20 Different Types of Animation Techniques and Styles

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20 Different Types of Animation Techniques and Styles
  • Admin
  • June 1, 2021
  • Animation

The process of manipulating figures in order to make them appear as moving images is known as animation. Eventually, we are surrounded by animation all over us in this 21st century. Be it your favourite films, cartoons, commercial advertisements, or other video types, and the animation are all around us, providing an ample amount of entertainment.

Animations are considered very easy to understand, eye-catchy, and very interesting to watch. These are factors why animation is used as a marketing tool technique to promote specific things. As a result, the need for animation is increasing day by day. So is the need for graphic designers and animators.

The  career in animation is a very booming one, and the youth is aiming towards selecting this field as their career options. Due to this evolving requirement of animators and graphic designers, the salary structure is also increasing with due advancement of time. It is the uniqueness of this field that is attracting so many people to get associated with it. We will further discuss twenty different animation techniques and styles that graphic designers and animators widely use to create a blockbuster project.

Different Types of Animation Techniques for Professionals 

The graphic designers and animators use various animation techniques and styles, which help them create a wholesome project of the motion picture. We will be looking forward to 20 such animation techniques and styles and will discuss them very concisely.

  • Conventional Animation: This type of animation involves drawing by hand for every frame associated with it. After the drawing part, they are fed to plastic cells. The animation sequence is created on a painted background image. The certain movies or motion pictures associated with this type of animation technique or style are Peter Pan, Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, The Lion King, Tarzan, etc.
  • Digital 2D Animation: This type of animation is used to create animation in the two-dimensional space via the established digital technologies. The basic fundamental of this technique is that there is no need of creating digital models, but all you need is to draw the frames. Certain software, namely Adobe Flash, Body Price, and many more, help graphic designers create an excellent animated project.
  • Digital 3D Animation: As the name suggests, this animation technique creates animation in three-dimensional space. This animation style also helps to turn fictional characters into real ones. They are straightforward to create and so are considered as the primary technique for movie making. This type of animation is limited to making short films, but they are also used in full-length featured films.
  • Flat Graphics Animation: This animation technique or style is one of the most widely used motion graphics and animation styles. This type of animation is mainly used in presentations and slide animation videos.
  • Motion Graphics Animation: This type of animation results from the pieces of animation or digital footage used to create the illusion of motion or rotation. These things, along with the combination with the audio, are used in multimedia projects. This technique of animation is widely used in making animated logos, film titles, and commercials.
  • Mechanical Animation: Machines can be animated instead of robotics in this mechanism of mechanical animation. This helps the animator make us understand the working of the machines without even creating the original machine. Thus, to explain the functionality of the machines, this type of animation is the best way.
  • Art Animation: This type of animation is the platform where the collaboration of the drawing and the art images occur to give the video a new end. This type of animation technique plays an important role in the marketing and advertising industry. In order to replace the human models for the advertisement of a company with a graphic one, this type of animation is used.
graphic illustration
  • Sand Animation: This is a unique animation process that is getting recognition all across the world. This is a presentation of images by using sand only. A glass table is being placed where a sand artist uses the table as a canvas to create animation using the sand placed on the table by moving sand in various directions.
  • Typography: This type of animation deals with any moving text. The term moving is used as the text can move like slow motion, expanding motion, shrinking motion, or morphing motion into something else. Thus, the animated text becomes more attractive in comparison to the static text. Maxi and kinetic type are the most widely used typography to give a futuristic touch to the videos.
  • Fluid and Liquid Effect: This type of animation technique is used via computer graphics techniques to generate animations related to real-life fluids such as water, smoke, and others. This type of animations focuses on analyzing the visual behaviour of the fluid. These are widely used for commercial advertising purposes.
  • Zoetrope: This is a pre-film animation device used to generate the illusion of motion by displaying drawings and photographs in a sequence that ultimately shows us the progressive phases of the motion.
  • Puppetry Animation: Digital Puppetry is also known as the manipulation of digitally animated 2D or 3D figures and objects in a virtually rendered platform or environment. This animation technique is widely used in filmmaking, television production, and also in many theme parks. Some of the films where this type of animation is used are King Kong, Puppeton, The Hand, The Pied Piper, and many more.
  • Key-frame Animation: A key-frame in animation is a drawing or shot that deals with any clean animation’s starting and ending points. These are eventually called frames because the position of the drawings in time is measured in frames on a strip of film or on a digital timeline for video editing.
  • Text and Background Animation: When you talk about text and background animation, the best example that can be used to describe this animation is the floating of a text in a changing background. This animation type is used in motion graphics animation and also in developing certain web pages.
  • Chuckimation: This is one of the famous animation types or techniques created by “Action League Now”. In order to summarize, this type of animation is a combination of stop motion and live shots where the characters are placed in a particular frame.
  • Stop Motion Animation: This type of animation is actually an animated filmmaking technique where the objects are manipulated physically in minute increments between the photographed frames. Thus, we can term this as frame-to-frame animation where physical objects which are static move around in a fluid movement. There are many examples regarding this stop motion animation: The Boxtrolls, Early Man, The Tale of the Fox, and many more.
  • Clay Animation: Also known as  Claymation, this type of animation technique is associated with clods of clay for moulding characters that the animators use to create their own story out of it. This type of stop motion animation is also known as plasticine animation as plasticine clay is being used generally to create the characters.
  • Cut out Animation: This type of animation is considered one of the oldest forms of stop motion animations. This type of animation involves flat characters, props, and backgrounds cut from materials like paper, cards, photographs, and stiff fabrics. The animators or graphic designers sort out the characters into smaller divisions and then piece together the individual cut-out shapes and move them into smaller segments, thus taking a picture.
  • Experimental Animation: Combining two or more illogical drawings or art to create a proper animated scene is known as experimental animation. This type of animation is subjective and nonlinear, dealing with the philosophic and spiritual concerns as per the opinion of the graphic or animation artists. Some of the movie examples of experimental animation are Alice, Perfect Blue, Fantastic Planet, Belladonna of Sadness, The Red Turtle, and many more.
  • Flipbook Animation: This is a type of animation that prevailed much before the incoming of computer animations. A flipbook is nothing but a booklet with a series of images that appears to be animated while the pages are viewed or flicked in very quick succession. Thus, the flipbook is one of the oldest and captivating animation techniques or styles.

Maya Academy of Advanced Cinematics or MAAC Girish Park, provides all the professional  animation courses to guide you through your career. If you are looking forward to joining the number one institution of the town, join us without any second thoughts. The best is assured in here.

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