Picasso Animation College, Lucknow

What is posing?
Posing is positioning character in such a way as to tell a story.
The biggest goal of posing is to show personality of a character, while showing his “business” in the scene. While posing, one has to remember attitude, appeal, balance, force, composition, exaggeration, contrast, flow and silhouette. These five, when done well give a great pose.

The first of these is attitude. To show attitude, we should understand the character that we are posing. How old is he. What is his background? What is his attitude in this scene? What is his mood? What are his intentions? What are his short-term and long term goals and so on? Once we have this information, we would usually draw 4 or 5 poses and see which one of them is best in the given context and composition. There are several ways of showing a particular attitude, mood and emotion. The degree of emotion he needs to have also defines the pose.. Is he upset? Annoyed? Frustrated? Angry? Mad? Homicidal? If he is upset, it could be a more “toned down” pose with just the face being the main ingredient.. But if he is really mad at this other person and wants to dessimate him, his pose will be elaborate and aggressive..

To get to the point of doing good poses, we need to understand three things first.

1) Action line or Flow line.
2) Silhouette.
3) Exaggeration.

A knowledge of these three is really important.

Action line is the general flow in which the body parts are placed in such a way as to suggest the direction, intent and mood of the character.

Consider this picture from Preston blair’s Cartoon animation.

A good training is to just draw an action line and try to build a simple character around it.. This will give an understanding of “balance” and “flow”.

See how all the characters have a single “Arc” type of a line running through their body? That is what makes these characters really “physical” and “appealing”.

BY

Noufal

Digital Faculty

Picasso Animation College

B 73 Nirala Nagar, Lucknow 226020

Storyboarding is vital for illustrating to your cast and crew what the shots in a film will look like. With a little practice, your storyboards will not only speed up the filming process, but also enable you to fully realize your artistic vision.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions
Things you’ll need:

• Pad of paper
• Pen or pencil

1. Step 1

Analyze your script. Depending on how hands-on you are, you may storyboard key moments of the film, a few shots per scene, or every single camera motion. Any of these is fine and varies widely from director to director. Sit down with the script and find the scenes that are most important to you and to the story. Focus on them first, and use them as your jumping-off point. Draw notes in the margins or keep notes separately on a pad, noting scene and page numbers.

1. Step 2

Picture the shots. Before you take any further steps, you should make sure that you have a clear vision of what each shot will look like. This will help you communicate it clearly. Think of how you would explain the shot to someone else, how it will look through the camera, how it will look to the audience and how it will look to you, watching it from the outside. This is part of the pre visualization process, or “previz,” which determines how the film will look. The process often also includes production design, lighting design and costuming.

1. Step 3

Determine your medium. Director Ridley Scott draws tiny pencil drawings that his crew calls Ridleygrams at the moment of shooting. This is all the storyboarding he ever does. Other directors use what is called an animatic, converting storyboards to digital images, making an initial version of the movie with stick figures and vague shapes that can be watched. This can be used later to make sure that every shot is perfect. Whether you choose to create slides in PowerPoint or make tiny stick-figure drawings on file cards, the rules are the same and you can do as much or as little as you like.

1. Step 4

Create your storyboards. The most important thing is to make sure that your storyboards require no explanation at all. This will take some practice, but by using the basic principles of comics, speech bubbles and movement lines, you should be able to tell the story of your film just with your storyboards. Others involved in the film should be able to immediately understand what is going on and what their jobs will be.

1. Step 5

Share your storyboards. Film is a collaborative medium, and storyboards are one of the great ways to make sure everyone involved understands your vision. Take the time before you shoot to make sure that everyone is on the same page and understands what you want. Make any necessary adjustments to your storyboards before shooting.

With thanks & Regard

Brijesh Verma

Creative Faculty

Picasso Animation College

B 73 Nirala Nagar, Lucknow  226020

Color – Full – Life

We can’t able to imagine our life without color. The entire place is full of color. So I like to talk about color theory and reality inside us.

