Animation in the past fifty years has taken large steps in improvements to what it is today. It has changed in many ways from techniques to their usage in entertainment. It has opened opportunities for new employment in companies. It has allowed us to see things we could only imagine. It has also changed the way of life.

To animate, according to the New World Webster Dictionary, is to make something alive or to give it motion. An animator according to ?Animators? from ?Chronicle Guidance Publications? is: ?animators create moving illustrations for motion pictures, television, direct-to-video commercials interactive video games, and the Internet. Create a series of sequential drawings of characters of other subjects, which when photographed and projected at specific speeds become animated.? (?Animators? np)

Animation's history can go back all the way to three thousand years ago in Eastern Asia with shadow puppets. In that place and time, it was one of the more popular forms of entertainment. In the past one hundred and fifty years there were devices called zoetropes that were wheels with pictures inside them with little slits dividing the pictures. The person

Computer animation may sound difficult, but there are only a few simple steps in creating an animated object. When making a computer animated cartoon or figure, a person must first have an idea on what to animate. Then that person puts that image into the computer and flexes it around a computer made skeleton. After that, that person would fill it in with the basic colors and effects. Next the animator would put in the details and put it in its background. In a short overview, leaving the animator with a finished computer animated object (?Animators?, 1-2).

With the help increased of technology and just plain modern ingenuity animation has evolved into a highly technological tool to bring life on a screen. In this world there are many ways of creating animation such as key framing, cel animating, and rotas coping. In key framing many artists, or animators, draw key frames of the product then hires junior animators to fill in the rest of the story. This technique saves time and money, but usually lacks quality. Using the technique of cel animation, animators use clear sheets of paper, called cels, to draw the moving parts of the scene while the background is placed behind it. Again this method saves time and money, but unlike key framing, it has good quality. Cel animating is the primary technique used by animators. Rotas coping is when you copy images from previous scenes and use them over again. This way is cheaper and saves time, but it lacks quality ("Traditional Methods" np). There are a few more techniques used, but these are the most popular methods.

According to George Lucas, animation in computer graphics has advanced so much that it makes his first Star Wars movies made back in the late seventies and early eighties look like silent films, from the early nineteen hundreds, to what he has done in his new movie The Phantom Menace (?George Lucas Behind the Scenes? 1). This is just an illustration to of what animation has been and what it will become. Animation has opened horizons that will soon open doors to a whole new world. A world that can create whatever can be imagined or drawn on a sheet of paper and bring it to life. Animation has and will continue to improve the society in which mankind lives in. Animation and technology that will continue to improve its? self to new heights at a pace which is beyond belief.

Animation is used today for many things, to show action, to express all kinds of emotions, or simply to encourage laughter. Another use, though most people do not think of this right away, is in making arcade games. Animation has also been used in commercials on television; in fact around twenty percent of televised advertisements have used cartoons (?Animators? 1). Animation is also being used for medical purposes to teach future surgeons how to do a certain operations without using a real patient to operate on. Basically, animation has been used to entertain and educate, leading to a better future for t

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Approximate Word count = 2004
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)