

2D animation has gone fully digital, and uses cutting edge technology to create the breathtaking detail and artistic fidelity we’ve come to expect from modern films. Of course, modern 2D animators don’t just use paper and pencils to create the animated features we see on TV and in the movies. 2D animation doesn’t employ any fancy digital models or virtual spaces, opting for a more straightforward approach: simply drawing the frames of each scene and letting our brain fill in the rest. Many modern animation studios (such as DreamWorks and Pixar) use 3D animation tools to create the characters and environments for their movies, sculpting them out of thousands of tiny digital polygons and animating them with computer code like puppets on strings. So why does animation work? Why don’t we just see a bunch of still pictures? The phenomenon that enables humans to perceive animation is called Persistence of Vision, a theory that supposes that an afterimage exists on the retina for one twenty-fifth of a second before escaping the present consciousness, allowing for frames to bleed into one another and create the perception of motion.ĢD animation is a type of animation created in a two dimensional context instead of a three dimensional context.

As children watching our favorite Saturday morning cartoons, it was clear that animation is more than just pictures played in a sequence, but how much more exactly?Īnimation is, at a very basic level, nothing more than a series of pictures, called frames, quickly played along a timeline or reel. Through recent advances in animation software and online classes like Michael Bernstein’s Learn to be an Animator class, right here on Udemy, it has become many times easier for a beginner to learn the fundamentals of 2D animation right from your own PC.īefore you launch headfirst into the world of animation, you should get to know exactly what 2D animation is. The animation industry relies on a skilled and highly specialized workforce to undertake some of the massive 2D animation projects we see today. Animations can teach, entertain and display data in a way that is intuitive to the viewer, and has revolutionized, or even inspired entire industries, such as Data Visualization. Since the dawn of modern animation software like Flash and Creatoon, animation has only become more prevalent in our society, evolving from basic flipbooks and cartoons to web applications and marketing tools. From the classic animated films of our childhood to the cutting edge CGI we see in blockbusters today, animation has been turning dreams into reality since the 1600s.
