Flipping Placards in Digital Form: Computer Animation

Surely you as a kid have tried drawing a character in a set of placards, with each drawing moving in succeeding order. Flipping cards is the simplest example of animation. Today, computers have upgraded the flipping placards, producing very complex animations that have put movies on the blockbuster stage.

Computer Animation is the art of creating animation with the use of computers. Computers can produce two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) animations. Some artist have even produced a three-dimensional projection of a fourth and fifth dimensional object, an complex undertaking only a computer could have produced. Computers provide animations for TV, movies, ads, billboards, presentations, and websites. Movie makers refer to computer animation as Computer Graphics Imaging, or CGI.

All forms of animation, from flipping placards, motion pictures, and CGI, are an illusion of movement. The eyes perceive that they are seeing a moving object. In fact, it is a set of still images of the object repeating or gradually changing. A medium projects the set of still pictures in quick succession, making it appear as if they are moving. This process works the same way with TV and movies. Each frame of the film roll is a still image. Because of the speed, the eyes believe that they see an object move by itself.

For 3D animation, artists built a 3D model of the object on the computer. The 3D model is only a digital representation of the object, a very basic structure and almost unrecognizable image. In key-framing, however, artists can add the object\'s length, width, height, size, appearance, light, and depth of field to the 3D model. This would be one frame of the animation. The same process would repeat with the object gradually changing shape and positioning in each frame to simulate movement. Once the frames are complete, artists would render the data, connecting the frames and turning it into one whole animation. The same process is almost the same for 2D animations, but instead of a 3D model, 2D animators use illustrations.