Types of animation

Flash is able to combine almost every type of animation. It mainly uses vectors which connect dots with lines which then get curved to form a shape. They are more efficient than rasters/bitmaps because they store less information, but they tax the processor a lot when done improperly. Flash also supports sound, bitmaps, and movies.

Gif animation is what you usually see on internet message boards and stuff like that. They are thumbnail sized bitmaps which have several keyframes to give the viewer a sense of motion.

3D animation has for the most part replaced traditional Cel animation. You see it in every Pixar movie and high budget video game. They all start off as three-dimensional vectors which are called meshes. The meshes then gets texture (which is a usually a combination of bitmap images) applied to them. Videogame graphics are rendered in real-time which requires a system with powerful hardware (that’s why ps3s and xbox360s are so expensive). Movies are already pre-rendered so they don’t require much hardware to run. Rendering a complex scene can take a very long time if you computer isn’t fast enough. Each frame in a Pixar movie takes about 6 hours to render, and there are 24 frames per second (in other words, it takes a single computer 6 days to render one second of animation).

Stopmotion animation involves real objects which get manipulated by real people in front of real cameras. I say “real” so much because it’s one of the few types of animation that doesn’t start off digital. Stopmotion can involve people, clay people, or simple objects (like toys). It’s called stopmotion because the animator literally has to stop the camera and move the objects each keyframe to give the viewer a sense of motion. Here's a good example of stopmotion:
The Trick Master

Cel animation was used a lot by Disney back when they didn’t care about branding Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers. It has many similarities to stopmotion such that it involves a camera and real objects, but this form of animation is two dimensional and involves layers. The ‘Principles of Animation’; particularly ‘squash-and stretch’, ‘exaggeration’, and appeal; were widely used with this form of animation (which made all the Disney characters appear void of any proper bone structure).

Direct animation, also known as Drawn on Film animation, is basically animation that is drawn on film (duh).

Broadcast Design is what you get when you combine animation and video. (I think) So special effects combined with video can be considered Broadcast Design. District 9’s special effects were made with 3D animation, King Kong’s special effects were made with stopmotion animation. So any type of animation can apply.

Algorithmic animation is not made with keyframes, but instead with code. Flash uses code to make custom mouse cursors. RenderMan (pixar’s engine) uses code to simulate water physics and cloth motion. Algorithmic animation is used in places were frame-based animation would be impossible.

Flipbook animations can be found in some math and science text books. Each page acts as a single keyframe, and the viewer flips through the keyframes to watch the scene. They are usually drawn by bored students who have nothing better to do during class.

-AS