Sunday, May 20, 2012

Animated videos explained

Animated production is a great way to engage your audience. There are countless examples of great animation work. But in order to understand what makes a successful animated video, one must really capture the basics and explore some of the history behind animation. This article seeks to explain what animation is, and look at how modern animation has progressed.

Animation, like film, is really just creating the illusion of movement by putting a series of frames, or images, in order and flipping between them quickly. A flip book is perhaps the most basic way to create animation.

If the drawings displayed in the image were placed on twelve seperate pages in a flip book, it would create an illusion of a man running. Animated video is the same essential concept, but scaled up.

There is a distinct difference though, when creating an animated TV show such as Family guy, which typically lasts for around 20 minutes. There are 30,000 individual frames that either need to be drawn by hand or on a computer. Imagining the man hours and dedication needed to produce 500 episodes of the simpsons is almost incomprehensible, needless to say it requires a lot of dedication from a large team.

To put this into picture, an episode of the Simpsons takes around 8 months from start to finish. This covers writing, voice acting, animation, colouring, music and post production sound. Due to the length of the process it means that up to 10 episodes have to be in production at the same time. Obviously because Simpsons is renowned and the most famous TV animation series to date, the production time and cost is a lot larger then that or your typical corporate or internet animation.

Dragonfly Productions - is one such leading animated video company based in London. You can take a look at the most popular animated videos and understand the above discussed concepts of animation! 

1 comment:

  1. Creating an animation can be a tedious task. It deals with a great amount of time for it to be successful. You can also do outsourcing and find out the different impacts of different styles of videos. Check out: http://www.agentsofvalue.com/animated-video-production/ to know more.

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