Color Theory

In the visual arts, color theory is a body of practical guidance to color mixing and the visual impacts of specific color combinations. Although color theory principles first appear in the writings of Leone Battista Alberti (c.1435) and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (c.1490), a tradition of “color theory” begins in the 18th century, initially within a partisan controversy around Isaac Newton’s theory of color (Opticks, 1704) and the nature of so-called primary colors.

Color in the eye

This image (when viewed in full size, 1000 pixels wide) contains 1 million pixels, each of a different color. The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors.

The ability of the human eye to distinguish colors is based upon the varying sensitivity of different cells in the retina to light of different wavelengths. The retina contains three types of color receptor cells, or cones. One type, relatively distinct from the other two, is most responsive to light that we perceive as violet, with wavelengths around 420 nm. (Cones of this type are sometimes called short-wavelength cones, S cones, or, misleadingly, blue cones.) The other two types are closely related genetically and chemically. One of them (sometimes called long-wavelength cones, L cones, or, misleadingly, red cones) is most sensitive to light we perceive as yellowish-green, with wavelengths around 564 nm; the other type (sometimes called middle-wavelength cones, M cones, or, misleadingly, green cones) is most sensitive to light perceived as green, with wavelengths around 534 nm.

Light, no matter how complex its composition of wavelengths is reduced to three color components by the eye. For each location in the visual field, the three types of cones yield three signals based on the extent to which each is stimulated. These values are sometimes called tristimulus values.

The response curve as a function of wavelength for each type of cone is illustrated above. Because the curves overlap, some tristimulus values do not occur for any incoming light combination. For example, it is not possible to stimulate only the mid-wavelength (so-called “green”) cones; the other cones will inevitably be stimulated to some degree at the same time. The set of all possible tristimulus values determines the human color space. It has been estimated that humans can distinguish roughly 10 million different colors.

The other type of light-sensitive cell in the eye, the rod, has a different response curve. In normal situations, when light is bright enough to strongly stimulate the cones, rods play virtually no role in vision at all. On the other hand, in dim light, the cones are under stimulated leaving only the signal from the rods, resulting in a colorless response. (Furthermore, the rods are barely sensitive to light in the “red” range.) In certain conditions of intermediate illumination, the rod response and a weak cone response can together result in color discriminations not accounted for by cone responses alone.

This image (when viewed in full size, 1000 pixels wide) contains 1 million pixels, each of a different color. The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors.

Color in the brain

The visual dorsal stream (green) and ventral stream (purple) are shown. The ventral stream is responsible for color perception.

While the mechanisms of color vision at the level of the retina are well-described in terms of tristimulus values (see above), color processing after that point is organized differently. A dominant theory of color vision proposes that color information is transmitted out of the eye by three opponent processes, or opponent channels, each constructed from the raw output of the cones: a red-green channel, a blue-yellow channel and a black-white “luminance” channel. This theory has been supported by neurobiology, and accounts for the structure of our subjective color experience. Specifically, it explains why we cannot perceive a “reddish green” or “yellowish blue,” and it predicts the color wheel: it is the collection of colors for which at least one of the two color channels measures a value at one of its extremes.

The exact nature of color perception beyond the processing already described, and indeed the status of color as a feature of the perceived world or rather as a feature of our perception of the world, is a matter of complex and continuing philosophical dispute

The visual dorsal stream (green) and ventral stream (purple) are shown. The ventral stream is responsible for color perception.

It is quite unbelievable but is all about colorful life.

Thanks & Regards,

–

R. Sridhar

H.O.D – Faculty

Picasso Animation College

B 73 Nirala Nagar, Lucknow 226020

Art history is more than just a collection of dates and foreign-sounding names, obscure movements and arcane isms. Every age, for the last 50,000 years has left its unique imprint on the world, and from the first cave paintings to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from the Byzantine mosaics of the Hagia Sophia, to the graffiti-inspired paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, art history tells the story of our evolving notions of who and what we are and our place in the universe.

