Select One from Column A and One from Column B

If you've ever asked Google what kinds of animation there are, At the top of your search results will probably be a studio or an art college and they will tell you that there are five or six kinds of animation. They'll tell you that there's Traditional Animation, 2D animation, 3D animation, stop motion, whiteboard and motion graphics. This answer may be good enough for you if you don't think too deeply about it. If you ponder the simple answer for a while, though, you might find some holes in that explanation.

"Isn't traditional animation done in 2D?" you may think. You're right.

"Didn't I see them do some 3D stuff in that traditional animation thing?" you may try to remember. You're right about that too.

What do these discrepancies mean for our hard and fast list? Not much really. It only means that the list is correct but limited. In truth, attempts to create a list of "major" kinds of animation is far too limiting for the art form.

Ok, that's a really cerebral answer for a simple question. Its depth may impress the other people in the bar at 1:30 in the morning, but, accurate or not, it's useless when you need to choose an animation type for your media campaign or elearning course.

At Novamation MEDIA, we like to take the family restaurant approach when it comes to helping you make that decision. We do that by dividing your animation choices into column A and column B. You see, at Novamation, there are "kinds" of animation and "styles" of animation. Our animation meal also comes with a side dish that we will refer to as "the deliverable", or "type" of file.

A style of animation describes the way the animation "looks like" it was created. Traditional animation looks like every frame was drawn by hand. 2D or vector animation only moves a little bit at a time and only in certain parts. 3D animation looks like it was done on a computer, while stop-motion looks like it was done with puppets or clay. These "looks like" analogies are mostly incorrect when it comes to how the animation may actually be made, but it help us define a style the animation takes on. Incidentally, isometric is a form of fake 3D we will explore a bit later.

A kind of animation describes the delivery method of an animation. Whiteboard animation has a static, unmoving background that is a single color or image. Animated Gif usually cycles around again and again in just a matter of seconds. This can sometimes be called a logo animation. Motion graphic animation is an animation where stuff moves but there are no characters. This can sometimes be called a text animation.

A type of animation doesn't necessarily limit itself to animation. Almost any media file can come in a type. A file type can be a static image that includes jpeg, tiff, bmp or png files which technically can't be “animation” because they can't move. Animated image files don't require streaming or a player like animated gif files. Internet movie files that can be streamed over the Internet like mov, mp4 or avi files. And, you can even request a file that runs from a dvd like an mpeg-2.

Now, all that's necessary is to select a kind of animation. Let's say, you want a static background (whiteboard animation). Then you can combine that selection with a style of animation. How about a 3D robot (3D animation). You may even add that you want it to repeat a certain action (animated gif).

This makes things simpler, but not always fool-proof. There are some exceptions. When we explore some of those complications later, as some requests and perceptions get confused.