Animation
Hello.
Of all the graphic arts, animation is the most technically demanding.
Animation, especially as used on the Web, is a very broad term. Nowadays, anyone with a program that can interpolate frames thinks they are doing animation. Draw a box, go forward a second, move the box, go forward another second, spin the box. Play it back. Look, it’s animation!
Unfortunately, much of what passes for animation on the Web is only a slightly slicker version of that. How many times can you watch text phrases fly in from the right side of the screen while fading in and scaling down? An animation should have more going for it than movement. It needs a communicative purpose.
That’s what we mean when we talk about animation: using movement for a communicative purpose. “Acting with a pencil” was an old fashioned definition that’s still appealing. That’s the art of animation—not spinning, whooshing logos accompanied by a driving techno beat.
You do not have the Flash plugin installed, or your browser does not support Javascript (perhaps you could enable it?)
How would you explain the importance that data has to a company? We came up with this approach. Some concepts are not inherently visual but still need to be communicated to an audience. (By the way, the marshmallow shape is the symbol for databases used in flowcharts.)
We do a lot of animation in our work. Some of it’s in Flash, and some of it is designed for output in video or in streaming media for the Web. Some of it is created using traditional cel-based animation (we use an Oxberry animation table with a peg registration compound) and some of it originates completely within the computer.
For ComputerSculpture.com, we created navigation animations that help buyers find their way through a variety of products aimed at particular stages of a complex industrial process.
Our motion graphics have been used in corporate videos to quickly illuminate complex concepts. We’ve been hired by several technology companies to explain what they do to investors and customers. Often, an animation can make a difficult concept clear in seconds.
For BLADE Network Technogies, Inc., we created a Flash-based animation which explains the simplification of the data center that's possible using their innovative network switches. To view, click on the screenshot above.
We’ve developed some proprietary techniques which makes possible certain complex effects. For example, we developed a sprite and path animation system which allows sprites with no transparent pixels to be fully anti-aliased and even appear partially transparent against a particular background. No real time compositing is required when this animation is played. It sounds obscure, but it looks great and, if you’ve ever needed to do it, you’d appreciate how valuable it could be. It's particularly well suited to DHTML animation over static backgrounds. For a sample of a low frame rate (6 fps) sprite and path animation, see the embedded movie on the “Kids Online Network” page elsewhere on this site.
We are often called upon to create shots with no provided imagery. In a continuous shot, an air traffic controller’s job is compared with that of a computer network administrator. Motion graphics can communicate complex ideas more effectively than narration alone. Click on the graphic above to see a streaming Flash video of a collection of low budget motion graphic shots done for OffRoad Capital in 2000.
Our animation work is often tightly bound to our work as digital compositors. We’re no stranger to rotoscoping articulated mattes in an effort to seamlessly blend two shots together. In our work, we use After Effects, Lightwave, Flash, Motion, Motor, together with many other tools. But it’s all in service of the communicative function of animation.