Whether you’re an art enthusiast who’d like to know more about the history behind your favorite works and artists, or somebody who couldn’t tell a Titian and a De Kooning—but would like to—Art History For Dummies is for you. It takes you on a tour of thirty millennia of artistic eArt history is more than just a collection of dates and foreign-sounding names, obscure movements and arcane isms. Every age, for the last 50,000 years has left its unique imprint on the world, and from the first cave paintings to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from the Byzantine mosaics of the Hagia Sophia, to the graffiti-inspired paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, art history tells the story of our evolving notions of who and what we are and our place in the universe.

Whether you’re an art enthusiast who’d like to know more about the history behind your favorite works and artists, or somebody who couldn’t tell a Titian and a De Kooning—but would like to—Art History For Dummies is for you. It takes you on a tour of thirty millennia of artistic expression, covering the artistic movements, major artists, and indispensable masterworks, and the world events and cultural trends that helped spawn them. With the help of stunning black-and-white photos throughout, and a sixteen-page gallery of color images, it covers:

The rise and fall of classical art in Greece and Rome

The differences between Renaissance art and Mannerism

How the industrial revolution spawned Romanticism

How and why Post-Impression branched off from Impressionism

Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism and other 20th century isms

What’s up with today’s eclectic art scene

Expression, covering the artistic movements, major artists, and indispensable masterworks, and the world events and cultural trends that helped spawns them. With the help of stunning black-and-white photos throughout, and a sixteen-page gallery of color images, it covers:

The rise and fall of classical art in Greece and Rome

The differences between Renaissance art and Mannerism

How the industrial revolution spawned Romanticism

How and why Post-Impression branched off from Impressionism

Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism and other 20th century isms

What’s up with today’s eclectic art scene

By

Shalini Singh
Creative Faculty
Picasso Animation College
B 73 Nirala Nagar, Lucknow 226020

Compositing : In visual effects post-production, compositing refers to creating new images or moving images by combining images from different sources – such as real-world digital video, film, synthetic 3-D imagery, 2-D animations, painted backdrops, digital still photographs, and text

Q. What are main concepts of compositing that one should learn regardless of what compositing app one choose to use?

You have to see things in black, white and grey, i mean seeing everything in its alpha channel, as that forms the basics of compositing. When you look at the image you shall look for its edge details and how it can be relieved from it background in terms of its alphas….it.

Compositing Mathematics/ concept:-

Alpha channel

32-bit graphics systems contain four channels — three 8-bit channels for red, green, and blue (RGB) and one 8-bit alpha channel. Simply, it’s the channel containing transparency information. In RGBA, A denotes alpha channel, alpha channel stores transparency information in black white and grey.

Black indicates 100 % transparency
white indicates 100 % opaque

Intermediate levels of grey indicate partial transparency/opaqueness
darker grey indicates more transparency… ie, as we move towards white, opacity increases.
Matte
————–
Mattes are used in photography and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image. In film, the principle of a matte requires masking certain areas of the film emulsion to selectively control which areas are exposed. However, many complex special-effects scenes have included dozens of discrete image elements, requiring very complex use of mattes.

MASK
——–
As the name suggests…. masking out something. Suppose we have an image of a person standing in front of a building. If we want the person alone to be isolated we will resort to masking its like separating the person from the building using pen tool or suitable tools
Rotoscoping , keying techniques can be associated with masking.

Alpha compositing is the process of combining an image with a background to create the appearance of partial transparency. It is often useful to render image elements in separate passes, and then combine the resulting multiple 2D images into a single, final image in a process called compositing. For example, compositing is used extensively when combining computer rendered image elements with live footage. In order to correctly combine these image elements, It is necessary to keep an associated matte for each element. This matte contains the coverage information – the shape of the geometry being drawn – and allows us to distinguish between parts of the image where the geometry was actually drawn and other parts of the image which are empty.

