What is animation?
First, the question of all questions: What is animation? Well, per the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, it means the following:
1. To give life to; fill with life
2. To impart interest or zest to; enliven
3. To fill with spirit, courage, or resolution; encourage
4. To inspire to action; prompt
5. To impart motion or activity to
6. To make, design, or produce (a cartoon, for example) so as to create the illusion of motion
While I could get philosophical with the first four definitions, what we are really talking about here are the fifth and sixth definitions. Animation means motion. I like to broaden that a bit and say that animation is change over time, specifically some type of visual change. Motion is basically the change in something’s position over time. One minute it is over here; the next minute it is over there. Theoretically, it was also in the space between those two points, but I won’t get metaphysical about it (not just yet anyway). It moved, and some time elapsed between the time it was at the first point and the time it was at the next one.
But an object doesn’t necessarily need to change its location in order to be considered animated. It could just be changing its shape. Remember those photo-morphing programs that were all the rage in
the late 1990s? You start with one picture of a girl and one picture of a tiger, and the program creates an animation between them. Or the object could be changing its size or orientation, such as a plant
growing or a top spinning. Or it could even simply be changing its color. If you’ve been around long enough, you might remember some of the earliest animations on home PCs consisted of just cycling colors. You make a picture of a waterfall with a bunch of shapes in various shades of blue. You then cycle the colors of those shapes. If done right, the result gives the impression of falling water even though, technically, nothing is moving at all.
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What is animation?
First, the question of all questions: What is animation? Well, per the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, it means the following:
1. To give life to; fill with life
2. To impart interest or zest to; enliven
3. To fill with spirit, courage, or resolution; encourage
4. To inspire to action; prompt
5. To impart motion or activity to
6. To make, design, or produce (a cartoon, for example) so as to create the illusion of motion
While I could get philosophical with the first four definitions, what we are really talking about here are the fifth and sixth definitions. Animation means motion. I like to broaden that a bit and say that animation is change over time, specifically some type of visual change. Motion is basically the change in something’s position over time. One minute it is over here; the next minute it is over there. Theoretically, it was also in the space between those two points, but I won’t get metaphysical about it (not just yet anyway). It moved, and some time elapsed between the time it was at the first point and the time it was at the next one.
But an object doesn’t necessarily need to change its location in order to be considered animated. It could just be changing its shape. Remember those photo-morphing programs that were all the rage in
the late 1990s? You start with one picture of a girl and one picture of a tiger, and the program creates an animation between them. Or the object could be changing its size or orientation, such as a plant
growing or a top spinning. Or it could even simply be changing its color. If you’ve been around long enough, you might remember some of the earliest animations on home PCs consisted of just cycling colors. You make a picture of a waterfall with a bunch of shapes in various shades of blue. You then cycle the colors of those shapes. If done right, the result gives the impression of falling water even though, technically, nothing is moving at all.