Sunday morning cartoons gave us our first peek into a fantasy land, where nothing seemed impossible. Nowadays, it is cartoons everywhere.
Sights and sounds today are newer, and adding to them a touch of the wow factor, are animation studios.
Animation always was a fascinating medium, considering we get to watch and do so much more than we do in real life.
All about it
So what is animation exactly? How do we see the cartoons in motion on the television screen or on at the theatres? Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement.
In simple parlance it is the act of giving motion to objects. A simple example of animation is the flip book animation, a sequence of images drawn on pages of a book, flipping it gives a feeling of motion. This occurs due to us having the inherent human trait known as ‘persistence of vision'.
This principle is used in both live action films and animation films. Here, every second of motion is captured using 24 frames.
There are two categories of animation work. 2D format involves drawing all frames manually or the digital 2D animation done with the help of software. While 3D format involves sophisticated software like Maya to model and animate objects. Remember "Gulliver's Travels"? That is 3D for you.
Some of the newer shows include ‘The Little Kalari Warriors' by Toonz. They are producing a 3D animated feature film ‘Twinergy' starring Amitabh Bachchan as the central character.
‘There is so much to explore in animation. It is a field where one cannot get bored, since it is a new thing every single day,' saysGreen Gold Animation's founder and MD Rajiv Chilaka.
Green Gold will continue to produce Chhota Bheem and Krishna Balram, besides a few TV movies. A theatrical animated film is also being planned, but is still in the nascent stage.
Also look out for ‘The Jungle Book', a 52-episode animated series and a 60 minute TV feature from DQ Entertainment.
Also, under production are 'The New Adventures of Peter Pan', 'Lassie & Friends' and 'Charlie Chaplin'. It is also co-producing "The Little Prince" and "Little Nick" with international broadcasters and producers.
A new animated television series in all regional languages and a Indian content based animated feature film is being made by Color Chips. They are even working on an entertainment-based education system using animation and also an E-learning project.
It's going to be so much fun watching newer cartoons in days ahead.
On production
Pre-Production: The generation of a story, its main characters, the stage, the script and writing of the dialogues.
A pictorial representation of the story is created on paper or even digitally. This is known as the story board.
The story board is drawn up in which, it specifically says how each character or object would behave and also given an action to do in a particular second.
Production: Here, the artists either manually draw all the frames or use software to depict a sequence.
Post-Production: Once, all the frames are ready, the motion is synchronised with dialogue and sound or visual effects are added.
