Make Your Own Animation: How to Make Animations

Animation could be defined as an illusion of motion created by displaying a sequence of images rapidly. The images could either be 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional in nature. The optical illusion, which is one of the important aspect of creating an animation result from a phenomenon called 'persistence of vision'. Creating a motion picture is the most common method to make an animation.

How to Make Animations?

Many different techniques or methods could be used to create your own animation. One can either use the traditional technique, computer animation or the stop motion technique in creating animation. The following paragraphs provides information about the basic types of animation.

Traditional Technique
The technique was used for many films that were made in the 20th century. In the traditional technique, the first step is to make drawings for the sequences to be presented in the animation. These drawings are photocopied onto acetate sheets. The side of the sheet which is opposite to the line drawings should be filled with the assigned colors. These sheets are then photographed on motion picture films using a rostrum camera.

Computer Animation
The two basic categories of computer animation are 2D and 3D animation. The 2D animation is created either using '2D vector graphics' or '2D bitmap graphics'. Morphing, tweening, interpolated rotoscoping and onion skinning are the techniques used in 2D animation.

The technique known as 'rigging' is used to create 3D animations. Although many other techniques are used to create a 3D animation, rigging is most commonly used. The digital models made for 3D animation are manipulated with the help of an animator. The mesh is given a digital structure to facilitate easy manipulation.

Stop Motion
The stop motion technique too uses the phenomenon of optical illusion to create animations. However, in this method, real world objects are manipulated physically and then photographed one frame at a time. Puppet animation, clay animation, cutout animation are some of the types of stop animation.

Make Your Own Animation

One can easily create a GIF animation with the help of a software called 'Adobe Photoshop'. The image file should be set to 100 x 100 pixels and the resolution at 72 pixels per inch. The mode should be set to RGB color. The 'show layers' option should be chosen from the 'floating palette' of the 'Window' menu. To draw a picture, the stencil tool should be used. A duplicate layer should be selected by clicking on the layer palette's sub-menu arrow. The next step in the process is to click on the eyeball icon present at the bottom of the layer palette on the left side. The image is saved by selecting the 'jump to' option under the file menu, followed by clicking on the 'Adobe ImageReady 2.0' option. The image should be saved when prompted to do so. Animation of the image is done with the help of the 'show animation' option present under the 'Window' menu. Clicking on the 'show animation' option would bring up the 'animation floating palette'. The 'Make Frame from Layers' option which is present under the 'animation palette sub-menu' is used for the purpose of animation. The animation needs to be saved by clicking on the 'Save Optimized As' option.

The different methods and techniques mentioned above can be used to make your own animation. One can create cartoon characters and many interesting things by using the various animation techniques.