2D Development Process

·    First decide the total number of frames to be engaged for the particular animation sequence. This is what is called the span of the animation. The more the number of frames, the better – because, with gradual transition, the movements of the objects tend to be natural and smooth. On the flip side, this also means that we have to develop more number of frames!

·    Tools like Flash provide flexibility to the users, to increase or decrease the number of frames between the key frames. However, it is better to plan as much as possible in the beginning rather than alterations during development. A proper projection on the number of frames required for a given sequence comes only with experience!

·    Since we have already identified which are all the important key frames in which important transitions are going to occur, we need to divide the span across the frames. For example, if we are planning an animation with a span of 70 frames and if we have 7 key frames – then we may plan to distribute 10 frames between each key frame.

·    The movement of the object(s) between two key frames dictate the number of frames to be inserted between them. If the movements are long, more frames are to be allocated in-between two key frames.

·    Develop the key frames. For the very first key frame, you may have to draw the objects to be animated or import them from files. But for subsequent key frames, it is enough if you show the relative movement of the object with respect to the present.

·    First key frame development involves drawing the actual figures over the frame, using one or more drawing tools available with the environment. Sometimes, it may be felt that the drawing tools supported by the animation environment are simply not enough . . . in such cases, the frames have to be stored as individual bitmaps and manipulated using any of the advanced image editing software – till the desired results are obtained. This is a cumbersome process.

·    In professional animation studios, it is compulsory to leave the key frames to be developed by experienced animators and leave the frames in-between to budding professionals.

·    Once the key frames are done, the frames in-between can either be automatically generated or hand drawn using relevant tools. The nature of transformation or movement determines the choice.

·    The speed at which transformation between key frames occur, determines the number of frames. This speed can be easily controlled in tools like Flash.

·    Once the frames are completed, they can be played back using the playback feature.

·    When all the slots in between the animation have been completed, then they have to be linked and rendered together.

·    The final stage of animation development process is to plug-in the animation thus developed into the project slot.

·    There are two ways of plugging in the animation into the project slot – they are linking and embedding.

·    Linking is the process of maintaining the animation file outside the multimedia core program and making relevant calls to the animation media file or playback – whenever required. This is the most preferred means of plugging-in animations into the project. The only flip side is that the animations can be seen by the users outside the program and may even be copied and reused!! (In short, file is minimized and maximized as per need)

·    Embedding is – ‘literally’ is the process of bundling the animation as a part of core multimedia project file. Professional multimedia authoring programs have something called resources – and once you specify all the sounds, videos and animations as resources, they automatically manage them and make them available to the execute program during runtime.

Placed by: Chaudhary Amit V.