4. Basic animation terms

Keyframe

One way of creating an animation is to create a first frame by hand, then manually create another frame a few frames away that is significantly different from the first one. Then use an automatic process to create the in-between frames. These important frames are called keyframes.

Tweening

The 'automatic process' mentioned above is called 'tweening'. Tweening is the process where the content of the frames between the keyframes are created automatically by the animation software so that the animation glides smoothly from one keyframe to the next.

Rendering

This is a process where colour, shades, shadows and other effects are added to the basic animation by the animation software. It is an extremely computer-intensive task. For example, if a photo-realistic image in a single frame takes 10 seconds to render - a 1 hour film would take 240 hours (10 days) to complete. This is why Hollywood studios have 'render farms' made up of hundreds of powerful networked computers.