To store this matte information, the concept of an alpha channel was introduced by A.R.Smith in the late 1970s, and fully developed in a 1984 paper by Thomas Porter and Tom Duff. In a 2D image element which stores a color for each pixel, an additional value is stored in the alpha channel containing a value ranging from 0 to 1. A value of 0 means that the pixel does not have any coverage information; i.e. there was no color contribution from any geometry because the geometry did not overlap this pixel. A value of 1 means that the pixel is fully opaque because the geometry completely overlapped the pixel.

If an alpha channel is used in an image, it is common to also multiply the color by the alpha value, in order to save on additional multiplications during the compositing process. This is usually referred to as pre multiplied alpha. Thus, assuming that the pixel color is expressed using RGB triples, a pixel value of (0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.5) implies a pixel which is fully green and has 50% coverage.

With the existence of an alpha channel, it is then easy to express useful compositing image operations, using a compositing algebra defined in the Duff and Porter paper. For example, given two image elements A and B, the most common compositing operation is to combine the images such that A appears in the foreground and B appears in the background; this can be expressed as A over B. In addition to over, Porter and Duff defined the compositing operators in, out, atop, and xor (and the reverse operators rover, rin, rout, and ratop) from a consideration of choices in blending the colors of two pixels when their coverage is, conceptually, overlaid orthogonally:

As an example, the over operator can be accomplished by applying the following formula to each pixel value:

where C_o is the result of the operation, C_a is the color of the pixel in element A, C_b is the color of the pixel in element B, and α_a and α_b are the alpha of the pixels in elements A and B respectively.

Note that if it is assumed that all color values are pre multiplied by their alpha values (c = αC), we can write this as:

Alpha compositing on images can be done in most graphics programs.

Aspect Ratio: The ratio of width to height of a displayed image.

Academy Aperture

A film aspect ratio where the original image capture area is 1.37 (typical working image resolution 1828 x 1332) although it is often masked during projection to 1.85.

Anamorphic
A wide-screen film format that horizontally squeezes the image area captured on the negative by using an anamorphic lens. During projection the image is unsqueezed by the inverse amount to make it look “normal” again. Original image capture area is .838″ x .7″. Usually projected with a 2.35.1 aspect ratio. Cinemascope is the trade name of an anamorphic technique.

Vista Vision

A film format which runs standard 35mm film stock through the projector in a horizontal direction rather than vertically. Vista Vision frames are twice that of standard 35mm ones and they use eight film perforations per frame (sometimes it is called eight-perf). The aspect ratio of a captured Vista vision frame is 1.5 and a typical working resolution is 3072×2048.

Background Plate

The primary plate over which all foreground elements are composited. Usually live action.

Blue/Greenscreen
Blue/Green Screen Elements are often filmed in front of a uniformly lit blue, green or red screen. This forms a clear, bright color from which a matte can be extracted. This process separates into layers elements from the original image

Chroma Key
A matte extraction technique that separates a subject from its background based on a color that is unique to either the foreground or the background image. A pure color which has a strong “chroma” yields the best results.

Calibration
The adjustment of a display device to show colors as closely as possible to the way they will appear in their final viewing format. At Cinesite this usually refers to workstation monitors. Color Lookup Tables (CLUTs) are created which show the values of colors on the monitor and how they will look on projected film.

Cineon File Format
The most common file format, developed by Kodak, used to store and represent images scanned from original film for visual effects work.

Optical printer

An optical printer is a device consisting of one or more film projectors mechanically linked to a movie camera. It allows filmmakers to re-photograph one or more strips of film. The optical printer is used for making special effects for motion pictures, or for copying and restoring old film material.

Common optical effects include fade outs and fade ins, dissolves, slow motion, fast motion, and matte work. More complicated work can involve dozens of elements, all combined into a single scene. Ideally, the audience in a theater should not be able to notice any optical printers work, but this is not always the case. For economical reasons, especially in the 1950s, and later in TV series produced on film, printer work was limited to only the actual parts of a scene needing the effect, so there is a clear change in the image quality when the transition occurs.

The first, simple optical printers were constructed early in the 1920s. Linwood G. Dunn expanded the concept in the 1930s, and the development continued well into the 1980s, when the printers were controlled with minicomputers.

