I have yet to do anything that is even close to be considered productive or important to contributing to the continuity of my goals. But enough about how great I am at procrastinating at the most dire of times. I'm trying to get Adobe Flash Pro, my only hope right now is to get the student & education edition. Only. Hope. I hope it won't become tedious, I hate paperwork and jumping through hoops.
I cannot for the life of me think of anything particularly interesting for the post of interest, so I guess I'll just do a little lecture of traditional animation for it, cel-animation to be precise. Not that cel animation isn't interesting, I find it fascinating. Here we go.
The two people anyone should know about when dealing with cel animation is John Randolph Bray (who produced the second animated film in color, The Debut of Thomas Cat (1920)), and animator Earl Hurd (known by creating and producing the silent animated short, Bobby Bumps). Hurd and Bray are jointly responsible for developing the processes of cel animation, and were granted patents for their process in 1914. It is a part of traditional animation where each frame was drawn by hand, the drawing is then transferred from paper to a thin, clear sheet of plastic called a cel, a contraction of celluloid (the original flammable cellulose nitrate was later replaced with the more stable cellulose acetate). It was then inked and when it dried, on the opposite side; colored in with acrylic paint or something similar until technology advanced to the point where it could be inked and colored in digitally.
One cel typically contained one character, another sheet to another character and the background was the bottom image, then all the layers would go on top of each other, a glass sheet on the very top to flatten any irregularities and then photographed by a special animation camera (also called rostrum camera). Each cel has registration holes, small holes along the top or bottom edge of the cel, which allowed the cel to be placed on corresponding peg bars before the camera to make sure that each cel aligned properly. If the cels weren't aligned correctly, the animation, when played at full speed, would appear "jittery."
Sometimes, frames may need to be photographed more than once, in order to get camera effects. Pans are created by either moving the cels or backgrounds one step at a time over a succession of frames (the camera does not pan; it only zooms in and out). Once every scene in the production has been photographed, the final film is sent for development and processing, while the final music and sound effects are added to the soundtrack.
Cel animation, despite the long process of creating it, saved a lot of time and labor from previous animators. In very early cartoons made before the use of the cel, an example being Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the entire frame, including the background, characters, and items, were drawn on a single sheet of paper, then photographed. Everything had to be redrawn for each frame containing movements. This led to a "jittery" appearance; a scene of drawings, each frame slightly different from the one before it.
When not everything is redrawn, such as a head or body of a character that is talking, and only having their mouth moving (a style Hanna-Barbera is known for), is referred to as limited animation and was frequently used for small budget cartoons. Limited animation is also well recognized for animation loops, where the background scene repeats itself. A promotional music video from Cartoon Network's Groovies featuring the Soul Coughing song "Circles" poked fun at animation loops as they are often seen in The Flintstones, in which Fred and Barney (along with other Hanna-Barbera characters), supposedly walking in a house, and wonder why they keep passing the same furniture over and over again.
A personal favorite of mine since I was little.
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