Motion and frames
Animation: to make, design, or produce (a cartoon, for example) so as to create the illusion of motion. Interesting that the definition writers should choose to throw that word illusion in there, yet entirely accurate. It happens that with just about every form of motion media, only an illusion of motion exists. Here’s where we get to the concept of frames.
Virtually all visual animation media uses frames—a series of still images shown very rapidly to simulate motion or change. Anything you see on a computer, television, or movie screen is based on frames.
This goes back to the earliest days of cartoon animation, where the individual pictures were drawn on sheets of cellophane and became known as cels, and the earliest motion pictures, where a similar
technique was used with multiple photographs.
The concept is simple: You show a bunch of images that vary slightly from one to another, and the mind blurs them together as a single, moving image. But why do we insist on calling it an illusion of
motion? If you see a man walk across the room on a movie screen, is that not motion? Of course it’s only an image of a man, not the real thing, but that’s not why we don’t consider it to be real motion.
Remember when I talked about an object being over here and then later over there, and I said it moved through the intervening space? Well, that is real motion. Objects move through space smoothly, not in several jumps. (You quantum physicists in the audience, just be quiet.) But any and all frame-based motion does just that. It doesn’t move from spot to spot; it disappears and reappears in another location in the next frame. The faster it’s moving, the bigger jumps it takes.
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Motion and frames
Animation: to make, design, or produce (a cartoon, for example) so as to create the illusion of motion. Interesting that the definition writers should choose to throw that word illusion in there, yet entirely accurate. It happens that with just about every form of motion media, only an illusion of motion exists. Here’s where we get to the concept of frames.
Virtually all visual animation media uses frames—a series of still images shown very rapidly to simulate motion or change. Anything you see on a computer, television, or movie screen is based on frames.
This goes back to the earliest days of cartoon animation, where the individual pictures were drawn on sheets of cellophane and became known as cels, and the earliest motion pictures, where a similar
technique was used with multiple photographs.
The concept is simple: You show a bunch of images that vary slightly from one to another, and the mind blurs them together as a single, moving image. But why do we insist on calling it an illusion of
motion? If you see a man walk across the room on a movie screen, is that not motion? Of course it’s only an image of a man, not the real thing, but that’s not why we don’t consider it to be real motion.
Remember when I talked about an object being over here and then later over there, and I said it moved through the intervening space? Well, that is real motion. Objects move through space smoothly, not in several jumps. (You quantum physicists in the audience, just be quiet.) But any and all frame-based motion does just that. It doesn’t move from spot to spot; it disappears and reappears in another location in the next frame. The faster it’s moving, the bigger jumps it takes.