Recently I have been doing some research on how to animate with Adobe Animate. So far I have only learned the basics which are things like knowing about the timeline, creating frames and keyframes and just the overall layout of the program. I created a few short animations that each last about a second because I wanted to use them for my final project for my course in 3D modeling and animation. Let’s just say I deviated from the 3D aspect and stuck to 2D drawings and animating those, but no matter what kind of animation it is, it takes a lot of time and planning.

A perfectly good example of how much time and planning animation takes is by looking at it from the perspective of stop motion animation. You have to storyboard each scene before posing all your characters as well as plan out the story, create your main characters and their poses, their environment, every little detail that would make a huge difference in the film must be planned out before filming. All this planning is done so that you not only waste your time having to redo so many shots and take longer in the production, but also it saves you a lot of time because you can pinpoint what aspects you want to change before filming.

Stop motion animation is much more time consuming because you have to plan it out frame by frame, move a character take a picture of that character and then move the character again and take another picture. Essentially animation is an abundance of still images played back at a rate that gives the illusion of movement. With that being said a good example of a movie that was produced in stop motion was The Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton.

As a child that was my favorite movie, but I never knew that it was a stop motion animation until I saw the making of the movie. It fascinated me and made me appreciate the movie so much more because of how much time and consideration and work that it took to create a 1 hour and 16-minute movie. Putting it into perspective, a movie-going into the big screen is shot at 24 frames per second, that is 24 different images you have to take and many poses you have to manually change for just one character for stop motion animation. As a rough estimate, for a 1-hour stop-motion animation one needs to create around 86, 400 frames!