Unit 65 Assignment 1

Web animation for interactive media

Uses of web animation:

Banner ads- Banner ads are a form of advertising on websites. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser.

These are places the banner add can be placed

This is an example of a creative banner which lets you interact. this car in=s damaged but when you press the numbers of the phone number shown it gets fixed after each number

Animated interface elements- When part of your web page or design is not static, but can move or interact with the user, it is an animated interface element. For example having a button that changes colour when the user mouses over it, or a web banner that plays a movie.

linear and interactive animations- Linear animation involves animating for linear media like video and film, on web you cant interact with it as it will be showing the ad on it own. Interactive animation refers to animating for use on interactive media like video games and computers, on the web you can interact with the ad which makes it more fun.

Promotion- This type of ad promotes a product to try get more people buying it, to promote this product to sell more.

This is an example of promotion using food to make them want to buy it

History of animation:

flick book- a flip book is a set of multiple pages that have similar individual pictures on each page so that when you flip the pages the images it will look like a little animation with the pictures on the pages. The first flip book appeared in September, 1868, when it was patented by John Barnes Linnett under the name kineograph ("moving picture"). They were the first form of animation to employ a linear sequence of images rather than circular (as in the older phenakistoscope).

These are examples of a flip book.

Animated cartoon- This is a film for the cinema, television or computer screen, which is made using sequential drawings, as opposed to animations in general, which include films made using clay, puppet and other means. Early examples of attempts to capture the phenomenon of motion into a still drawing can be found in paleolithic cave paintings, where animals are often depicted with multiple legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion.

An 1893 phenakistoscope disc

Simulated mirror view of the disc

Graphic information file format (gif)- The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability. CompuServe introduced the GIF format in 1987 to provide a colour image format for their file downloading areas, replacing their earlier run-length encoding (RLE) format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used LZW data compression, which was more efficient than the run-length encoding that formats such as PCX and MacPaint used, and fairly large images could therefore be downloaded in a reasonably short time, even with very slow modems.

a slow motion gif

Animation:

optical illusion of motion (persistence of vision)- Persistence of vision refers to the optical illusion whereby multiple discrete images blend into a single image in the human mind and believed to be the explanation for motion perception in cinema and animated films. Like other illusions of visual perception, it is produced by certain characteristics of the visual system.

Look at this one for a minute then look around

Look at this on and when turns grey the colour will still be there or you can look away and there will be a rainbow

Claymation- Clay animation or claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay. Each object or character is sculpted from clay or something similarly pliable material as Plasticine, usually around a wire skeleton called an armature, and then arranged on the set, where it is photographed once before being slightly moved by hand to prepare it for the next shot, and so on until the animator has achieved the desired amount of film. Upon playback, the human mind of the viewer perceives the series of slightly changing, rapidly succeeding images as motion.

This is a short clip of an example of claymation, it is of the well known clay animation 'Wallace and Gromit'

Stop motion- Stop motion is a technique used in animation that physically manipulates an object that appears to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or "claymation". Not all stop motion requires figures or models; many stop motion films can involve using humans, household appliances and other things for comedic effect. Stop motion using objects is sometimes referred to as object animation.

2 stop motion examples

Computer generation- Computer animation, or CGI animation, is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer-generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to the moving images. Modern computer animation usually uses 3D computer graphics, although 2D computer graphics are still used for stylistic, low bandwidth, and faster real-time renderings. Sometimes, the target of the animation is the computer itself, but sometimes, it is another medium, such as film.

Disney and pixar are the 2 of the most well known companies to use computer graaphics

Digital animation:

Vector animation- Vector animation is a term used to refer to animation in which the art or motion is controlled by vectors rather than pixels. Vector animation often allows cleaner, smoother animation because images are displayed and resized using mathematical values instead of stored pixel values. One of the most commonly used vector animation programs is Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash). Before understanding the science behind vector animation, you must understand the difference between the two major graphic types: bitmap and vector graphics.














Raster (bitmap) animation- In computer animation, the term “raster graphics” refers to animation frames made of pixels rather than scalable components, such as vertices, edges, nodes, paths or vectors. Storing images as pixels rather than vectors or vertices enables much deeper and more realistic lighting and colour because the computer doesn't have to render each frame in real time as it does in a 3-D video game.

Example of Raster (bitmap) animation

File formats (.fla, .swf)- The format used for the animation is entirely based around how complex the animation is, where the animation is designed to be used; such as a webpage, and how large the file is for the animation. Different formats for animations include animated GIFs, Dynamic HTML such as Java, Shockwave and Flash.

These are examples of type of files used for animation

Web animation software:

Authoring- An authoring system is a program which has pre-programmed elements for the development of interactive multimedia software titles. Authoring systems can be described as software that lets its users to create multimedia applications for manipulating multimedia objects.

Flash- Adobe flash is a multimedia and software platform used for creating vector graphics, animation, browser games, rich Internet applications, desktop applications, mobile applications and mobile games. Flash displays text, vector and raster graphics to provide animations, video games and applications. It allows streaming of audio and video, and can capture mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera input.

Director- Adobe Director is the primary editor on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product space during the 1990s. Various graphic adventure games were developed with Director during the 1990s, including The Journeyman Project, Total Distortion, Mia's Language Adventure, Mia's Science Adventure, and the Didi & Ditto series. Hundreds of free online video games were developed using Lingo, and published on websites such as Miniclip and Shockwave.com.

Players:

Flash player: Flash player is freeware software for using content created on the Adobe Flash platform, including viewing multimedia, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming video and audio. Flash Player can run from a web browser as a browser plug-in or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player was created by Macromedia and has been developed and distributed by Adobe Systems since Adobe acquired Macromedia. Flash Player has a wide user base, and is a common format for games, animations, and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) embedded in web pages.