How does animation work?

Question

I’m high right now, watching an animated show. Can somebody help me understand how someone even thinks of doing this? Help!

In: 2

Answer 1

I’ll try my best, first we need to understand that our eyes see a lot of information but our brain would be overwhelmed by it and therefore it naturally filters a ton of info, like for example you stop noticing your nose after a while, except this is for ocular information.

Imagine a graphics card, like a low quality, playing a high graphics game, high res ultra settings will cause the computer to work harder and slow down and drop in fps, but if you lower the graphics settings and resolution then the games fps would go up, that’s basically the brains fear.

So the brain filters things it does not want. So when you’re moving, fast moving objects are blurred so you can’t see them well. If you spin very fast, everything will be blurry. Similarily, we process information only so many times a millisecond, and when things have smooth transitions from one moment to another, the brain interprets it as moving slowly, you’ll notice that if you put a pencil in your hands and wave it, the pencil starts bending. It’s your brain putting a filter to lower the processing load of fast moving objects.

Now we noticed if you place images overlapping eachother, and brightly light a light behind the canvas, then the images would create a smooth transition. Picture something like this; | __ / |. If you draw each on a piece of paper and over lap them and quickly flip through them it will look like the line is 1 solid objects staying in place (do it with 30 pictures, 12 poses of the line rotated upon its center of mass by 30% ) your brain will filter it to perceive the line as 1 meta object which stays in place and turns a full circle.

Animation is just a collection of images of an object super imposed upon it self by layers, with slightly different poses to show a fluid or rigid movement based on the intention of the animator, and the effect that we observe by quickly flipping through a series of these images.