2D Animation

All the animations I do are 2D animations because monitors can only display images in 2 dimensions. This section is dedicated to the classic, flip-book type animation. Normally, animations are made by creating a series of still images and "flipping" through them quickly to create the illusion of motion. Depending on the compression format used, many movie files are exactly that. If you wish to go the old-fashioned route, you can draw a series of images, convert them to PICT format and use an application like ConvertToMovie or Adobe Premiere to compile them into a movie. You don't have to do it this way, though. There are several applications that allow you to create or import objects and specify the motion of the objects on the viewing space across a timeline. All the in-between frames are created for you. An example of such an application is MotionWorks' Promotion.

Here is an example of a very simple animation created with Promotion:

Example Promotion Movie (QuickTime 212K)

I have not worked with Promotion to a great extent. We have had very little demand for this type of animation. However, I believe that this type of animation could be very useful. In lectures, figures are used to better explain things. But often the things being explained are processes and static images don't fully capture their essence. Whereas simple animations can be extremely informative. An example would be the binding of substrate to the binding site of an enzyme and the subsequent formation of a chemical bond.

Leanne Olds created the following animation using still images photographed in the Carroll lab and Adobe Premiere. Since the images were not photographed with creating an animation in mind, they did not fall regularly on a timeline like a normal animation would. This problem was solved by using Premiere to adjust the duration of each frame to place each image in the proper place on the timeline.

Butterfly Movie (QuickTime 194K)

Back to Multimedia main page