Let's explain a bit the animation techniques.
So, for starters,
remember that animation is an illusion,
so everything you see is not real.
Even I am not really moving now.
You're just seeing a semplification...
...of the movement I made right now,
because the video camera takes thirty frames per second,
which simplify my movement...
...and create the illusion, but you don't really see the movement.
This illusion works incredibly well.
How does animation work?
Animation consists in:
instead of taking someone who is really moving,
and using a movie camera to record their movement...
...and creating a simulation,
we do the opposite.
There is no movie camera in animation.
There is none.
You don't need the techonolgy of the machine...
...recording you with thirty frames per second,
because each picture can be taken...
...potentially even years later.
Animation is that illusion in which I, human being,
take pictures whenever I want,
to create the illusion that something that can't actually move, is moving.
The most famous and used technique ever is the traditional.
The traditional technique consists in a drawing,
which gets redone from scratch,
and redone again,
and redone again.
Each drawing you make has some slight changes,
so when you see these drawings in sequence...
...it creates the illusion of movement.
Pretty simple concept, right? This is traditional animation.
Then it takes many names based on the support used to draw.
If you use a cel, that is an acetate sheet,
with a paper sheet, strapped together,
it's hard to explain, but that is an animation cel.
If you use a real classic drawing,
done by pen nib and all that,
that is traditional animation.
If you instead used the same technique,
but the sheet was digital...
...and the drawings are made on a tablet, for instance,
it's called paperless.
And it's the same as traditional technique,
there's simply no paper waste.
What if it's with pixels?
That's pixel animation.
Pixel animation is the same thing,
but the drawing this time is made...
...using little colored squares called pixels.
You could animate in any other way, using sand,
you could use any support...
...but if every time you have to redraw the character,
it's traditional animation.
Rotoscope is one of the types of traditional animation.
What is the rotoscope?
It's the same thing, but I didn't make up a drawing,
I filmed a person...
...and now I'm tracing the individual frames.
There are also full movies made with rotoscope,
tv series made with rotoscope,
but in the past the rotoscope was mainly used...
...to create more realistic humans,
who perhaps could be a bit unsettling...
...and, I don't know, give off a strange feeling.
In Pinocchio and 101 Dalmatians...
...the vehicles are animated with rotoscope,
so there are tiny models that actually move,
they are filmed and then the movement is traced.
In The Lord of the Rings everything is in rotoscope,
there are real people actually moving,
that get traced later.
Nowadays we hear much about cel-shading.
What is cel-shading?
It's just an effect you apply to your drawing.
So you make traditional animation,
usually paperless, all chill,
but then you use the computer to help you with the lights.
And maybe some other details too.
That's what happened in Klaus for example.
So you drew everything by hand,
the lights are simply done with the computer.
Disney already used another technology called C.A.P.S.,
which allowed it to create drawings on paper...
...then move them to the computer...
...and handling them as it pleased.
But you got the gist: there's traditional animation,
then there are the variants.
The thousand ways to do it.
Then there is stopmotion.
Stopmotion is one of the most talked about techniques ever,
everyone knows the word stopmotion.
And stopmotion animation,
or stop frame, is the animation where you take an inanimate object...
...and you take a series of pictures...
Don't take pictures while you move the object,
do it when it's alone, so it will seem that it moved.
The stopmotion type that almost everyone thinks about is puppet,
that is when you use the so called articulated toys...
...which move bit by bit by taking many pictures.
In traditional animation,
if a character jumps it's not hard...
...nor different than making it roll.
In stopmotion animation,
making a character jump means having to find a special effect...
...or visual effect that lets you hide the fact...
...that the toy can't stay hanging in the air...
...to get a picture taken.
So you need an alternative solution in order to have it hanging,
looking like it's jumping but it's really not.
So in stopmotion things like rain are very hard to achieve,
when in traditional animation it takes nothing.
