Animation for Beginners

Animation is an art. No, wait. Animation is a fun art. We can also say that animation is a technique whereby you give life to characters or objects, but the truth is, animation is much more than that... it’s miracle! When we talk about animation, we should start by looking at our eyes. Nothing miraculous there? Of course, there is... and the ability to generate a sense of animation is part of our ability to see or more specifically how we see. Seeing is science!

Imagine you have a mountain of photographs, now imagine that you begin to see them, one by one, as fast as possible. Every time you focus on a photo, your eyes capture the information and send it to your brain. Your brain in turn, converts it into the signal that you see. I see a house, I see a boat, I see my uncle!, and so on. You might think that seeing just means opening your eyes, but each time you “look” at anything it takes a great exchange of information between your eyes and your brain, to turn that into the image that you receive. This process is not easy to perceive because it takes such an extremely small space of time, fractions of a second.

Now, let’s see what happens when you take the mountain of photographs and you begin to quickly view them one by one. For each image that you place before your eyes, your brain begins to make an interpretation of it, however, since you keep replacing each image with a new one, if you do this at the right speed, your brain is unable to interpret the whole picture before it has to start to interpret the next image. When the flow of photos is large enough and passes at high speed, your brain begins to mix the information from an image with the previous and the next, creating the sensation of movement. That’s when the magic happens and we can talk about animation.

It is estimated that the human eye is capable of distinguishing only around 24 images in a second if you try to view them one after another. If the number of images is equal or greater than 24, then the eye begins to see that the elements begin to acquire motion. Wait a minute. Does this mean that a film is nothing but a huge pile of pictures that pass before my eyes at breakneck speed? The short answer is yes! However, we must bear in mind that a movie is something a little more complex, as it is audio-visual content, which means that it also includes sound and a lot of technical details that we’ll leave pending for later.

In the world of animation, each image from which an animation is composed known as a “frame”, so the speed at which a film is projected is measured in frames per second (FPS) . The more frames you have in a second of animation, the better the illusion of movement will be and the fewer you have, the more the sense of flow will erode.

Currently, we have a wide variety of animation techniques with which we can create content like we see in film and video. Here are some techniques:

Okay, now that we have a little more clarity on the concept of animation, we’ll see what Tupiis! Well, our definition is pretty basic, it is free software for the design and creation of 2D animation. A project developed by animators for animators, and now in this new stage, once again in active development.
Want to learn how to use it? What are we waiting for? Let’s start!