Advances in Animation!

Although the majority of this lecture was focused on the differences between western and eastern animation, and how stories are driven differently, I preferred the brief look at various ideas of animation that make the environment seem much more believable, which until this lecture, I assumed they were common sense, and kind of always used, but apparently not. The first animation we saw was the Pixar short, 'The Adventures of André and Wally B.'.



This was the first 3D animated film to incorporate various concepts of animation. One of these was the way the characters were created. Before this, all characters had been rigid and solid, yet these were able to be squashed and stretched which is one of the key principles of animation. The trees in the background were created using a particle effects system, where one tree was modelled, and the particle system would repeat the geometry a certain number of times randomly within a set area. It was also the first film to use motion blur, which made the character movements seem much more fluid and realistic.