Animation

Animation Styles

Rotoscoping

Likely the most prominent example of rotoscoping recently is the movie A Scanner Darkly.

Rotoscoping involves filming a live action scene then animating over the scene by hand, since it's a real scene being depicted, it creates a much more realistic scene than animating by scratch.


Stop Motion

Stop motion involves the use of real-life models, which can be puppets, clay figures or any number of things, then by photographing, manipulating and rephotographing the models, which when put together in a sequence creates the illusion of movement.

I grew up watching things like Wallace and Gromit, and was unaware at a young age that stop motion was the key to how these things were moving.

Stop motion gives a sense of animation that can't be (completely) replicated by a computer, which is why a lot of directors choose to use it instead of CGI, movies like Coraline and Fantastic Mr Fox were made using stop motion, while watching you really appreciate the hours that have gone into the work that's on screen and I think in a lot of ways that's part of the magic of stop motion animation.

Frame by Frame

Traditionally, animation large scale was produced frame by frame, using cels, which were layered over hundreds of times and photographed to produce animation. This style has been nearly entirely replaced by computer animation of the cels, which allows for not only a faster production speed, but excessively more control over the animation and graphics of the scene.

Frame by frame is responsible for the majority of animation regarded as 'classics', but it was during the 90s that major studios began to incorporate computers into standard cel animation. Classic manual cel animation has largely been replaced by digital cel creation, which allows for CGI effects, but as with stop motion, people believe that manual animation gives a kind of magic to an animation that can't be replicated. The movie Redline was all hand drawn, utilising over 100,000 frames and seven years of work for the production team.

Anime especially is a major source for this kind of animation. Anime's style and variety rivals that of tradition real-life film, to the point where it's spread far beyond Japan and has become a major player in the western market (though not as much as a lot of people should like).

Computer-generated and computer based animation

The true king, the all-powerful, versatile, increasingly accessible, devilishly handsome and spectacularly fast growing industry of computer animation has become the go-to style for movies, anime, special effects, titles, it's allowed for a 3D style of movie making that could not have existed prior, it's allowed for scenes in movies that would be considered impossible not forty years ago to be produced, and what's better, the capabilities and realism of these animations is consistently growing and reaching the point where real life and CGI will be unable to be told apart.

3D animation is usually produced by creating a 3d model in a computer program, giving it a structure and ways of movement then animating it using keyframes to show it moving through an environment. For 2D animation, the same thing occurs but without a 3D model, instead using a 2d element which can be either manipulated or replaced frame by frame to show movement.


Computer graphics is controversial in some ways, being that it can replicate other forms of animation, the movie Flushed Away is a good example of this. It's interesting to look at how computer animation has evolved, for example, take the Dire Straits video Money for Nothing

This was one of the first videos to use human-style 3DCG models and was considered groundbreaking when released. Compare this to how animation has evolved to a point where they're being made to look unrealistic because audiences will be averse to something that looks overly real (Pixar's Up is one of my favourites in recent years)

Bear in mind this animation is nearly four years old, CGI has advanced even further since then.