Thematic Project : Flipbook of Animation

Animation tells story, this is our flipbook.

Thematic Project : Animation - Progress

Sketches: Timing, Arc, Rendering, Spacing & Movement.

Animation tells story

What is creative multimedia? Let us separate both of the words and take a look. First and foremost, the word of ‘creative’ is a mental process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts and multimedia is a combination of several media types in a single digital object or collection. There are many types of creative multimedia. Animation is one of the common type of Creative Multimedia. Basically, animation is the combination of visual and sound effects. When images of different position or movement are arranged together, we can tell story by using those images. But it is bored to look at lots of images and sometime we cannot understand the message that the author wants to deliver to us. With the alignment and movement of a certain group of images, we are able to create illusion of movement. When the illusion is added with sound effect and background music, it becomes more realistic and dramatic. By using this way, it is easier for public to understand the story.

Visual can be formed through motion capture like drawing or photography. With the modern technology, people can even capture what we see around us into video directly. Although using video camera to capture images around us is the easiest and fastest way to record scenes, video camera cannot record things which do not appear in front of us, what I mean is our mind, our imagination. Humans are born with imagination and creativity, it is a treasure from the God, so why don’t we make full use of our mind? With various type of storytelling through visual and background music like piano as well as violin, people will be attracted. In order to make our storytelling more interesting, appropriate sound effects like fire burning sound, water flowing sound, wind blowing sound and animals sound can touched audience heart effectively.

Nowadays, animation has been developed well. Apart from powerful human beings like Spiderman, Fantastic 4 and the incredible Hulk, machines that owns super power are always playing important roles in animation, examples like i-robot and Transformer. Not even those characters are always involved in animation, monsters and beast can be the main character too. The classic examples are the Beauty and the Beast, Spirited Away and Avatar. All these characters are created by human imagination.

When we talk about animation, it consist of lots of knowledge. A successful animation is formed by proper plot, characters and great script. Script is the bones of animation. Just like a building, without strong bones inside, it may collapse in no time. For animation, a good story already brings fifty percent of the succeed. Then, with the animation theories and techniques applied in every parts, animation becomes complete. We are familiar with the animation that heroes are the main character in the story. Usually the Heroes’ journey are similar. The story lines are made of twelve Hero’s journey Principle. All these knowledge comes from studies and research.

Different position have the different work because the area and apartment in animation is large. Script writers write legend, comedy, fiction, folklore and historical story. Director has to make sure the progress is smooth. He has to control everything like timing and places. The characteristics of the characters in animation have to be expressed well in the story. Sometimes, characters have to be simplified and stylized in order to show their expression and emotions. Animations that produced by Walt Disney like Lion King, Tarzan and Mickey Mouse show the creativity and imagination of us.

Different techniques like rotoscoping, photorealism and cinematography are applied by animators to deliver different messages. Animation is used as a way to tell the public to love life, protect wild animal, anti pollution and anti war. In traditional ways, animators produce animation through tweening, morphing, anion skinning, interpolated, frame by frame and flipbook. With development of new technologies, there are softwares like After effect , Maya and Flash. Animators use these softwares to manage and edit the movement, timing, lightning, angle, and modeling.

By making full use of animation as a kind of creative multimedia, animations like clay animation, object animation, model animation, cutout animation, graphic animation, go motion, pixilation, silhouette and puppet animation are created.

Last but not least, animation plays an important role of media that greatly affect the world. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect in this world. People often use the reliable media to convey messages for their own benefits. Animation is also one of the media people may be using. People believe that animation can be greatly potential for human life in the future. It is a leap towards the future from pencil drawing frame by frame on paper to tell story. In nutshell, animation is a useful media that delivered the messages to people among the society and it give a great impact to the society and the people.

Prepared by,

Lau Chong Siong

Chew Kok Yong

Tan Pei Lyn

Lee Xin Kuo

Mindmapping - Creative Multimedia & Animation

Mindmap 1 : Creative Multimedia

Mindmap 2 : Animation