Animation is an object that moves across or into or out of the screen.

Persistence of vision is what allows people to see animation. The human eye will still hold an image for a brief moment. The brain seeing a series of images change over time will see movement. Flip books& Zoetropes let you see a series of moving images on paper as an animation.

• Animation & Multimedia Sequencing:
  Animation is when the computer shows a series of movements of objects.

• Frame animation has a series of graphics that are shown in rapidly on the screen. Sort of like a flip book animation.

• Multimedia sequences allow you to take a series of animations and do audio visual effects, such as fades between scenes. Adobe Premiere is one such package. 3D Studio allows you to use physics to make your characters come to life.

• Cel animation. You have a series of keyframes and then you draw the in between frames. Such as a character walking. Tweening fill in the keyframes. This can be done by hand, as Disney did years ago. However with a computer program, it can be sophisticated enough to calculate the in between frames. In cels, the parts of the scene are moved about. So a person's mouth is on a different cel or layer. To change the mouth as they speak, you only need to update a tiny portion of the image.

Kinematics & Inverse Kinematics - Kinematics is the study of movement and motions that involve joints. In a standard Kinematic program you need to know yourself how to position all the joins. If you want to make it look more realistic you can pose people using a program that supports inverse kinematics, such as Fractal's Design's Poser. Inverse Kinematics has limits set on the body parts, so hands don't bend backwards etc. Knows how the characters move, so it can do the tweening for you. Each body part has a parent part, "The Knee bone's connected to the thigh bone..." The knee is the child part of the parent thigh. With inverse kinematics, the computer can move the joins of the object so it moves realistically.

Morphing transforms one image into another image.

Flash & Animated GIF are popular animation formats for the web. The same movie based clips, like AVI, MOV, MPEG can be used for animation as well