As for animation, it is a series of related drawings captured in a media that will display them in sequence, but so rapidly, the eye is fooled into seeing motion. The earliest media for animation was a set of flip cards. Today, animation is commonly displayed as a movie, as a video, or on a computer screen.

Animation is a unique art form: It’s dynamic; it gives the illusion of motion, life, and action, and it has nearly universal appeal. From quickly produced Saturday morning cartoons to finely crafted full-length movies, animation attracts large and varied audiences. The finest examples of animation are truly sublime works of art, capturing, displaying, and evoking emotions. Animation creates new apparent realities from sheer imagination.

Yet for all it’s wide appeal animation is a relatively new form of artistic expression. Whereas painting and sculpture have existed for thousands of years, the technology to produce animation has existed for less than a century. And within the past decade digital technology has had a revolutionary impact on the animation process. For most of this century animation was produced by large team of artists and technicians. The traditional process has been characterised as part art and part craft.

The first animated film, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, was made in 1906 by J. Stuart Blackton an American newspaper illustrator. Blackton filmed a series of faces that had been drawn on a blackboard and also used a variety of other techniques. Another early-animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur, was created by the American cartoonist Winsor McCay in 1914. In this film, for the first time, a character drawn of lines seemed to live and breathe on the screen.

Animation on computer does not simply offer a simple alternative to other types of animation. It represents a fully new discipline. Computers are used to bring a new dimension to the art of animation.

Multimedia Animation is used in education, entertainment, a logo of a particular company, business presentations, marketing, scientific sector and tourist sector.

An animated character can fly without wings, fall off a cliff without getting hurt, or be squashed as a pancake and pop back into shape. But what are the limits ????? Well, the only limits to what animation can show is the limit of the artist’s imagination.

There are 2 basic types of animation:

Firstly, the 2 dimensional (2D) which is animated flat drawings;

Secondly, the 3D objects such as puppets or clay figures.

To make an animated film, a series of drawings – or an object placed on a series of positions – is photographed, one picture at a time, by a motion picture camera. In each picture / frame, the subject’s position is changed slightly. When the completed film is run, the subject appears to move.

In the year 1970s, if a text had to be added on the screen on which there is a presenter, this would require three screens. Artists and writers first prepare a storyboard, which is an illustrated script. The storyboard looks like a giant comic strip with sketches showing the action of the story and dialogue written under each sketch. Next, the music and the dialogue are recorded. Then the work of animation begins.

For the 2D – The animation of drawings is the technique most often used to create animated films and television shows. To look smooth and natural, a single action that takes one second of screen time may require as many as 24 drawings. More than a million drawings may be used in an animated feature film. Most television cartoons use fewer drawings per second. As a result, the characters’ movements may not look as lifelike.

The animators draw every movement of every character that will appear in the film. When the drawings are completed, they are traced onto sheets of clear plastic called cels. Colours are then painted on the reverse sides of the cels. Other artists paint the backgrounds in the film. The finished cels are laid over the backgrounds and photographed with a special camera that shoots one frame of a film at a time. The soundtrack is added after the photography is completed.

For the 3D – the 3D figures and objects can be animated using a process called stop-motion photography. Animators often work with special puppets, which are made of flexible plastic moulded around a jointed metal ‘skeleton’.

The multimedia animation requires a team:

• Director: leading the team
• Writer: writes the story
• Artist: creates the drawings
• Typist: types the texts