the working process with a 3D video we have already made it quite well here.

Recipe #5 Sophisticated
Stop motion (Stop-frame animation)

Ingredients:
Camera

Puppet or modelling clay

Animation software

After hand-drawn animation stop motion can be called the second time-consuming animation technique. We know it well first of all due to a bit dark but lyrical works by Tim Burton. Just remember his 'Nightmare before Christmas'!

Some people recognize this technique by a frequently used material - modelling clay, for example, 'Sheep Shaun' and the game 'The Neverhood'.

Watch a small video about how this animation is made:

Sometimes this technique may use tools and elements of 3D technologies, as it was made in 'Coraline' and 'The BoxTrolls'.

Recipe#6 Universal salad

Animated infographics

How to cook:

Put easy and accessible ingredients of computer animation according to your taste, add informative seasoning.

From the point of animation infographics is a combination of easy solutions of 2D and 3D animation techniques. This remarkable tool is used to provide information in an attractive and understandable format and it is one of the most popular techniques with designers. 

These are several recipes we remembered. However animation is such a spacious art phenomenon that we wouldn't manage to describe all its tools even within several years. Therefore cook your animation together with us and cook your animation yourself =)