The types of 2D animations

Stop motion 2D animations

This type is a painstaking method of animation used in both 2D and more so in 3D in which you had a still photo of each frame, by redrawing the frame slightly different to the last, or for 3D moving the object or image slightly too to end up with a sequences of images which can be played in order to give the illusion the image in front of you is being animated.





Cut out and Collage Animation

The style of cut out and collage is I'm sure a well known one to many people and it pretty much holds its own seen it came to are screens I'm sure by now you know what i mean as long as your of an older generation yup that's right you guessed it South Park.
 South Park is one of the leaders in using this type of style which its simple cartoons with strong story lines that aren't for everyone..
 The is style is pretty much the same as stop motion so its more a technique if you like using previously made characters and using different cut out images to animated them such as different mouth shapes to show a character talking in so many frames using these images in the different stop motion pictures.






Rotoscoping

rotoscoping is i would say an easier way to making an animation but none the less a very artistic finish depending how much time you are willing to put in to each frame drawn, essentially this type is tracing a movie that has already been filmed by drawing over each frame in the movie clip, the video clip is sometimes kept to give colour or in most cases deleted after completing each frame individually to give a movie like animation.






Path Animation

Path animation is the easier type of animation and proberly the most liveless of animations its just mainly moving the same image from one side of the picture to the other without drawing each frame just using more advanced programs such as Flash to fill in the missing frames when animating an objects movement, maybe the most liveless of all but is still used in almost every animation in some way shape or form.





Cel Animation

Now this one everyone will have seen but maybe didn't know that is was done this way and the best example of this would be the Walt Disney films before they switch to digital in the 1990s. Cel animation is using a transparent cel the outline is drawn on the front of the Cel and the colour on the backside of the image to eliminate brush stroke marks then this images would be put on top a background and then using the same method as motion stop each image would be painted and photographed in sequence.