fst chap 3: types of movies

cel animation

Animation that uses a series of drawings on pieces of celluloid, called cels for short. Slight changes between the drawings combine to create an illusion of movement. This is also called hand-drawn or traditional animation.

When an object or animation becomes too humanlike, we tend to feel revulsion instead of empathy, and it falls into the uncanny valley.

If a filmmaker strives for a high level of verisimilitude in computer-generated characters, as Robert Zemeckis did in The Polar Express (2004), he may risk taking the humanlike resemblance too far, causing viewers to notice every detail of the characters' appearance or movement that doesn't conform to the way real human beings actually look or move. Our emotional response to these "almost human" characters will, therefore, be unease and discomfort, not pleasure or empathy—a negative reaction known as the "uncanny valley."

performance capture

Motion-capture suits record millions of pieces of data that add to the characters' visual details. The actor was required to wear a special suit covered in markers, which recorded information that was then digitally transformed into the computer-generated character.

Stop-motion, hand-drawn, and 3-D are the three basic types of animation.

These are the three basic types of animation. To create hand-drawn animation, animators draw or paint images that are then incorporated into a motion picture one drawing at a time, as in Cinderella (Walt Disney Productions, 1950). Stop-motion, as in A Grand Day Out (Park, 1989), records the movement of objects (toys, puppets, clay figures, or cutouts) with a motion-picture camera; the animator moves the objects slightly for each recorded frame. Computer animation uses the virtual world of 3-D computer-modeling software to generate the animation, as in Toy Story 3 (Unkrich, 2010).

pastiche

a dramatic, musical, or literary work made up of bits and pieces from other sources; a hodgepodge borrows elements from previous works of art.