Career Opportunities – About Computer Animation

For anyone who is too young to remember early computers, you most likely have no idea exactly how much more advanced this technology has become. For the ones that do remember the early computer animation graphics, you know exactly how far computer animations have come.

Animation actually refers to any kind of animated graphic, not just the 3D animations. Animation has historically been produced in two ways. The first is by artists creating a succession of cartoon animations frames, which are then combined into a film. A second method is using physical models, such as in King Kong. The model is positioned, the image is recorded, then the model is moved, the next image is recorded, and the process continues. At times a simple rendering machine is used to produce successive frames to create animations, where the image is slightly changed in each one. It is hard to believe that it all started as basic cartoon figures in a book and flipping the pages over.

Most of the early computer systems did not have the power necessary to preview and interactively control computer animation, which depends heavily on motion control. Since many of the early animators were scientists rather than artists, more often than not a script, or program, was written to help control and create animations.

In the early days of animations cartoons, expert animators such as Walt Disney, would design (choreograph) an animation by drawing certain intermediate frames called keyframes. Then the other, less experienced animators would draw the in-between frames. The sequence of steps to produce a full design computer animation would include developing a story (or script), and laying it out on what is known as a storyboard. This is a sequence of drawings showing the form, structure and story of the animation. Once a detailed layout of the action scenes is produced, it is correlated with a soundtrack. They would then transfer the frames to sheets of acetate film, called “cels”. The cels were then assembled into a sequence and filmed.

You may not have realized it, but if you have used PowerPoint, or a similar application to put together a project, then you have likely used 2D animations. However, since humans are fairly inept at drawing three-dimensional objects and since it would be impossible to create the tens of thousands of drawings by hand, the superiority of computer animation is clearly evident when creating 3D animations.