2009

Animation Concepts
Animation is based on a principle of human vision. If you view a series of
related still images in quick succession, you perceive them as continuous
motion. Each individual image is referred to as a frame.
A frame is a single image in an animated film.
Traditional Animation Method
Historically, the main difficulty in creating animation has been the effort
required of the animator to produce a large number of frames. One minute
of animation might require between 720 and 1800 separate images, depending
on the quality of the animation. Creating images by hand is a big job. That’s
where the technique of keyframing comes in.
Most of the frames in an animation are routine, incremental changes from
the previous frame directed toward some goal. Traditional animation studios
realized they could increase the productivity of their master artists by having
them draw only the important frames, called keyframes. Assistants could then
figure out what belonged on the frames in between the keyframes. The
in-between frames were called tweens.
Animation Concepts | 3079