Animation — Art, 11–13
How a sequence of still images can make your eyes see movement, change and time. Art, 11–13 years.
Movement made from still pictures
Animation creates the feeling of movement by showing still images one after another. Each image changes a little, and your brain links the changes into an action. The animator decides what moves, what stays still and how long each moment lasts, so time becomes part of the drawing.
Why use frames?
A drawing can show one position, but it cannot show a whole action happening through time. Artists needed a way to make movement visible without continuously drawing a moving line. By placing changing pictures in sequence, animation solves that problem and lets you control speed, pauses and transformations.
Animating a bouncing ball
Make a small flipbook with 12 pages. On page 1, draw the ball high; on pages 2–5, place it lower and lower, then squash it slightly at the floor; on pages 6–9, stretch it upward; finish high on page 12. Flip the pages: the changing gaps make the ball speed up and slow down instead of simply jumping.
Every frame need not change equally
A reasonable mistake is moving the object the same distance in every frame, because equal steps seem neat and fair. But equal spacing makes motion look mechanical, with no natural speeding up or slowing down. Keep frames close together when the object is slow, and farther apart when it is fast.
Animation outside the flipbook
Animation appears in films, games, adverts, weather maps and science diagrams. A game uses it to show a character running; a weather map uses moving colours or arrows to show change over time. You can use a short animation to explain a process that would be hard to understand in one still picture.
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