Week 1

Hello Everybody,
I am Ross Johnson, a Junior RT Production student, and this is my understanding animation blog. l have very little animation experience so basically every I learn in this class will be knew to me. A couple of things that I found intriguing in the first week were the difference between animation and video, some of the old animation "toys", and how "stop motion" animation is achieved.
One of the first things we talked about was the difference between animation and video. While I knew it was different, I never really thought about why. We basically boiled it down to being that animation is taking something still and creating motion with it, and video basically the opposite. You take something moving, constantly being filmed, and basically slow it down and capture it. I had never thought of it this way.
We also viewed some examples of old toys that basically paved the way for animation. The zoetrope was the one that really interested me. It was basically a cylinder with images spread apart on the inside, and a few holes evenly spread on the outside. When you spun the wheel and looked through the holes it appeared that the images were moving. This effect was achieved due to persistence of vision.
Stop Motion animation was another thing we discussed. I had seen a few music videos that had utilized the technique but never really understood how it worked. I found out that this effect was achieved by taking 2 frames at a time. This allows you to get the stuttering stop motion appearance. Those are all my thoughts for this week.
-Ross