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An animator is an
artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the ...
who creates multiple images, known as frames, which give an illusion of movement called
animation Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...
when displayed in rapid sequence. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, and video games. Animation is closely related to filmmaking and like filmmaking is extremely labor-intensive, which means that most significant works require the collaboration of several animators. The methods of creating the images or frames for an animation piece depend on the animators' artistic styles and their field. Other artists who contribute to
animated cartoon Animation is a method by which image, still figures are manipulated to appear as Motion picture, moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent cel, celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited ...
s, but who are not animators, include layout artists (who design the backgrounds, lighting, and camera angles),
storyboard A storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. The storyboarding process, in t ...
artists (who draw panels of the action from the script), and
background artist A background artist or sometimes called a background stylist or background painter is one who is involved in the process of animation who establishes the color, style, and mood of a scene drawn by an animation layout artist. The methods used can e ...
s (who paint the "scenery"). Animated films share some film crew positions with regular live action films, such as director, producer, sound engineer, and editor, but differ radically in that for most of the history of animation, they did not need most of the crew positions seen on a physical set. In hand-drawn Japanese animation productions, such as in Hayao Miyazaki's films, the key animator handles both layout and key animation. Some animators in Japan such as Mitsuo Iso take full responsibility for their scenes, making them become more than just the key animator.


Specialized fields

Animators often specialize. One important distinction is between
character animator Adobe Character Animator is an Emmy Award-winning desktop application software product that combines real-time live motion-capture with a multi-track recording system to control layered 2D puppets based on an illustration drawn in Photoshop or Il ...
s (artists who specialize in character movement, dialogue,
acting Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor or actress who adopts a character—in theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode. Acting involves a broad ra ...
, etc.) and special effects animators (who animate anything that is ''not'' a character; most commonly
vehicle A vehicle (from la, vehiculum) is a machine that transports people or cargo. Vehicles include wagons, bicycles, motor vehicles (motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, mobility scooters for disabled people), railed vehicles (trains, trams), wat ...
s, machinery, and natural phenomena such as rain, snow, and water).
Stop-motion Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames i ...
animators don't draw their images, instead they move models or cut-outs frame-by-frame, famous animators of this genre being Ray Harryhausen and
Nick Park Nicholas Wulstan Park (born 6 December 1958) is a British animator who created ''Wallace and Gromit'', ''Creature Comforts'', ''Chicken Run'', ''Shaun the Sheep'', and '' Early Man''. Park has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of ...
.


Inbetweeners and cleanup artists

In large-scale productions by major studios, each animator usually has one or more assistants, " inbetweeners" and "
clean-up Cleanup, clean up or clean-up may refer to: * Cleanup (animation), a stage of animation workflow * Clean-up (environment), environmental action to remove litter from a place * Cleanup hitter, a baseball position * Clean-up Records, a record lab ...
artists", who make drawings between the "key poses" drawn by the animator, and also re-draw any sketches that are too roughly made to be used as such. Usually, a young artist seeking to break into animation is hired for the first time in one of these categories, and can later advance to the rank of full animator (usually after working on several productions).


Methods

Historically, the creation of animation was a long and arduous process. Each frame of a given scene was hand-drawn, then transposed onto celluloid, where it would be traced and painted. These finished "cels" were then placed together in sequence over painted backgrounds and filmed, one frame at a time. Animation methods have become far more varied in recent years. Today's cartoons could be created using any number of methods, mostly using computers to make the animation process cheaper and faster. These more efficient animation procedures have made the animator's job less tedious and more creative. Audiences generally find animation to be much more interesting with sound. Voice actors and musicians, among other talent, may contribute vocal or music tracks. Some early animated films asked the vocal and music talent to synchronize their recordings to already-extant animation (and this is still the case when films are dubbed for international audiences). For the majority of animated films today, the soundtrack is recorded first in the language of the film's primary target market and the animators are required to synchronize their work to the soundtrack.


