A Glossary of some select Animation terms.

By James Ball

In this week’s CIU Lecture our task for the week was given out and that task was create a glossary of 4 animation related terms of your choice. The terms I chose are Apollo, Key Framing, Rigging and Animatics. 

Image 1

Apollo: Or the Apollo Platform was developed by DreamWorks in collaboration with Intel over the past five years. Apollo contains an advanced suite of software tools that gave the artists at DreamWorks powerful, almost magical tools to create the recent “How to Train Your Dragon 2”.

The collections of components that make up The Apollo Platform are as follows:

PrEMO, is a tool that gives artists instant access to an unprecedented amount of parallel computer processing power, allowing them to edit characters in full resolution detail and in real time unlike that old system of get an idea put it into the spread sheet and wait around from 15 seconds to 20 minutes to see the render and change that was done to your work.

Torch, is an interactive lighting and asset management tool that let artists quickly bring focus to characters and scenes by adding, removing or re-positioning lights with the aid of a drawing tablet.

Key Frame: A key frame is the story telling drawing. They are drawing or drawings that show what is happening in a shot. If a sad man sees or hears something that makes him happy, we would just need 2 positions to tell the story.

 

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Rigging: The rigging process in an animation movie is the process of adding a skeleton to the model so that body parts of the animated character are attached to one another and allow the animator to manipulate them.

Animatic: An animatic is a movie with sound and is developed from the storyboard. The storyboard panel is exposed for the duration of the scene and sometimes, the characters are placed on a trajectory to indicate a motion. The camera moves are also animated. The animatic is use to determine the rhythm of a project and provides you with a good preview of what is happening before starting the production. Below is an Animatic recreation of the Angler Fish sequence from Finding Nemo recreated by user eMokid 64 on YouTube.

Until next time, as always . . .

This is James Ball signing out!

References

Image 1: Retrieved 26-02-2015 - http://billdesowitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Apollo-Logo-2C.jpg

Retrieved 26-02-2015 - (The Secret Weapon DreamWorks Used to Make ‘How to Train Your Dragon 2′) By Ken Kaplan, Intel iQ Managing Editor - June 30, 2014 - http://iq.intel.com/the-secret-weapon-dreamworks-used-to-make-how-to-train-your-dragon-2/

Retrieved 26-02-2015 - News Fact Sheet - Intel Boosts DreamWorks Animation Applications – PDF – By Unknown user - http://download.intel.com/newsroom/archive/Apollo_factsheet.pdf

Retrieved 26-02-2015 - (Making of How to Train Your Dragon 2 - Part 2, the tools) by itsartmag - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x21hsdx_making-of-how-to-train-your-dragon-2-part-2-the-tools_shortfilms#from=embediframe

Image 2: Drawn By James Ball AKA Me.

Retrieved 26-02-2015 – Glossary - https://www.toonboom.com/glossary

Retrieved 26-02-2015 – Find Nemo Animatic recreation - eMokid 64 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyFGwgo9_fQ