Chapter 8. Frame-by-Frame Animations

8. Frame-by-Frame Animations

Frame-by-frame animation was the traditional form of animation used before the days of computers. Live-action movies and video are really a form of frame-by-frame animation. The camera captures motion by snapping a picture every so often. Animation simulates motion by showing drawings of elements at various stages of a movement.

Traditional animators, such as those who worked for the early Walt Disney or Warner Bros. studios from the 1930s through the 1960s, had to create hundreds of images, each one slightly different from the next, to achieve every movement of each character or element in the cartoon. To turn those drawings into animations, they captured the images on film, putting a different image in each frame of the movie.

Traditional animators painted individual characters (or parts of characters) and graphics on transparent sheets called cels. They stacked the cels to create the entire image for the frame. The cel technique allowed animators to save time by reusing parts of an image that stayed the same in more than one frame.

In Macromedia Flash 8, you, too, can make frame-by-frame animations by placing different content in different frames. Flash calls the frames that hold new content keyframes.