All ANIMATION TECHNIQUES - List

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?

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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...

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And remember to check
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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 could
discuss over this 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.