Animations

24-11-23 00 / episode: 312

What kind of animation do you like?

I think everybody likes some kind of animation whether it's this kind or that kind.

Some people like making it too.

When it comes to making animation there's homemade and then there’s computer made animations

After that if you're not making animation you're probably one of the large group of people watching animation.

I want to talk about making and watching animation today.

Introduction

Hi and welcome to the Les Perras podcast for extensive English listening.

These podcasts are great for listening to a wide variety of vocabulary.

Today you're listening to episode 312 and it's about animation.

Homemade animations

Homemade animations are kind of the domain of hobbyists and kids.

I know my kids did their own animations and they used paper and pencil at the very beginning.

Paper and pencil animations are cheap and easy to work with, simple and disposable.

Just about anybody can do them and it teaches you the fundamentals of animation.

On the other hand they're pretty limited.

That's why I taught my kids how to do stop motion animation.

All you need is a cheap digital camera and patience.

You take a picture, change the scene a little bit,

take another picture,

change the scene a little bit and keep going until you finish the sequence.

Then you put it into some kind of video editing software and it turns it into a movie for you easily

but it takes a long time.

That brings us to our next topic

Computers

Making animations with computers also takes a long time.

On the other hand you have tremendous power and control

and you can make much higher quality animations.

You can also go quite a bit faster once you put the groundwork in.

A lot of the animation software is pretty expensive but there's a couple of famous ones that are free.

The most famous free software that I like to use is blender.

If you want to learn how to do animation, that's a great place to start.

But it's pretty hard to learn at the beginning.

Because it's kind of hard to learn

and it takes time, most people don't do animation.

This brings us to the next topic.

Watching

Watching these animations is pretty much the domain of everybody.

Some animations are pretty crazy some are unusual but

I like to lump animations into two broad groups.

First there's Hollywood animation.

The easiest one to think of here is Disney, or Pixar.

Those two companies make animations that are watchable by just about anybody.

The next big group that I talk about is anime which is the animations that come out of Japan.

I was surprised when some family came to visit from canada.

They told me that they were really interested in Japanese anime.

In the time that I've been gone from Canada, Japanese anime has really blossomed in popularity

and a lot of people know quite a bit about it.

So it's a real big player in the animation market.

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I’d love it if you made a comment below, too.

Tell me what you think about animation. Do you make it? Or watch it?