In the late 1980s, digital compositing began to supplant optical effects. Since the mid nineties the conversion to digital effects has been virtually total.

Aerial image

An aerial image is a projected image which is “floating in air”, and cannot be viewed normally. It can only be seen from one position in space, often focused by another lens.

Aerial image technology was used in optical printers and movie special effects photography before the advent of computer graphics in movie production, and also for combining animation and live action footage onto one piece of film.

Schufftan process

The Schüfftan process is a movie special effect named after its inventor, Eugen Schüfftan (1893–1977). It was widely used in the first half of the 20th century before it was replaced by the travelling matte and bluescreen effects.

The process was designed by the German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan while working on the movie Metropolis (1927). The movie’s director, Fritz Lang, wanted to insert the actors into miniatures of skyscrapers and other buildings, so Schüfftan used a specially-made mirror to create the illusion of actors interacting with huge, realistic-looking sets.

Schüfftan placed a plate of glass at a forty-five-degree angle between the camera and the miniature buildings. He used the camera’s viewfinder to trace an outline of the area into which the actors would later be inserted onto the glass. This outline was transferred onto a mirror and the entire reflective surface that fell outside the outline was removed, leaving transparent glass. When the mirror was placed in the same position as the original plate of glass, the reflective part blocked a portion of the miniature building behind it and also reflected the stage behind the camera. The actors were placed several metres away from the mirror so that when they were reflected in the mirror, they would appear at the right size.

In the same movie, Schüfftan used a variation of this process so that the miniature set (or drawing) was shown on the reflective part of the mirror and the actors were filmed through the transparent part, as shown in the illustration.

Over the following years, the Schüfftan process was used by many other film-makers, including Alfred Hitchcock, in his film Blackmail (1929), and as recently as The Return of the King. The Schüfftan process was later replaced by matte shots, which were easier and more efficient to create.

Multiple exposures

In photography, a multiple exposure is an exposure in which the sensitivity to light is reduced and then increased at least once during the total exposure time.

Ordinarily cameras have a sensitivity to light that is a function of time. For example, a one second exposure is an exposure in which the camera image is equally responsive to light over the exposure time of one second. The criterion for determining that something is a double exposure is that the sensitivity goes up and then back down. The simplest example of a multiple exposure is a double exposure without flash, i.e. the camera image is responsive to light twice during the complete exposure.

Some single exposures, such as “flash and blur” use a combination of electronic flash and ambient exposure. This effect can be approximated by a Dirac delta measure (flash) and a constant finite rectangular window, in combination. For example, a sensitivity window comprising a Dirac comb combined with a rectangular pulse is considered a multiple exposure, even though the sensitivity never goes to zero during the exposure.

In film and photography, double exposure is a technique in which a piece of film is exposed twice, to two different images. The resulting photographic image shows the second image superimposed over the first. The technique can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects to a scene that were not originally there. It is frequently used in photographic hoaxes. It also is sometimes used as an artistic visual effect, especially when filming singers or musicians.

It is considered easiest to have a manual winding camera for double exposures. On automatic winding cameras, as soon as a picture is taken the film is typically wound to the next frame. Some more advanced automatic winding cameras have the option for multiple exposures but it must be set before making each exposure. Manual winding cameras with a multiple exposure feature can be set to double-expose after making the first exposure.

Since shooting multiple exposures will expose the same frame multiple times, negative exposure compensation must first be set to avoid overexposure. For example, to expose the frame twice with correct exposure, a -1 EV compensation have to be done, and -2 EV for exposing four times.

Medium to low light is ideal for double exposures. You don’t have to use a tripod if you combine different scenes in one shot. However, in some conditions, for example, recoding the whole progress of a lunar eclipse, a stable tripod is almost a must-have. Double exposures are not the limit, as multiple exposures are possible, but the photographer should try not to overexpose the film. Another way to superimpose pictures is digitally, using a software photo editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. Simply alter the opacity of the two images and line them up over each other.

