Introduction to Animation

Project the first two slides of the Course Presentation in the student chapter Introduction to Animation and introduce them to the word “animation.”

Project the next slide and ask if they are familiar with these movies:

• The Lion King
• The Lego Movie
• The “Wallace and Gromit” series (this image is from the short A Close Shave)
• Toy Story

Explain that these are all examples of animation:

• The Lion King was made using hand-painted “cel” animation
• Toy Story was made with computer animation (which is now the most common kind of animation)
• The “Wallace and Gromit” movies were made with stop-motion animation
• The Lego Movie was made with a mixture of stop-motion and computer animation.

Project the next slide and explain the basic “rules” of animation:

• Start by taking a photo (or making an image by drawing or painting it, or making it on a computer)
• Move what’s in the image just a little bit
• The two arrows mean to repeat that process:
  • Take another photo after you’ve moved it
  • Move it a bit more
• And keep doing that until you have moved what’s in the image through the whole movement you want to show.

When you’re done, you can press “Play” to see it move!

Now show the video Flipbook Example in fullscreen or in the student chapter.

Explain that this is an example of a kind of animation called pixilation – the person in the video moved just slightly between each photo.

Tell students that this is where the word “movies” comes from – all videos, not just animation, use the trick of showing many still images to make our brains think they see movement.