Overview

Animation lets you use drawings or computer-generated images to create motion video. Using art as the source of your images frees you from real-world constraints; your talent and imagination are the only limits. Using a computer to generate images can remove a lot of the tedious work involved in traditional animation, and QuickTime can help you reduce the bandwidth needed to deliver animation over the Web.

QuickTime supports three kinds of animation: traditional cel-based animation, vector images, and sprite animation. As you've come to expect with QuickTime, you can mix and match, using vector graphics in a cel animation or as vector sprites, or superimposing sprites over a background of cel animation.

And of course, you can mix animated video tracks with other QuickTime tracks music, narration, text, live streams from Uzbekistan, you name it. You can even use motion video or live streams as animated sprites. Sprites are a particularly wonderful media type because you can "wire" them to perform interactive or automated actions.

Wired sprites (and wired Flash) are described further in Chapter 16, "Getting Interactive."

Cel-Based Animation

Cel-based animation happens when you create a series of still images and display them in rapid succession, using a flip-book, a film projector, videotape, or a computer screen. In the early days of animation, the images were painted on celluloid film and individual images were called cels. And, well, a lot has changed, but they're still called cels. Go figure.

There are basically three ways to create cel-based QuickTime...

Computer Animation for TV, Games, Multimedia and Web

By Marcia Kuperberg

ANIMATION: AN EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE

Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) are the dominant form of interaction with computers. In these simple change or move animation is a part of the ordinary experience of using a computer. The visual display of contemporary computers is constantly changing: it seems alive with movement and change, and in this it embodies a believable intelligence. Icons in toolboxes change to indicate the currently selected tool or option, menu lists drop down from toolbars. Context sensitive cursors replace the simple pointer with crosshairs, hourglasses, rotating cogs, a wristwatch with moving hands. The cursor on my word-processor page blinks purposefully whenever I pause in writing this text. Status cursors appear when a mouse button is pressed to indicate the current action or its possibilities. Images of sheets of paper fly from one folder to another.

Fig. 4.6: Sprite animation draws on separate images that depict each frame of the animation. Each of these sprite images is displayed in turn at the sprite's screen location.
An animated object may be made up of several sprites. In the example here the changing smoke trail could be separate to the image of the model train. In sprite-based multimedia these objects may have behaviours associated with them.

Our computers, left alone for five minutes, start to display scrolling text messages, Lissajous loops, flying toasters or company logos. We click on an icon representing a program, a folder, a file and drag it around the screen from one place to another. Our simplest and...

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Overview

Cel-Based Animation

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ANIMATION: AN EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE

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