More Animation Techniques

A couple of weeks ago, I did a blog post about different animation techniques. This week, I want to talk about some uses of animation that we do not necessarily recognize on first sight as well as talk about some other animation techniques.

The first animation technique I want to talk about is 'stick animation'. Stick figures are used often in storyboarding but as far as I remember, they have also been used in animation. The following is a very powerful video conveying a social message through the use of advanced stick animation.

Stick animations are often made with Adobe Flash. They are easier to draw and animate. There are also many online sites that allow you to animate stick figures frame by frame and export them in different formats. An example of this site that I tried using is:

http://www.stickpage.com/stickanimatorgameplay.shtml

I used this site to create a small 14 frame animation. I would have uploaded it here but I could not get the Adobe Flash to download in time.

Another animation technique that I found to be very interesting was paint-on-glass animation. In this style of animation, slow drying paint oils are manipulated on sheets of glass to create animation.

This is a popular animation technique however, it is considered very hard to master. The most well-known paint-on-glass animator is Russian animator Alexandr Petrov. He has used this style in numerous award winning short films.

This is a short film using paint-on-glass animation created by a college student.

I think these are two very awesome animation styles. Paint-on-glass is something that I would definitely want to give a shot.

My First Animation Software!

When I was younger we didn't have all this fancy technology of After Effects or Maya. Okay well maybe we did but I had no idea that it even existed. My brother was in high school at the time and he brought home this program called Pivot. It is a simple software to create animations. Based on stickfigures, the software gives you the possibility to create an animation by moving the joints and nodes of the figures.There is no need to redraw your figures in each frames. The figure creator gives you the possibility to create any types of figures you want. I fell in love with software and began creating little animations. Here is a video on the software and some examples on what people have done.

If you are looking for something to mess around with I definitely recommend downloading Pivot. It is really easy to use and you can do some pretty amazing things with it.