Simple animation

       Ben came home for the weekend, and he gave me a lesson on simple animation.   This little clip was created with two photos of the little finch.   But there are three frames that loop over and over.   The third frame is a merging of the two separate photos. I would call it superimposing one photo on top of another, but Ben tells me that the correct terminology for this is extrapolation.

       This animation of the little sparrow was made by Ben. It was the demonstration created by him for my lesson.   If you look carefully at both of these animations, you will notice that the colors are not as vivid or sharp as my usual photographs.   There is a good reason for that.   When you save a photograph, you use a .jpg extension. “Jaypegs” are capable of displaying millions of colors!   To convert the jpg’s into animation, you must change the extension fom .jpg to .gif.   Gifs can only use the color safe pallete of 256 colors.   Your browser will approximate the millions of colors from the original jpg, and by a process called dithering, pare down the photo’s colors.   This unfortunately, can make the animated photos look a little grainy.