With electronic imaging, long duration sensitivity is not practical, so multiple exposures are usually made using CEMENT (Computer Enhanced Multiple Exposure Numerical Technique). This simulates the effect of multiple exposures numerically, by using a computer, or computation.

The use of CEMENT as a medium of artistic expression dates back to the 1970s and early 1980s with the invention of the wearable computer as a tool for visual artists. Using CEMENT for the production of visual art, especially when walking around with a flash lamp, is called light-vectoring. A more colloquial term for light-vectoring is dusting.

With traditional film cameras, a long exposure is a single exposure, whereas with electronic cameras a long exposure is best attained by integrating together many exposures. This averaging also permits there to be a time-windowing function, such as a Gaussian, that weights time periods near the center of the exposure time more strongly. Another possibility for synthesizing long exposure from multiple-exposure is to use an exponential decay in which the current frame has the strongest weight, and previous frames are faded out with a sliding exponential window.

Cineon Lightning Recorder
The Cineon Lightning laser recorder uses proprietary optics for optimal digital picture to film image transfer. The red, green and blue lasers expose the Eastman EXR color intermediate 5242 film without adding more grain to the film and matching the quality of the original negative.

Cineon Lightning Scanner
The Cineon scanner uses proprietary CCD (image capture chips) sensor technology for optimal film to digital picture image transfer. This technology is designed to scan 35mm film frames in all film aspect ratios and formats (including Vista Vision) at one-quarter, one-half or full film resolution.

Cine speed

A program offered in Cineon compositing software that modifies the length of sequences by subtracting or adding frames i.e. it is often used for lengthening and shortening shots.

Clean Plate

A clean plate (a plate with no subject in frame) is used to replace some portion of a shot. I.e. a clean plate might be used in a wire-removal to provide the image area that was obscured in original live action photography.

Color Correction

Changing the degree of contrast, highlights, color saturation and shadows in a shot. Color correction allows for the delicate adjustment of aspects that a cinematographer controls when shooting a film.

Crowd Replication
Small groups of actors or extras can be replicated digitally in a scene, creating on illusion of many people; often used in stadium, crowd or audience shots.

DataCine Master

This term is commonly used by people who work with a Spirit DataCine to complete a film transfer to data. It refers specifically to the use of a DataCine device for scanning of film.

Chalice

Cinema compositing software maker Silicon Grail has been acquired by Apple Computer, according to a Web page that replaces their existing Web site.

Apple has acquired technologies from Silicon Grail, including the RAYZ and Chalice product lines, reads the statement in its entirety. Founded in 1995, Silicon Grail was started by Academy Award winner Ray Feeney, who founded Hollywood digital effects pioneer RFX. The company’s first product was Chalice — the first commercially available high-end 2D film compositing solution. Developed to run on Irix, Linux, Windows and OS X, RAYZ is a compositor based on Chalice, which provides effects and color correction tools for cinema. The software has been used in feature films including Deep Blue Sea, Titanic, and Star Trek: Insurrection, Men In Black and others.

RAYZ sports support for drag and drop functionality, customizable menus and toolbars, and a reconfigurable layout that can be set up to suit the user. It implements features like Composite Decision List (CDL) technology, and implements Kodak’s CINEON image file format technology as well.

The news of Silicon Grail’s technology acquisition follows other similar moves from Apple as the company continues to expand its influence into the professional film production industry, including the company’s acquisition of compositing software maker Nothing Real.

An Apple spokesperson confirmed for MacCentral that they had acquired technologies from Silicon Grail and said only that “Apple intends to use the acquired technologies in future products.

Jayant  Mehra
Faculty Member
Picasso Animation College, Lucknow

The idea of being a freelance animator  can seem like a dream; you’re your own boss, you set your own hours, create your own work environment, never have to leave your home.

While working for yourself can be extremely rewarding , whatever your set of skills and area of interest- 3D animation, Flash, animated graphics, web animation. But there’s an awful lot of added responsibility that comes with being your own boss.

