Animation Communication Designer
Animation in relation to game consoles also has complications since they continually increase their capabilities to emulate real 3-D, photo-realistic action (Figure 2). The market for 3-D animation in the gaming community is always growing and highly competitive. Skills that are seen to be more prominent include character and creature development, achieving photo-realistic playback with minimum memory allocation, understanding moving camera dynamics, and, of course, good teamwork. This increasingly develops the player’s expectations for new consoles and ultimately enhances their imagination and thus their senses of perception.
Business communications is probably the largest market for 3-D animation, especially videos and DVDs that are made to explain the hidden intricacies of medicine and high technology. Such an example is the ‘Inner Life of a Cell’ by Harvard University (Figure 3). To view the full video visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjexZ88wIno. This has given students in the field of medicine to visualise cellular functions. It was perhaps much more difficult for medical students in the 1940s to imagine this themselves!
Doing 3-D animation for Hollywood feature films is also not an easy task. Persistent and concentration is absolutely required on this market, not to mention a bit of luck. However, character animation and compositing is considered to be slightly easier to get into. Along with Hollywood feature films, TV commercials are another hard market to crack. As the commercials get higher in budget, the market gets harder to crack. Though, an amateur advertisement should still be able to get some work on cable. However, the top markets are dominated by the big advertising agencies that have an established custom of seeing new talent.
Animation, usually tailor made to fill today’s commercial requirements, make available to advertisers and film producers a great number of techniques and effects. “The amount and variety is limited only by the collective imagination of the talented men and women who plan and produce the commercials.” (Levitan, L.E. 1962)
Animation can convey many different messages or meanings just by the way it is perceived – much like the other fields of graphic design. For example, if something zooms across the screen, it communicates "fast" or "urgent." And if it was a slow move, it can communicate "calm" or “gentle” It's really about timing, or rhythm, and we can all relate to that language.
However, it's one thing to recognise that motion and rhythm as universal forms of communication, but to take it a step further – communication through motion is deeply embedded in our culture in other ways. Although not entirely to do with animation, an example I can think of is the common saying: “this movie is too MTV”. This refers to the quick edits which are typical of music videos and have become a property of the MTV brand. By establishing a particular motion-based style, MTV has added a huge attribute to its brand.
In the more distinct realm of the graphic designer, motion design has even more of an influence and an impact. For instance, I can easily recommend to a designer on my team, "This should have more of a Kyle Cooper look." (Kyle and his company's work can be viewed at http://www.imaginaryforces.com.) The designer would, (or should) understand that I was referring to a darker, portentous, more distressed text approach. (Though Kyle and his company have designed film titles and commercials of many different styles, he is best known for his ground-breaking work on film titles from movies like Seven and The Island of Dr. Moreau.) (Figure 4)
In these examples, the content is mostly irrelevant to the perceived message. It's the impact of the motion that conveys the high energy of MTV, or the chaotic, darker style of Kyle Cooper. It is through techniques like these that animation can affect our senses of perception.
Conclusion:
Eighty per cent of the information we receive comes through our eyes, sight is our key sensory medium. Computer hardware is now able to support highly detailed and sophisticated visual imagery and will become universally available.
Animation provides an extra dimension to still images, for without diminishing their information content it allows them to be discursive (in the same way as spoken language). Film, television, and now multi-media, have led us to subsume the moving picture into our vocabulary of communication. Computers allow us to bring all this together to provide one of the most powerful tools yet devised for education, communication and dissemination - that of computer animation.
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