This is the first installment in a series of articles on computer animation.

Click here for other articles about computer graphics and animation.

Let’s start off by understanding a basic concept: Your computer cannot handle animation. Sorry to disappoint you.

Nothing can move on your computer screen – or on a television or movie screen either, for that matter. The image on the screen is static. That means that it does not move.

Nevertheless, you certainly do experience the feeling or the illusion of movement on the screen. Let’s illustrate the way that this happens.

Take a pad of paper. Make a small drawing at the bottom of the first page. On the second page copy that drawing in almost the same location. Move the shape just a tiny bit to the left or to the right. Again, move the same drawing a tiny bit more on the next page. Do that over and over again. By the time you finish your artwork on the entire pad, the pictures may have shifted a few millimeters, or a fraction of an inch.

Grasp the staple end of the pad in your left hand (or in your right hand, if you’re a leftie) and riffle the pages.

Click here for an article about lefties.

Watch the picture at that time. You will think that you see a moving object.

Do you have any 8 mm filmstrips? If so, you will note that the consecutive pictures on the filmstrip all seem to be identical. Now look closely, and you will notice a minor difference in each picture. As the filmstrip moves through the projector you see one picture after another. This gives you the illusion of movement.

No, that’s not the way a computer screen works. There’s no filmstrip behind it, and no tiny gremlins hide inside your monitor and flick pages in a pad. However, there are individual pictures that have minor changes, and those changes give you the feeling of movement on your computer screen.

Click here for a description of how your screen is refreshed to show animation or moving pictures.

Computer Animations: How Your Computer Screen is Refreshed To Show Animation or Movies.

The previous installment explained the basic concept of computer animations.

Click here for the previous article, which explained the basic concept behind computer animations.

The screen on your computer is refreshed many times a second. That means that you see one picture, which is rapidly replaced by another picture, and then another one, and then yet another one. When you read this article, the screen is refreshed many times, but the object remains the same. You don't see any motion because each page that is refreshed is on the identical location on your screen. However, the movie that you play from your DVD drive, or the news report that you watch on the Internet - if your computer can handle streaming video - is made up of a series of static images.

Typical computer screens are refreshed 60-85 times every second. Computer professionals describe this as a refresh rate of 60 or 85 Hertz. Your computer technician can change the frequency that the screen is refreshed, but more is not always better. It may place an undue strain on your computer system, causing it to work inefficiently.

Sixty different screens per second is much faster than our experiment in the previous article.

Click here for the previous article to read about our little experiment.

Computer Animations: It Doesn’t Have To Be All That Slick.

The previous installment in this series explained how you seem to perceive good computer animations by viewing a series of pictures in a sequence.

Click here for the previous installment in this series, which explained how you perceive computer animations.

Of course, you would see an incomprehensible jumble if the screens would be very different each time. That is why each image has a very slight change from the previous picture, as we saw with the pad of paper and with the filmstrip. Your mind is capable of grasping that change and interpreting it as real movement.

We don't always require smooth or slick movement. Sometimes we just need to give people the idea or vague perception of movement. In such cases, we only need a small sequence of different shapes, and we can then fill in the missing part of the movement “in our mind’s eye”.

Take the familiar example of Word’s Save animation, or Windows’ graphic illustration of copying from one disk to another. There aren’t many screens, but they provide you with the idea of movement.

Word’s animation shows the outlines of a large rectangle that gets progressively smaller as it moves from the entire screen to a little spot on the bottom corner of the screen. Your perception of the gross movement of those rectangles supposedly gives you the feeling that your text is being saved onto the disk. This illusion of animation on the screen certainly does not represent real movement. It is important for us to understand this concept, so that we can develop our own computer animations.

The next article in this series will deal with subliminal teaching

Click here for the next article in this series. This link will be available soon.

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Animation and Subliminal Teaching

Click here for the first installment in this series.

Some utility programs allow you to add an occasional secret screen to your animations. When you play back the animation at a speed of 60-85 pictures per minute, you won’t see that hidden screen.

Your mind anticipates a continuous series of pictures that follows a set sequence. A single screen that rushes past out of sequence is ignored. You don't even realize that you saw anything of importance.

However, your eyes did see and comprehend that screen. The image on it did make an impression on your mind.

This is the basis for subliminal advertising – which was outlawed in the United States decades ago. These unbelievably powerful subliminal messages are sent beneath (“sub”) the regular line (“limin”) of thought.

You can still buy some programs that add an occasional secret screen to your animations. They are very useful for educational purposes.

Imagine doing your work, and having a secret screen flash “House=le maison=bayit”. If you are faced with this at random times during the course of a filmstrip, then you will learn the word for “house” in both French and Hebrew while doing your regular computer work, but without exerting any additional effort.

You can create subliminal screens by yourself using programs such as Mindlink. I don't necessarily recommend that antiquated DOS program, so you can search for others that are based on Windows and which have the same effect.

Future installments of this series will present readers’ experiences using programs that show subliminal messages.

Click here for other computer multimedia programs.

Click here for other computer graphics programs.

Creating your own animations

This is part of a series of articles about computer animations.

Click here for the first article in this series about computer animations.

You could probably draw a basic picture with Paint, and then make a copy of it with a slight modification, and then make another copy with another slight change, and so on. You could then ask somebody to create a program that would show these drawings in rapid succession. That would create the illusion of motion or animation.

Click here for the first article in this series, which described how to create the impression of motion.

However, it is likely that people who would have to develop animations in this way would rapidly give up the job. It would be a tedious way to work.

In addition, since all of these slight changes are made by hand, we can assume that some of these motions will be more acute or severe than others. Although we would prefer to see smooth transitions from one picture to another, this sequence will be jerky. In addition, pictures made by Paint take up a great deal of room on the drive. The resulting animation would be extremely large and unwieldy and would require an excessive amount of the computer’s resources. Those who don't have sufficient memory or a strong enough microprocessor may not be able to achieve the right effect on their computers.

Obviously, a program such as Paint, which creates individual pictures, will not be of much assistance in creating animations.

For this reason, special programs have been developed which can create the illusion of animation. It is recommended that you use one of these programs.

A suggestion might be the animation feature in PowerPoint.

Click here for an article that describes how to create animations using PowerPoint’s features.

Click here for other programs about computer graphics. Creating Animation with PowerPoint

This is part of a series of articles about computer animation.

Click here for the first article in this series about computer animation.

Obviously, each PowerPoint slide is static. There is no motion from the slide itself – it’s a still picture. When you click on the next slide, there is again no motion.

Click here for an article about creating the illusion of motion or animation on the screen.

However, PowerPoint’s Custom animations allow you to provide the illusion of movement. Any object, picture, or block of text can swoop into the screen from the left or from the right, it can open up from the center, or it can “arrive” in many other ways and in any sequence. Each new line that comes into the screen can dim the previous line. As the author, you determine which pictures, graphics, or text will be presented, the sequence that it will appear on the screen, the color or font, and more.

No, I don't to create a free advertisement for PowerPoint. They make enough money without me! The PowerPoint people also have a great deal of competition from other programs, including IBM Lotus Freelance and Astound – and those products are superior to those in PowerPoint in many ways. This article uses PowerPoint as an example because of its popularity, not because of its quality.

However, keep in mind that you usually cannot mix and match effects or features from the different programs. For this reason, it is best to become familiar with the different programs before you begin.

Any program will allow you to make certain basic changes to text or graphic images. However, effects that are specific to a specific program may not be transferable to other programs. It is thus recommended that you review the options in all of the available programs. Choose the program which is most suitable or which gives you the best animation effects for your own purpose. You may add graphic images from most other programs to enhance the final product.

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