Time management, for one – it’s surprisingly easy to run out of time when you’re working from home. It’s just too easy to get distracted. There’s also a lot of temptations at home that you don’t have in a traditional office.

So the important thing to consider when working at home as a freelance animator is that, yes, you’re working.

You have to be responsible enough to set yourself a work schedule, and disciplined enough to adhere to it. If you don’t, you’re not a freelance animator – you’re just unemployed.

When you first start freelancing, you might have a client or two. You’ll need to build a client base, which involves marketing yourself as a freelance animator and making inquiries about potential jobs. You’ll also need to keep in touch with your existing clients, sending polite, professional e-mails just to keep yourself in their radar.

As you build your freelance business, your client base will grow on its own – happy clients will not only return to you with more animation work, they’ll also refer others to you, who’ll expect great work.

So have a great freelance career!

From-
Shazia Raza
9795460063
Academic Counsellor,
Picasso Animation College, Lucknow

Medical Animation

That’s right, you read that right: medical animation. Not only does animation have uses in the commercial areas of marketing, entertainment, and industry; it also has a foothold in the career field devoted to saving lives.

Medical animation has a large variety of applications, from education to demonstration to data capture and manipulation. Animation can have both hospital, institutional, and pharmaceutical applications. Animators in the medical field can apply their skills to many tasks, including:

• Demonstration of how pharmaceutical drugs work in the bloodstream and body;
• Interactive models of the human body on both macroscopic and microscopic, interior and exterior scales;
• Interpretation of patient data into 3D visual images;
• Creation of instructional materials for medical students;
• Demonstration of surgical techniques in virtual representation;
• Breakdowns of how medical equipment/proposed medical equipment will work.

There are many other applications, and some medical imaging facilities are even perfecting techniques in which sensors can be used to produce accurate, fully-interactive 3D representations of an individual patient’s body, replacing current video imaging technology.

Medical animation is a very detail-oriented career that requires a great deal of education beyond mere animation techniques. Unlike most animation, you aren’t just dealing with the outside appearance and the “outer shell” of the model, where what’s on the inside doesn’t really matter as long as the exterior looks good and moves correctly. Medical animation tends to be more interactive and deals with layers upon layers of precise anatomical modeling, that often must be accurate down to the cellular level.

It’s like being a surgeon, without getting your hands dirty–and it’s equally fascinating (but not for the weak of stomach, though at least if the sight of blood makes you faint, you’re safe).

Medical animation is probably one of the most exacting, difficult paths that you can follow in the animation field—but if it suits your tastes, then it can also be one of the most rewarding.

Shazia Raza

9795460063

Academic Counsellor

Picasso Animation College, Lucknow

The animation industry in India is in its infancy and offers a lot of scope for career growth. There is a significant demand for highly skilled and trained workforce that merges technical and artistic capabilities. There is an immediate need to increase awareness about the industry to attract talent and to offer-training programs that trains talent comprehensively in all the skills, but also focuses on skills that best suits the individual’s aptitude.

The animation industry offers career opportunities in a range of activities - from technology-based jobs such as scanning, compositing, digital ink and paint, and game designing to creative guys like visual-effects supervisors, 3D modellers and character animators.

The bulk of the animation jobs are in the field of advertising which require short animation clips. Animation has its uses in entertainment as well as in practical applications in industrial research and scientific research.Animators work in film and television studios, advertising and software production companies where they may be creating games and educational software.

What skills do you need?

Animators must have creative and artistic abilities. Flair for drawing, sketching, and painting is necessary. They must generate ideas, although they are known to collaborate with writers for ideas. They must be able to feel the pulse of the people. They must also have an observant eye to detect people’s distinguishing characteristics and society’s interesting attributes or incongruities along with a good sense of humour.

A good portfolio is the primary means by which employers evaluate animators. The portfolio is a collection of hand-made, computer-generated, or printed examples of the artist’s best work. Assembling a successful portfolio requires skills generally developed in a college/ polytechnic/ art/ design programme in graphic design, fine arts of visual communications. Internship also provides excellent opportunities for animators to develop and enhance their portfolios. Animators should be able to acquire an understanding of the technical aspect of the media – print, television, and multimedia as an additional input.

