We all grew up on the good old Soviet cartoons. But, seeing Dunno, Funtik, or other favorite heroes on the screen, no one thought about how much effort was put into creating one minute of the cartoon. What is animation? Where did her story begin? 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 technical techniques, which are based on the creation of moving images, or rather the illusions of their movement, since many still pictures and scenes are used for this. That is, in fact, this is a shooting of pictures or dolls depicting individual moments of movement. Animation appeared much earlier than the Lumiere brothers invented cinema. Modern animation is increasingly called the term "animation", from English "animation". Animation, animation are close, but not identical, concepts. Their relationship can be characterized as follows. Animation is the creation of animation when frame-by-frame shooting of drawings, scenes, paper designs, etc. is carried out.
Cartoon Invention
What is animation? Part of the childhood of many guys. But where did it start?
In 1877, self-taught engineer Emil Reynaud constructed a praxinoscope - a mechanical toy with a mirrored rotating drum and a ribbon on which pictures were applied. Hand-drawn animation originated precisely from this invention. Reynaud later improved his unit: now the drawn pantomimes, which were painted by hand, lasted from 7 to 15 minutes, although one cannot but admit that this device for synchronizing image and sound was primitive, but not for those times
Moving pictures
The animation technology looks like this: on each next frame the hero figure is presented in a slightly different phase of movement. Separately taken pictures are individually photographed and projected onto the screen. Broadcast speed - 24 frames per second.
What is animation? This is a creative work, the creation of which takes a lot of time and labor of hundreds of people. The producers determine the general idea of the tape, the scriptwriters work on the plot and write the script, which will then be divided into scenes and episodes, illustrated by a series of sketches. After that, it all comes to the table to the director-animator, who distributes the scenes between the animators: each of them draws a certain position of the characters in the episode. Intermediate scenes will be drawn by younger animators. The remaining artists are creating the background on which the action unfolds.
Then the outline drawings need to be painted. They are transferred to transparent plastic, outlined with ink and painted. After that, the operator photographs the drawings using a special camera. The last stage is the synchronization of image and sound.
There is another technique for creating a cartoon.
Puppet animation
Russia is the birthplace of puppet, or voluminous, animation. With the development of this type of cartoons, a new technique for creating films has appeared. Nevertheless, the process of creating the tape remained no less laborious.
The first step in creating a cartoon is writing a script and thinking through the images of heroes. According to the sketches of the characters, dolls, their costumes and shoes are sewn, which will correspond to the image of each of the characters. This is the most time-consuming stage of work, since each doll must be movable.
The second stage is shooting the phases of movement of the dolls corresponding to the scenario. One episode can be shot for several days, or maybe several months. A full-length puppet cartoon can be shot for 3 years or even longer. But basically, volumetric animation lasts 5-15 minutes, but even several months are spent on it.
Why is this happening? For example, according to the cartoon scenario, the hero runs along a forest path. To shoot this scene, the character doll is placed on the background of a moving scenery, which depicts trees, the sun, clouds, sky, birds. Creating the effect of a running character, the animator manually moves the legs and arms of the hero, turns his head. Thus, each phase of the character’s running is gradually filmed. Together with the body, the phases of the movement of clothes and hair are also removed. So, within one day of shooting a cartoon, when all the photos are combined into one video sequence, the creators of the tape take only a couple of seconds of screen time.
When computer technology came into the animation, puppet cartoons began to be shot much faster.
Electronic animation - animation
Electronic animation, or animation, is created using a computer: pre-prepared graphic files are arranged sequentially as a slide show. No less popular is the flash-animation, when the cartoon is created using the special program Macromedia Flash. It is easy to use and configure, which determines its popularity.