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

EARLY GAMES AND HYPERTEXT

At the end of the twentieth century the increasing accessibility of computer technologies, both economically and in terms of the knowledge required to create content for them and use them, contributed to the emergence of new media forms, and animation became a defining mode within them. Outside of commercial applications, the emergent computer industries in both leisure and military sectors adopted visual display technologies that became increasingly capable of realistic graphics.

Early graphics were often crude blocks or lines, but they carried enough information to allow a viewer, willing to suspend disbelief, to accept the reality of what was depicted. An important element of these early graphics, and a major feature of their believability , was change and movement in short, animation. The on-screen location of the sprite images used to construct the display can be changed in computer programming code relatively easily. If this happens fast enough (above 12 frames a second in interactive media) the changes are read as continuous action. Updating the location of a graphic object creates an apparent continuity of movement; changing its image creates a continuity of behaviour .

Fig. 4.7: Narrative forms can be shown diagrammatically. Here the unisequential mode of the cinema-type animation is shown in the top diagram. Separate episodes follow a single consistent line that does not vary from showing to showing.
The middle diagram represents the narrative form or shape of interactive multimedia where links between sections are set and determined by the author. In...

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Overview

Cel-Based Animation

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EARLY GAMES AND HYPERTEXT

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