General Concepts
Animation is showing images at a very rapid rate to show the illusion of video. Basiclly, animation is "show cool pictures fast."
Animation is made by animators who have learned the illusion of motion. They had to learn how to draw indvidual frames. Frames are the indivual
images shown at a specific rate, called FPS. FPS stands for Frames Per Second. Often times, animators play their animations at 24FPS.
That means that they have to make 24 drawing for only one second of animation!
This is also all a little diffrent from computer generated images (CGI.)
CGI animators often don't create each frame. They create indivual poses and then the computer fills in the rest of the frames.
History
The first ever animation that was puplished was made in 1908 by a french artist. Animation has been around for almost
as long as film itself. And even before that, people made flipbooks. The first flipbook ever made was in 1860.
Animation only started to go off in the 1950's to 1960's. That was also the time that rubberhose cartoons where getting
phased out and proffesional animators knew how create the "illusion of life." Also during the 1960's, Disney became popular
for it's stunning movies and high quality animation.
Disney's animators Frank Tomas and Olliver Johnson where some of the best animators working at Disney.
They where the ones to create the "The illusion of Life." They published the book in 1981. People today still
that book for refence when learning animation. Ollie and Frank where also one of the "twelve old men." This team
was assebled by Mr. Disney himself to make the best animated pictures ever.
How animators made these animations at the time was by using a flipbook-like method. They would draw a frame on a sheet of
paper and then stack another one on top. After that they would draw another frame. Then they would add the sheets of
paper between the two frames. So using their heavly diciplened and trained eye, they fliped btween the two frames and
drew in between them. So after repeding this millions of times by a ton of animators, they would color them and then have a movie!
About Me
I have been animating for about seven and a half years. I started with doing some stop motion with toys that I had. After that, I switched to digital software. Recently I started to really crack down and learn as mutch as I can about animation. Through that, I learned that you had to know a lot of things about drawing. A lot of proffesional animators come from a art background, so from that, I reccomend learning art before you try animation.