Chapter 11 ANIMATION  Group Name: Creative Web World  Jose T Barriga  Claudia L. Espinosa  Ranjana Agarwal

Animation adds visual impact to your M ultimedia projects and Web Pages  It is possible to animate a whole project or only part of it.  Visual effects are available in most authoroting packages.  Macromedia Director and Adobe Premier have many transition effects.

PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION  Animation is possible because of a biological phenomenon known as persistence of vision and a psychological phenomenon called phi.  When a person sees an object, it remains chemically mapped on the eye’s retina for a brief time after viewing it.  Our mind perceives this action as a visual illusion of movement.

PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION  Television uses 30 frames per second. Meanwhile, movies on film are shot at a rate of 24 frames per second.  If you plan to create an animation, first it is useful to create a written script with a list of activities and required objects. Then you can build your sequences and experiment with effects.

CEL ANIMATION  Disney used a series of different graphics on each frame of movie film. A minute of animation may require 1,440 separate frames.  In order to create a movie, they used celluloid sheets for drawing each frame. Today it has been replaced by acetate or plastic.  Cel animation artwork begins with keyframes that are the first and last frame of an action.

CEL ANIMATION  The series of frames in between the keyframes are drawn in a process called tweening.  Tweening an action requires calculating the number of frames between keyframes and the path the action takes.  The penciled frames are assembled and filmed to check smoothness, continuity, and timing. If they are satisfactory, they are inked and painted on.

COMPUTER ANIMATION  Employs the same procedural concept as cel animation. It uses layer, keyframe, and tweening techniques.  The word inks means special methods for computing RGB pixel values so that the images can mix their colors to produce special transparencies and effects.  The smaller the object, the faster it can move.

KINEMATICS  Kinematics is the study of the movement and motion of structures that have joints such as a walking man.  In order to animate a walking step, you need to calculate the position, rotation, velocity, and acceleration of all parts involved.

MORPHING  Morphing is an effect in which one image transforms into another. It is possible not only using still images but also using moving images.  Some examples of products that offer morphing features are Avid’s Elastic Reality, Human Software’s Squizz, Image Ware’s Morph Wizard among others.

MORPHING  The previous figure illustrates how the images of 16 kindergarten children are dissolved one into the other in a continuous compelling motion video.  These morphed images were built at a rate of eight frames per second, and the number of keypoints was held to a minimum to shorten rendering time.  The point you set in the start image will move to the corresponding point in the end image.

ANIMATION FILE FORMATS  The file formats designed to contain animations include Director (.dir,.dcr), Studio Max(.max), Motion Video(.mpeg,.mpg), Compuserve(.gif), and Flash(.swf) among others.

MAKING ANIMATIONS THAT WORK  The most widely used tool for creating multimedia animations for Macintosh and Windows environments is Macromedia;s Director.  If you want to create a rolling ball, you can use Photoshop and Kai’s Power Tools’ Spheroid Designer to do that.  First, create a new blank image file that is 100X100 pixels, and fill it with a sphere.

A ROLLING BALL  The next step is to create a new layer in Photoshop, and place some text on this layer.  Spherize the text using Photoshop’s distortion filter, and save the results. To animate the sphere you need to make a number of rotated images of the sphere.

A ROLLING BALL  Rotate the image in 45- degree increments to create eight images.  You can make a bouncing ball to animate your Web site using GIF89a.  You can also make the ball with a 3-D graphics tool that will shade it as sphere.

A BOUNCING BALL  Then duplicate the ball by placing each copy of it in a vertical line at the ten locations 1,4,9,16,25,36,49,64,81,100. Our goal is to create a separate image file for each location of the ball.  You can also do this construction process with Director or Flash.  You can also add a back ground and other art elements. Then export each frame using the export function.

A BOUNCING BALL  With applications like GifBuilder for macintosh or Gif Construction Set for Windows, you can turn your collection of images into GIF89a animation.