Thursday, 25 February 2016

1.1 & 1.2 Essay: role of an animator

What is a role of an animator?
The role of an animator is to make a sequenced of images, that are called frames. Once these images are put together they create an illusion of life and movement and this is what you would call animation. Animation can be made on a digital software, drawn by hand, puppets or models.




What techniques are taken in this role?
When working on an animation there’s a lot of things you need to get used to and do. First there’s the script writing and when I say this I mean have some sort of story that you want the characters to be in and a plot with a beginning, middle and end. Once that is done then you can sketch up a bit of a character design so you have the basic idea of what he/she looks like. Then there’s the storyboard where you do quick drawings of what will happen in the story, plus you can add some arrows and a small description of what’s happening in every scene. Storyboarding is a key part of making an animation as it’s the part where it gives the animator a basic idea of how it going to play out. After that there are the rough thumbnails where the animator experiments with the different poses of the characters. Then after doing some rough passes (that is also known as animatic).
Then there the key frames that are drawn out and the in-betweens to keep the flow of the animation. After that there’s the final clean ups colouring and background to make it a full coloured animation and then they add some special effects and voice acting. If I had to pick on what is the most important part on having an animation is having a story and having the key frames that can tell the story.


When I did the animation for my FMP, adobe youth voices and other assignments I used adobe flash as it has most of the tools I needed to do animation and it had the smoothing pen for drawing smooth lines. I also liked using the onion skin tool for doing the in-between frames and with some simple parts of the animation I use motion tween like with moving the eyebrows up to create a shock look.

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