Advantages with Flash Animations

In today’s market, it’s becoming more and more important to catch people’s attention quickly before they click away. Flash allows you to convey additional meanings to your message, more than just print or static images allow. Movement accentuates emotion, or can eliminate the need for emotion, depending on the purpose, allowing your message to be delivered to the consumer with less room for interpretation on their part. A mini-commercial for your website. If people read it, see it in action and hear it, they are more likely to remember it in the future. People love entertainment. If you can entertain and educate people they will be more likely to desire your product and services. Consumers will be more likely to stay on your website to find out more if you can capture and intrigue them.

Flash allows you to be funny, excited, determined and many other emotions, at the same time of showcasing what your company provides. This helps differentiate your business from all the others. Consumers are inundated with information that sounds and looks the same as the last guys. Flash animation gives you a chance to showcase what you do best, but you need a professional to do it. There is a tendency for many inexperienced web designers to go flash crazy. Your audience can only look at one thing at a time.

Too much flash confuses the consumer and makes your website difficult to navigate. If you overload them, or have flash that takes too long to upload, the consumer will click away and you may lose them for good. A professional graphic artist can design animation that accentuates the message, at the same time entertaining and educating the audience.

Animations as one of the modern forms of entertainment

One contemporary example of suspension of disbelief is the audience’s acceptance that Superman hides his identity from the world by simply donning a pair of glasses, conservative clothing, and acting in a “mild-mannered” fashion. Not only is the disguise so thin as to be ridiculous, but also in the TV series, Adventures of Superman, this absurdity was carried to an extreme. Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen constantly suspected Clark Kent of being Superman, yet when obvious evidence was right in their faces — such as times when Clark was missing his glasses — they never saw the resemblance.

Strangely, while some audience members took issue with the flimsiness of Superman’s disguise, they didn’t take issue with the idea of the existence of a super being whose only weakness was kryptonite. One defending suspension of disbelief might say that flying, along with the rest of Superman’s abilities, is a foundational premise regarding the character, which the audience accepted as part of the deal at the beginning.

Another major example of suspended disbelief was The Flintstones cartoon series. The characters have televisions, cars, telephones, and various appliances that would be powered by electricity in modern society, The show was set in “prehistoric” times and there was no mention of electricity. The “prehistoric” characters were even shown to celebrate Christmas and travel into the future.

Gary Larson discussed the question with regard to his comic strip, The Far Side; he noted that readers wrote him to complain that a male mosquito referred to his “job” sucking blood when it is in fact the females that drain blood, but that the same readers accepted that the mosquitoes live in houses, wear clothes, and speak English.

Kinds of animations

I have heard that there are three different kinds of animation are there animated they are gif’s, plug-ins animation and java script based animation. Let us know them in detail. The number of ways to produce an animation for a web page grows daily. We’ll look at a few of these and begin with the simpler ways to make and place animations and progress to the more complex:

Animated gifs: Animated gifs are perhaps the simplest ways to create an animation. Simple freeware tools exist for their creation, and the process of fashioning a satisfactory animation is usually only a matter of choosing several regular gif files and placing them in the proper order in the animated gif program. Then, once the animated gif has been created, it is placed on the web page the same way that a regular gif file is.

JavaScript-based animations: JavaScript (a relatively simple programming script language that works with HTML in both Netscape and Internet Explorer and not to be confused with java) can be used to create effects similar to animated gifs. The advantage to JavaScript-based animations is that they can be more interactive. A common JavaScript-based animation on the web is one that changes a bit of text to a different color when the cursor is placed on it. This is a popular animation for menus. JavaScript-based animations require that certain bits of computer code be placed at specific points in the HTML source page.

Plug-in animations: Animations created by other software programs can be viewed on a web page if the web browser is using a plug-in. A plug-in is a bit of software that adds functionality to the browser. One of the most popular plug-ins, for example, is the Shockwave plug-in. If it is installed on a browser, then a user can view animations created by Macromedia’s Director program, a very powerful application to make interactive CD’s and other stand-alone applications. Another plug-in is the Real Player plug-in which lets the user view specially encoded video clips right on a web page.

These are different kinds of animations as on my knowledge.

History of Animation

There is lot to know about animation and its background and how it came into existence. First let us know what is animation? Animation is a series of still drawings that, when viewed in rapid succession, gives the impression of a moving picture. The word animation derives from the Latin words anima meaning life, and animare meaning to breathe life into. Now coming to the background of animation industry, the properties of animation can be seen in Asian puppet shows, Greek bas-relief, Egyptian funeral paintings, medieval stained glass, and modern comic strips. In 1640, a Jesuit monk named Althanasius Kircher invented a “magic lantern” that projected enlarged drawings on a wall. In 1736, a Dutch scientist named Pieter Van Musschenbroek created a series of drawings of windmill vanes that, when projected in rapid succession, gave the illusion of the windmill circling around and around. One of the first was the thaumatrope, developed in the 1820s by John Paris, also an English doctor. For example, a monkey on one side appeared to sit inside the cage on the opposite side. By 1845, Baron Franz von Uchatius invented the first movie projector. Images painted on glass were passed in front of the projected light. Forty-three years later, George Eastman introduced celluloid film, a strip of cellulose acetate coated with a light-sensitive emulsion that retained and projected images better than those painted on glass. The first animated cartoon Humorous Phases of Funny Faces by J. Stuart Blackton, of the New York Evening World, was shown in the United States in 1906. Two years later, French animator Emile Cohl followed suit with Phantasmagorie. Winsor McCay introduced Gertie the Dinosaur in 1911. Yellow Submarine, a 1968 animated film starring the Beatles, featured the process of pixilation, in which live people are photographed in stop-motion to give the illusion of humanly impossible movements. In the film The Lord of the Rings, directed in 1978 by Ralph Bakshi using rotoscoping, live action was filmed first. Then each frame was traced and colored to create a series of animation cels. By the late twentieth century, many in the industry were experimenting with computer technology to create animation. In 1995, John Lassiter directed Toy Story, the first feature film created entirely with computer animation. So this is the history of animation.