However if your stopmotion toy isn't just a toy,
but you can actually modify it,
you can reshape it because it's made of clay,
we're talking about claymation.
Claymation.
Not claymotion as I said in the last video.
I said it because it's easy to make mistakes,
but I swear that actually no, it's always been claymation.
And claymation is the same as stopmotion,
but you can actually change your characters,
modify them, and use a lot of clay or modelling materials.
Then there's cut-out, same as stopmotion...
...but you move pieces of cut paper on a sheet of paper.
You're not redrawing the characters,
because the face and the body are still the same.
You are moving them with the stopmotion technique,
but the visual result is much more similar to the traditional technique.
It's the animation you always saw with South Park, for example.
But careful, because South Park at some point changed technique.
Before it used real pieces of paper layed on,
then it started using vector animation,
also called rigged animation.
Gosh how do I explain the vector now?
Let's do this way,
vector animation could allow it to say:
happy birthday NordVPN!
In reality it's a drawing,
that I then cut in its joints...
...and I can move them.
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In this type of animation your character can have,
for instance, twenty possible movements,
just twenty and they can't increase.
But it's also such a fast and cheap technique...
...that I could use it to make him say:
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But it's also important to tell this technique apart from cgi.
Cgi has basically infinite potential.
The animator has a control over the character that allows them...
...to both preset some things, and also sit there...
...and correct on the way any small movement,
invent new movements that the figure can do,
teach the computer how to behave,
or take complete control of the character to animate,
of the setting to animate,
or whatever thing they want to move...
...inside this simulation.
Classic cgi is so unlimited that it's used...
...to make special effects in movies because, potentially,
you can do anything with it.
Remember that more realistic does not mean better though.
There is no correlation between the two,
cgi has its choices based on its needs,
you can discuss for hours.
Then we have mocap, that is motion capture:
it's same as cgi, so you create everything on the computer,
but the character's movement are not given by an animator,
like in the rotoscope they trace the real movements of an actor...
...who was likely wearing sensors...
...that relayed to a computer the movements made by the character...
...and replayed them with the animated character.
And we can have cel-shading here too,
it works in the opposite way to what I said before.
Earlier I talked about cel-shading on a drawing, so it's flat...
...but we put a 3D thing on top,
I can also do the opposite.
Therefore creating a 3D evniroment etcetera...
...and with cel-shading sticking...
...over the 3D figures something that looks like 2D drawings.
Then we have the mixed technique.
Mixed technique, I mean...
As a term it defines any technique that mixes different techniques.
The issue is that the techniques always get mixed with each other.
It's hard to find a single animated movie...
...that always uses only one single technique without aid from the others.
When we say mixed technique,
we usually mean those few existing films...
...that actually mix real people and animation.
How can you tell if it's mixed technique or special effects?
Because in the end in King Kong the gorilla is made in stopmotion,
and in the new King Kong the gorilla is made in cgi.
Yes, but in both cases they use animation techniques...
...in order to simulate a real creature.
Mixed technique is such...
...when you put together cartoons and real characters,
without pretending that one is part of the other or something like that.
Mixed technique uses human characters as such and cartoons as such.
It's the most expensive technique...
...and this is also why almost nobody uses it.
And then we have the new technique,
which everyone is talking about.
They made very few films with it but it already charmed everyone.
But I saw many doubts about it, so let's explain it.
Some call it meander,
some call it comiclook,
there are many names for this new technique.
It hasn't been decided yet,
because it depends on which one will be more frequent in speech.
For instance traditional animation wasn't called as such...
...before the other types existed...
...and rose the need to give a name to animation,
"the normal one".
The new technique consists in a mix of all the others.
Cgi is usually the base, but in almost all the animation work...
...the computer is wrong and gets corrected.
It's complicated to explain, but as a rapid example,
look at the Puss in boots rotating on himself.
In a cgi animation film,
the computer would just take the character,
and it would make it rotate on itself,
perfectly creating its rotation.
Instead, it was retouched with the traditional technique: