Multimedia and Animation Services

Author: Nitish Kumar

Today multimedia and animation are one of the popular fields listed in a creativity world. Multimedia communicates any information via various electronics mediums like audio, video, graphics, and text in industries. When text, audio, images, animation, videos, and so on are combined, this process is called multimedia processes, as multimedia is a combination of two or more medias. Animation is used to give life to an image. Animation is not a new concept in today's world, and most people have some favorite cartoon characters that they watch daily on their television sets. But animation is not merely a cartoon character in a TV; it is a much broader concept. Animation provides visual impact to the multimedia projects; it's a kind of pictorial presentation and has been highly used in entertainment and education industries. Animation consist of three basic elements: first one is picture-animation is pictorial presentation; second is motion-animation gives movement to the picture; and last is simulation-animation is created by drawing or some other method.

Multimedia can be categorized in two parts: linear and nonlinear. In linear multimedia, the users does not have control on the visualized picture, for example movies in cinema halls, and nonlinear are the ones on which the users have full control, like video games. Multimedia can also be in a form of live or recorded. Multimedia is being used in various industries such as education, entertainment, art, advertisement, engineering, and mathematics. But if we talk about the use of multimedia and about which industry has more use of animation, then we can name education and entertainment industries. As we know, entertainment field, including movies and animation movies, is a very creative field. Here the multimedia is being used for developing special effects in movies and animation. In entertainment, we can also add advertisement industry-which uses multimedia to communicate with its viewers-and games industry-where various games are developed with the use of multimedia and animation. In education industry, multimedia is being used to provide training program known as Computer Based Trainings (CBTs).

Types of Animations

  • Tweened Path Animation: This is the oldest animation software used by animators, only the animation frames are drawn, and major changes takes place in Keyframes. Flash is a tool that has been used for this type of animation. The procedure includes defining properties in Keyframes, and then continually changing the properties in the frames in between-properties include position, size, rotation, skew, blend, and foreground and background color. In this animation, object keeps on moving in a predetermined path that can be straight or have some curves.
  • Frame by Frame: This animation is manually handled by creating frame in an animation.
  • Vector-Based Animation: In this type of animation, each and every graphics elements is stored as a mathematical expression that consists of graphics size, shape, position, and other characteristics.