Georges Melie was well known for his use of special effects, he popularised techniques such as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and hand painted colour on screens.
His most notable work would be Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A trip to the moon) from 1902. It is considered the first film with visual effects, audience members were astonished at the time
Animation has since evolved, and with the technological advancements of the latter half of the 20th century, a new kind of animation was born.
In 1972 a film released entitled ‘A computer animated hand’ by Edwin Catmull and Frederic Parke. It was the world’s first 3D rendered film, it shows how a mold was made of Ed’s hand, on which polygons were very precisely drawn and measured.
The pioneering techniques used are the basis for 3D rendering we still use today in video games, movies, and special effects.
Despite the many advantages of this emerging medium, some were still sceptical that it could ever overtake hand-drawn animation.
Pros
- Superior movement – All characters and objects are built in a 3D space meaning you simply move the camera around in a similar way to how you could move a camera in the real world. This gives you more flexibility with moving through the world. It also allows you characters to rotate in 3D space without having to redraw each frame. Once your character is modelled, the animation process can be quite quick, excluding texturing and rendering of course.
- Provides the capacity to be more ambitious with a piece of work, there are more possibilities. E.g. You can do dangerous stunts.
- More realistic – Technology has advanced so much that you can now create photorealistic renders of your animation.
- Reuse models – Once you have modelled your character, you can reuse them in an infinite amount of new projects, which will save you both time and resources.
- There’s a bigger market for it. Production houses like Disney, Dream works and Pixar has helped drive the popularity of 3D animation across all platforms.
- far less time consuming than cell based animation, which is the traditional way of drawing frame by frame, involves redrawing every single frame. If you keep in mind that in the UK there are 25 frames per second that soon adds up to hundreds of drawings for a relatively short animation.
- Not necessarily time consuming to correct mistakes.
- Can make more detailed and complex images in less time.
- 2D can feel less dynamic compared to 3D. If for example you wanted to animate a car rolling, creating this in 2d would be really tricky as you would need to redraw the car from several angles and would become very time consuming. Alternatively, if you created the car in 3d space, you can simply rotate the car without having to redraw the car several times.
- As 3D becomes more available there seems to have been a decrease in demand for 2D animation. It is still popular and widely used, but 3D seems to be the ‘flavour of the month’.
Cons
- Limited imagination – 3D is tricky to stylise compared to the vast array of styles that can be created in 2D. There is a reason that most 3D animated characters have a similar style. You are somewhat limited by the rig when creating a character.
- A bigger investment – 2D animation can be a lot cheaper than 3D animation. This is mainly due to the advancements in software meaning not all animation needs to be drawn frame by frame, therefore reducing production time and in turn costs.
- Slower to make than 2D animation
- More complicated – There are several elements involved in making a 3D animation that complicate the process compared to 2D animation. When making a 2D animation, you design the characters and animate them. When working in 3D you need to model the character, animate the character, add lightning and create textures before you are able to see a glimpse of what the final animation will look like. It is a time consuming process and requires a lot of computer power to produce.
- Software – The software used to create 2D animation is not as draining for your machines as 3D animation software. You won’t need a huge render farm with beefy graphics cards to run the software, although it would make renders fly.
- Long lead times – Before you even get to see your character there is a lot of work involved which results in longer lead times.
- 2D animations seem to be more story orientated. When working with 3D objects, it is easier to get the ‘wow factor’ with sweeping camera moves and powerful effects, but this can sometimes distract from the story or more intimate moments.