Animation Styles 101

When you hear the word animation, we know exactly what you think of. You think of Disney and cheesy cartoons on TV. But animation is a whole lot more than that (but let’s be real, Disney movies and TV cartoons are awesome). There are a lot of different kinds of animation, and even more styles within the different types.

The first kind of animation you probably think of is 2D animation. This animation is created by stringing together a series of drawings together in a fast sequence. I drawing per frame, and a range of 12 – 24 frames per second of animation, depending on the project and the studio behind it. Originally, these kinds of animations were done by hand with pencil on paper and then transitioned onto animation cells with ink (this being the old, traditional Disney look). Nowadays, there are other methods of doing this that don’t involve so much ink and paper. Here at Bullseye, it’s done with individual frames in Adobe Photoshop. You can see it in our projects for Azure Paint Studio and Steve Albers Realty.

The second kind of animation you would probably think of just by hearing the word would most likely be 3D animation. Most animated movies that come out nowadays are created with 3D animation, and it’s the most common type of animation that’s used in video games as well. There’s a whole ton of different methods and programs used to create this style, so we’ll spare you all the details. You can see this style in our C&B Operations animation here: 

The type that we do the most of at Bullseye is motion graphics– and that covers a whole range of things. There’s no real way to describe what it looks like, but rest assured, you can look at just about any Bullseye animation and see the style of motion graphics. We’ve done tech-inspired styles, like our informative animations for Photovolt Instruments.

We’ve done mock-stop motion style animations, where we imitate the look of moving objects around with tiny movements frame by frame, which you can see in some of our sandwich construction videos for Country Hearth Breads.

We’ve done puppet style character animations, which you can see in the Loafy animations for Country Hearth Breads and this Patterson Thuente holiday animation:

There’s also a whole subcategory within motion graphics called kinetic typography, where it’s mainly text on the screen that’s being animated in an entertaining way, as seen in our video for ESP IT.

 

We’ve barely scratched the surface here. There are styles within styles, and new techniques constantly being developed in animation. It’s an art form that’s always evolving, always modernizing, always coming up with new ways of doing things. These types of animation are all things that can benefit anyone, if done with the right idea and the right script in mind. And here at Bullseye, we know how to find that right idea, and put it with the style that suits it best.