Evolution of animator's roles

As a result of the ongoing transition from traditional 2D to 3D
computer animation Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes (still images) and dynamic images (moving images), while computer animation refer ...
, the animator's traditional task of redrawing and repainting the same character 24 times a second (for each second of finished animation) has now been superseded by the modern task of developing dozens (or hundreds) of movements of different parts of a character in a virtual scene. Because of the transition to computer animation, many additional support positions have become essential, with the result that the animator has become but one component of a very long and highly specialized production pipeline. Nowadays, visual development artists will design a character as a 2D drawing or painting, then hand it off to modelers who build the character as a collection of digital polygons.
Texture artist A texture artist is an individual who develops textures for digital media, usually for video games, movies, web sites and television shows. These textures can be in the form of 2D or (rarely) 3D art that may be overlaid onto a polygon mesh to crea ...
s "paint" the character with colorful or complex textures, and
technical director A technical director (TD) is usually a senior technical person within e.g. a software company, engineering firm, film studio, theatre company or television studio. This person usually has the highest level of skill within a specific technical f ...
s set up rigging so that the character can be easily moved and posed. For each scene, layout artists set up virtual cameras and rough blocking. Finally, when a character's bugs have been worked out and its scenes have been blocked, it is handed off to an animator (that is, a person with that actual job title) who can start developing the exact movements of the character's virtual limbs, muscles, and facial expressions in each specific scene. At that point, the role of the modern computer animator overlaps in some respects with that of his or her predecessors in traditional animation: namely, trying to create scenes already storyboarded in rough form by a team of story artists, and synchronizing lip or mouth movements to dialogue already prepared by a screenwriter and recorded by vocal talent. Despite those constraints, the animator is still capable of exercising significant artistic skill and discretion in developing the character's movements to accomplish the objective of each scene. There is an obvious analogy here between the art of animation and the art of acting, in that actors also must do the best they can with the lines they are given; it is often encapsulated by the common industry saying that animators are "actors with pencils". More recently,
Chris Buck Christopher James Buck (born February 24, 1958) is an American film director, animator, and screenwriter known for co-directing '' Tarzan'' (1999), '' Surf's Up'' (2007) (which was nominated for the 2007 Oscar for Best Animated Feature), '' F ...
has remarked that animators have become "actors with mice." Some studios bring in acting coaches on feature films to help animators work through such issues. Once each scene is complete and has been perfected through the "
sweat box "Sweat box" is the animation industry's equivalent to rushes, or dailies. Nowadays, when an animated scene has been approved by the animation lead, it is sent to the edit suite. The editor inserts the scene into the relevant animatic or Leica re ...
" feedback process, the resulting data can be dispatched to a
render farm A render farm is a high-performance computer system, e.g. a computer cluster, built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI), typically for film and television visual effects. Origin of the term The term ''render farm'' was born during the ...
, where computers handle the tedious task of actually rendering all the frames. Each finished film clip is then checked for quality and rushed to a film editor, who assembles the clips together to create the film. While early computer animation was heavily criticized for rendering human characters that looked plastic or even worse, eerie (see
uncanny valley In aesthetics, the uncanny valley ( ja, 不気味の谷 ''bukimi no tani'') is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid object ...
), contemporary software can now render strikingly realistic clothing, hair, and skin. The solid shading of traditional animation has been replaced by very sophisticated virtual lighting in computer animation, and computer animation can take advantage of many camera techniques used in live-action filmmaking (i.e., simulating real-world "camera shake" through
motion capture Motion capture (sometimes referred as mo-cap or mocap, for short) is the process of recording the movement of objects or people. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robo ...
of a cameraman's movements). As a result, some studios now hire nearly as many lighting artists as animators for animated films, while costume designers, hairstylists, choreographers, and cinematographers have occasionally been called upon as consultants to computer-animated projects.


See also

*
Animation Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...
*
Computer animation Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes (still images) and dynamic images (moving images), while computer animation refer ...
* Computer graphics * Key frame *
List of animators This is a list of notable animators: __NOTOC__ A * Andrew Adamson * Takami Akai * Kazuki Akane * Alexandre Alexeieff * Roger Allers * Pete Alvarado * Robert Alvarez * Tetsurō Amino * Ken Anderson * Wes Anderson * Mark Andrews * Masashi Ando ...
*
Sweat box "Sweat box" is the animation industry's equivalent to rushes, or dailies. Nowadays, when an animated scene has been approved by the animation lead, it is sent to the edit suite. The editor inserts the scene into the relevant animatic or Leica re ...


References


External links


Animation Toolworks Glossary: Who Does What In Animation


{{Authority control Visual arts occupations Filmmaking occupations Computer occupations