Abstract

The animation always starts with an idea. The whole point is to tell a story, which includes doing the music and the dialogue initially before the animation is done. Visual development is the art of the movie. Dialogue is the screenplay, and what the animators match their product to. The movie layout is broken into story segments down to individual segments or shots.

A career in animation requires strong artistic skills and a solid familiarity with the latest in computer animation technologies. It also requires the ability to turn creative thoughts into compelling images, using them to effectively communicate an idea.



Animation started about 160 years ago, but has used digital techniques extensively only since 1990 with the film "Rescuers Down Under". Other notable animated movies were "Beauty and the Beast" and "Toy Story". Two 1998 movies were mentioned as examples of the cost differences between animation techniques. "Prince of Egypt" was a high quality film that cost about $110 million whereas "Rug Rats" cost $20 million. The two films brought in about the same amount of money during their initial release. The challenge is to provide techno-animation that will produce high quality productions at lower costs. There is an incentive to provide high quality productions, although they are expensive, since 80% of animated features make money. One way of reducing costs is to do 3-D digital modeling of objects and project 2-D images from them. These images are merged into the animation, reducing the amount of highly labor intensive hand animation. into story segments down to individual segments or shots.

Conclusion

One open challenge in computer animation is a photorealistic animation of humans. Currently, most computer-animated movies show animal characters fantasy characters machines or cartoon-like humans. The movie is often cited as the first computer-generated movie to attempt to show realistic-looking humans. However, due to the enormous complexity of the human body, human motion, and human biomechanics, realistic simulation of humans remains largely an open problem. It is one of the "holy grails" of computer animation. Eventually, the goal is to create software where the animator can generate a movie sequence showing a photorealistic human character, undergoing physically-plausible motion, together with clothes, photorealistic hair, a complicated natural background, and possibly interacting with other simulated human characters. Thus the animation technology is used in films and other purposes nowadays.