From-

Shazia Raza

9795460063

Academic Counsellor

Picasso Animation College, Lucknow

Storyboarding is an essential skill to animation, and a rather old-fashioned pencil-to-paper tool that will never go out of style–

When you’re working on an animation, even a short one, it’s almost impossible to just dive in and get started animating right away. Few people who could work right from a script and draw or model raw from the written description, but the results were not pretty.

Using a storyboard will help you organize your animation, and match your mental visualizations of scenes with the written script; it can also give you a visual format to communicate your ideas to others. A storyboard can be an elaborate, professional series of framed color artwork depicting action and motion in a scene, complete with written descriptions of dialogue, sound effects, and transitions into the next scene (these are most often used by studios for major projects)–or a single page of numbered thumbnail sketches, or even something as plain and simple as a quick series of motion-study sketches to capture the movement of a body that you want to animate.

If you use a storyboard you’ll find that you’ll be able to plan your animations more cohesively with clear marker points to show progress, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and trouble when struggling to make the entire thing come together from beginning to end. So students make this skill of Storyboarding as a strong tool for your future animation works.

ALL THE BEST

From-

Shazia Raza

3/2/2010

Academic Counsellor

9795460063

Picasso Animation College, Lucknow

Choosing an Animation School!!!!!

So, you want to be an animator????????

First of all, you need a  foundation in drawing — undoubtedly, the most important element of an animator’s education. All the computer skills in the world can’t mask a bad artist, so make sure that you find a program where you’ll spend the long, necessary hours honing your craft. Ideally, you’ll

want a program that offer a combination of drawing opportunities — including life drawing, layout animation, and fundamental drawing studies.

In addition to drawing skills, you’ll need a program that covers the requisite animation skills like storytelling, layout, character design, direction, design, editing, acting and visual communication. Animation skills should include not only a knowledge of fundamentals (weight, movements, timing, reversals, motivational forces and thinking time, etc.), but development in posing, breakdowns, in-betweening, clean-up and special effects (wind, rain, shadows, water, explosions, etc.) as well. A general background in visual communication — including design, composition, texture, color theory — is also key.

The Secret about Software

Everywhere you turn, you hear about how computers are revolutionizing the industry. Computer animation — led by films like “Toy Story”, “Monsters, Inc.” and “Shrek” — have dominated Hollywood’s box office the past few summers. So it makes sense that any prospective animator should concentrate on learning the latest animation software packages, right?

Well… not really. The truth is that, while computers have become an increasingly large part of animation education, they’re no substitute for the fundamentals — learning the nuances of drawing, shading, lighting, and storytelling. While you should know enough about computer graphics to know how they work in general, you should avoid just learning packages of software. Today’s packages will be rendered obsolete as quickly as you learn them, and many studios use proprietary software that you can’t learn in school anyway.

Focusing on Film, Multimedia

If you intend to pursue a job animating for television or film, then you should probably look for a program that matches that interest and provides the background the potential employers are looking for. Check for programs that focus on traditional skills like drawing, painting, and sculpture, as well as “film knowledge” such as cinematography and composition. Find out how the school will help you build an effective portfolio of your work: not just a collection of assignments, but a well-developed presentation of your unique point of view, and your technical skills.

Likewise, if you want to focus on producing multimedia animation, you should find a program that covers the constraints and peculiarities of producing animation.

Other Factors

There are numerous other factors to consider — the quality of faculty and facilities, school reputation, access to hardware and software.But as long as you keep these various factors in mind and remember to ask questions of school representatives, you’ll undoubtedly find a school from which to launch your animation career.

PICASSO IS THE ONE FOR YOU, YOU CAN ALWAYS RELY ON!!!!!!!!!!

Good luck!

AVINA BHAGWANI

ACADEMIC COUNSELOR

PICASSO ANIMATION COLLEGE, LUCKNOW.

+91-9506033762